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A “Commons Option” for the 21St Century

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A “Commons Option” for the 21St Century Solar Commons: A “Commons Option” for the 21st Century By KATHRYN MILUN* ABSTRACT. Private ownership of nature’s gifts—water, air, sunlight—stands in the way of solving the collective problems of the 21st century. In the case of sunlight, common ownership through community solar trusts can overcome both the inequities and the inefficiencies of investor-owned utilities (IOUs) with legal monopolies. Those monopolies function with the same arrogance as aristocrats did in the past, but now the stakes are higher: the future of the planet. This essay describes the Solar Commons Project by which a team of inspired citizens and public scholars joined to create a form of community-trust solar-energy ownership, in which multiple stakeholders benefit. The goal is to make this “Solar Commons” model an iterable, scalable, model of community solar that empowers low-income neighborhoods in the United States. An integral part of the project is a process of creating community-engaged public art to communicate the nature of community ownership. Artistic and theatrical presentations can help involve the public in dialogues around questions of utility management that are normally couched in technical language designed to obfuscate the political power of electric utilities. One role citizens can play is unmasking utilities when they publicly promote themselves as providers of clean energy, even when they are actively engaged in protecting the interests of fossil-fuel companies. Ultimately, however, creating a Solar Commons involves more than criticizing the failed institutions of the past. It requires us to think innovatively about ways to draw upon the history of the commons to design new modes of sharing sunlight and other common goods to create a more equitable, sustainable future. *Associate professor of anthropology and Director of the Center for Social Research, University of Minnesota, Duluth. Founded and directs the Solar Commons Research Project, which innovates and prototypes community trust ownership of solar energy for low-income communities. Her students from the Energy, Culture, Society course run the annual Duluth Power Dialog, bridging academic research with public policy and citizen engagement. Email: [email protected] American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Vol. 79, No. 3 (May, 2020). DOI: 10.1111/ajes.12348 © 2020 American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Inc. 1024 The American Journal of Economics and Sociology Common wealth, properly organized, provides a way to address the two great- est flaws in contemporary capitalism—its relentless destruction of nature and widening of inequality—while still keeping the benefits that markets provide. … Common wealth—that is, wealth belonging to everyone equally—includes the gifts of nature, societal creations, and economic synergies. It is immense and in some cases imperiled, yet it remains invisible to markets because it is poorly organized and lacks clear property rights. Organizing common wealth so that markets respect its co-inheritors and co-beneficiaries requires the cre- ation of common wealth trusts, legally accountable to future generations. These trusts would have authority to limit usage of threatened ecosystems, charge for the use of public resources, and pay per capita dividends. Designing and cre- ating a suite of such trusts would counterbalance profit-seeking activity, slow the destruction of nature, and reduce inequality. (Barnes 2015) Introduction In 2007, I was a new member of the Tomales Bay Institute (TBI) in northern California. The founder of TBI, Peter Barnes (2006), had just published a book that laid out the economic argument for building a “commons” sector of the U.S. economy, geared to managing and equi- tably distributing common wealth from shared resources, such as the atmosphere, water, and wildlife—sources of life whose value have been diminished by market and state-sector management (or lack of manage- ment). The climate crisis, water pollution, and massive species extinc- tion provided more than enough evidence to warrant new governance strategies based on a “common property” status of air and the public trust status of water and wildlife. Furthermore, the growing disparity in wealth in the United States called for new economic tools that would better distribute wealth accumulated from nature’s gifts, such as miner- als, wind power, and wildlife. Barnes had gathered a diverse group of activists and public scholars to brainstorm how new uses of trust own- ership could more sustainably capture and more equitably distribute common wealth from nature as common property. How could new, enduring institutions for a commons sector be created, and what experi- ments were needed to test common wealth trust ownership? These were the thoughts I took back with me to Arizona, where I was living at the time, a legal anthropologist newly out of work from the university. With the sun beating down on my head and my brain emancipated from my