In this episode, Hilary Langer speaks with Michelle Moore, CEO of the nonprofit Groundswell and author of the recently published book, “Rural Renaissance. Revitalizing America’s Hometowns Through Clean Power.” Michelle has spent her career advocating for equitable power. Her accomplishments range from delivering programs that cut energy use by $11 billion and led to the deployment of 3.2 Gigawatts of new renewable energy production while leading sustainability for the Obama Administration; to developing LEED into a globally recognized brand as Senior Vice President of USGBC. Hilary and Michelle discuss the values that motivate her, why Groundswell is revitalizing rural areas, and how the Inflation Reduction Act will change America.
In this episode, Hilary Langer speaks with Michelle Moore, CEO of the nonprofit Groundswell and author of the recently published book, “Rural Renaissance. Revitalizing America’s Hometowns Through Clean Power.” Michelle has spent her career advocating for equitable power. Her accomplishments range from delivering programs that cut energy use by $11 billion and led to the deployment of 3.2 Gigawatts of new renewable energy production while leading sustainability for the Obama Administration; to developing LEED into a globally recognized brand as Senior Vice President of USGBC.
Hilary and Michelle discuss the values that motivate her, why Groundswell is revitalizing rural areas, and how the Inflation Reduction Act will change America.
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Episode recorded: November 9, 2022
Email your feedback to Chad, Gil, and Hilary at climatepositive@hannonarmstrong.com or tweet them to @ClimatePosiPod.
Chad Reed: This is Climate Positive – a show featuring candid conversations with the leaders, innovators, and changemakers driving our climate positive future. I’m Chad Reed
Hilary Langer: I’m Hilary Langer.
Gil Jenkins: And I’m Gil Jenkins.
Michelle Moore: You have the opportunity to change minds by talking to people who don't agree with you. You also have the opportunity to learn something yourself. It's just part of what it means to be a member of a society and what it means to be someone who's ultimately deeply committed to service and to not letting your love for your neighbor be constrained by whether or not you agree.
Hilary: Our guest today is Michelle Moore, CEO of the innovative nonprofit Groundswell, which builds community power through solar projects, resilience centers, and clean energy programs. Previously, Michelle has held senior positions with the Obama Administration and the US Green Building Council. She joins us to discuss her recent book, Rural Renaissance, and how the Inflation Reduction Act provides a once in a generation opportunity to tackle climate justice.
Gil: Climate Positive is produced by Hannon Armstrong, a leading investor in climate solutions for over 30 years. To learn more about our climate positive journey, please visit HannonArmstrong.com.
Hilary: Michelle Moore, thank you so much for joining us here today. I'm really excited to have you. This is actually our first recording in our new studios, in the new offices, and it's wonderful to see you in person.
Michelle: Thank you so much. It's a blessing to be here with you this afternoon.
Hilary: Thank you. Michelle, you are the CEO of Groundswell, which is a nonprofit that brings low-income communities into the clean energy economy by connecting them to solar resiliency and energy efficiency, but before you got engaged in all of that, you were raised, baptist in rural Georgia and lived with your grandparents during the first grade. In your new book, Rural Renaissance, which is wonderful and I really enjoyed, you focus a lot on the importance of service to others and it seems to infuse, frankly, all that you do. How was that value taught to you?
Michelle: For me, my work, what I do professionally is how I can live out the commandment to love your neighbor as yourself, using what I know how to do, which is clean energy and sustainability, and for me, the aha moment really came when I was still working in the Obama White House actually, and I realized that throughout my entire career, about 20 years worth at that point, I had done a lot to reduce a whole lot of carbon pollution, GHG emissions, and to make a lot of big companies and a few households more energy efficient, which was good, that's worthwhile.
I felt good about that, but I had never done anything that would've helped folks like my grandparents or the people I grew up with, or my hometown. I really wanted to re-envision my work and we all spend so much of our lives at work, especially as adults around serving people and serving people like the folks I grew up with and doing in a way that was loving that was really thinking about serving other people as a joy and as a privilege and not serving other people being a chore, which is how I think our society and our culture can sometimes see that.
Hilary: Did you find that mindset in your community when you were growing up?
Michelle: I definitely did, and it was a value that my grandparents had, and my parents too. My grandparents they grew up during the depression and all of them grew up on farms. My Papa Moore's family owned a small farm that they lost during the depression, and my grandparents' families were sharecroppers and they had big farm families, nine surviving children, for instance, on my mama's side. All the siblings really had to help one another, and you not only helped one another within the family, you helped one another within your church and within your community so that people fell on hard times, or had a death in the family or something like that the community came together around them.
Thinking about our community and our neighbors and our neighborhood as being more than that just immediate circle but really being the town that we live and the state that we live in, our country, our world, every concentric expanding circle really challenges me personally to work and think in other ways, and also, particularly in the times that we live in to listen and to empathize and including with people who you don't agree with all the time, or you know what? You don't agree with for the most part, but to always find the common humanity in other people's needs and to really challenge yourself to think about what a loving response to your neighbor means, even when you and your neighbor don't agree.