Solar Commons 1025 academic discipline, I was free to imagine how solar radiation, with its distributed abundance and scalable photovoltaic technologies, could be claimed as common property and inspire a local ownership model to direct the common wealth benefits of the sun’s energy to those most in need. With that, the idea of a Solar Commons was born. It was not until 2018, after 10 years of creative, collaborative, legal, and financial work as well as pavement pounding for partners and sites, that the first Solar Commons Project was interconnected to the grid: a community-trust-inspired model that allowed solar panels on the roof of a building in one part of Tucson, Arizona to send a 20-year income stream to weatherize homes in a low-income neighborhood across town. The community-based research team wanted to make sure that no Solar Commons Project would recede into the same siloed, techni- cal, and financial obscurity that has hidden the ownership, equity, and pollution issues of 20th-century energy infrastructure. As a result, we were joined by a team of artists who worked with the Solar Commons beneficiary community to co-create public art that could make visible how this neighborhood was claiming its common property right to gather the sun’s common wealth for the well-being of the community. This essay uses a description of the Solar Commons Project to demonstrate why commons economic thinking presents a transforma- tive approach to the ecological and economic inequities of our histor- ical moment. Imagine a portion of the U.S. electric grid providing a “commons option” for communities to access their gathering rights to the sun’s common wealth. Low-income neighborhoods or depressed rural communities could capture their share of the sun’s energy with photovoltaic panels, send that electricity directly to the electric grid, and have grid owners pay for it with deposits into a community trust fund that would support much needed community programs and proj- ects. If the panels were installed on the roof of a neighborhood factory or warehouse, the roof owners would use the electricity on site and would pay for it with deposits to a community trust fund. The benefi- ciaries of these solar commons trust funds would be programs support- ing affordable housing and homeless shelters, sustainable community agriculture projects, paid internships for low-income high school stu- dents to work with community newspapers, job training programs, and much more. In short, Solar Commons would be an economic tool of 1026 The American Journal of Economics and Sociology the energy transition, supporting community-empowerment projects that local partners deemed useful for their community’s well-being. In 2019, the Solar Commons Project was a finalist in the U.S. Department of Energy’s “Solar in Your Community Challenge.” A 2018 analysis by the Rocky Mountain Institute of the financial model and scal- ability potential of the Solar Commons Project found that it presented a positive net present value to funders and could be quickly scaled to provide 10 gigawatts (GW) on the U.S. electric grid (Brehm and Lillis 2018a, 2018b). As of 2018, “cumulative operating solar photovoltaic capacity now stands at 62.4 GWdc, about 75 times more than was in- stalled at the end of 2008” (Runyon 2019). Indeed, applying commons design principles to solar energy, the Solar Commons Project aims to demonstrate a variety of economic uses and scaling techniques that can make Solar Commons a robust institution in a commons (as opposed to market or state) sector, connecting solar energy to the broad array of solutions proposed to better steward natural and community resources for ecological and economic equity in the 21st century. Beyond its practical potential, the Solar Commons Project provides a conceptual intervention into the dominant ownership structures of the U.S. electricity sector. Electric utilities are resistant to decarboniza- tion, compromised by conflicts of interest, and lacking in innovation and incentives to spark and share the benefits of the green energy revolution. Solar Commons brings a “commons” framework to the U.S. electricity grid. From a commons perspective, energy ownership can be analyzed, critiqued, and transformed beyond the private/public duality that has dominated 20th-century energy infrastructure. In what follows, I consider the ownership and economic issues of the current U.S. power sector from the perspective of commons. I begin with a historical introduction to the type of trust ownership that under- lies the Solar Commons model. Trust ownership is one of the oldest forms of property in the common law tradition. It arose as a correc- tive to inequities in the feudal property regime and has continued to evolve over time, often as a way around limitations of the dominant property regimes of its day. Going back to a time before the existence of the kind of private and public property regimes that have been nat- uralized in 20th-century energy infrastructure, we can more easily see the limits of our current energy ownership and the potential for legal Solar Commons 1027 innovation.
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