Hilary: That’s an important reminder, especially coming on the heels of a midterm election cycle.
Michelle: Indeed.
Hilary: I understand your grandparents worked in the textile industry, and you actually left Georgia for schooling in the start of your career and then returned home to Georgia to work for Interface. What was that experience like and how did that inform your future career?
Michelle: Growing up in a textile town in the deep south, going away from my fancy graduate degree and ending up coming back home to LaGrange, Georgia, and working for a textile mill was my absolute worst nightmare at the time, but it was one of the greatest blessings of my professional life because I went to work for Interface and I went to work for Ray Anderson, who had just recently, within six months of me joining the company, experienced what he always called the spear in his chest. He read Paul Hawkins book, The Ecology of Commerce, and realized that this multi-billion dollar global corporation that he had built, that employed thousands of people all over the world, was doing a lot to really harm the planet and the places and the people that he loved.
In response, Ray really transformed the way that Interface worked in the mid-1990s at a time when corporate sustainability wasn't even a thing and Wall Street thought he was crazy. I was just so grateful to see that up close and in person. To see to someone who grew up in a textile town like a lot of places across America, including places that had very different kind of industries, saw their economic opportunity get hollowed out by jobs in manufacturing going overseas, which is exactly what had happened in LaGrange.
To see how sustainability and better corporate values, care for our neighbors, care for the places that we live and could be placed at the center of a different way of doing business that was also sustaining good jobs she could be proud of right back at home. It's fundamentally shaped how I work from that time since.
Hilary: Was that experience what pushed you into the world of sustainability or were you already focused on that?
Michelle: Oh, absolutely. Working at Interface and working with Ray fundamentally shaped my aspirations for myself and how [unintelligible 00:06:24] contribute professionally from that point forward. It was all that in the pack of crackers. For me, particularly having come out of grad school in the mid-1990s, I cared about the environment and I love animals. I love animals and I love trees, and I love water and I grew up in a rural place.
In LaGrange, we have a big lake there called West Point Lake. At the time, there was a huge combined sewer overflow problem in Atlanta. Every time it rained more than about 0.5 an inch, which was on the regular, Atlanta would just dump all but raw sewage into the water. It would float down to the lake where I lived.
Hilary: That would motivate you.
Michelle: Oh, my gosh, it was powerful motivation but for me, I just didn't understand the justice angle of it. How could people continue doing stuff that they knew was wrong and hurt other people? Why would you do that? Money and ROI couldn't be a reasonable justification for that. At the time, being an environmental lawyer that prosecuted people for bad things after the fact or being an engineer that helped people do a little bit less wrong were really the only opportunities in the field.
One of the things that I really appreciate from having been there to witness the creation of the corporate sustainability movement at Interface Georgia in LaGrange, Georgia working at a textile company, was that it just really opened up a whole field of proactivity. That, as Ray always talked about it, we could do well by doing good. You could be incredibly successful in energy finance like Hannon Armstrong and you could do it in a way that you're leaving a better legacy too.
It's not an either/or, it's a both/and solution and that we can do better and better. The greater awareness that we have of the world around us and the people around us and the impact that we have on them. I really credit that professional awakening for me to working for Ray because it was absolutely not a part of any B school vocabulary at the time.
Hilary: Now at Groundswell, you're able to dig into this connection between social justice and environmental justice. Could you give our listeners an overview of what it is that Groundswell does and how it works?
Michelle: Groundswell builds community power and we mean that in every sense of the word. The organization was originally found in 2009 by a group of young organizers off the Obama 2008. They wanted to use the organizing strategies that had won the election and then won the Iowa Caucus to help people green their homes, to help people sustain green jobs, reduce their utility bills, and create a more equitable clean energy future. At that time, it was really all about energy efficiency. When I joined the organization in 2015, we launched our community solar program.
That has really been how we have built momentum around our values of service and equity and respect and excellence in putting people at the center of an equitable clean energy future. Today, we developed community resiliency hubs, community solar projects. We have an energy efficiency program called SOUL that's all about deploying energy efficiency as a [unintelligible 00:09:48] investment in housing equity.
We have our share power platform that serves more than 6,000 income-qualified customers with about $500 a year each in clean energy savings. We have a research initiative as well, our lab's team because we always really want to take everything that we learn and share it with a broader field so that everyone can benefit, and by what I learn the good stuff and also the hard knocks bumps and bruises because it's all of the above in terms of doing the work that we do. It's just a real blessing to work on that mission and also to be able to work with such a great team.
Hilary: How does the recent passage of the Inflation Reduction Act change the potential scope for Groundswell and similar partners?
Michelle: The Inflation Reduction Act really changes the potential impact and scope of our work for all of us in this field. I think that particularly in the media environment that we all work in, we can experience a major piece of legislation like the Inflation Reduction Act passing is a headline that comes and goes.
It is a 700 and some odd-page piece of legislation. I cannot say that I have read the whole thing, but it is chock full of transformative programs are going to be shaping the marketplace that we all work in for the next decade to come, and just to give you a little bit more texture on the scale of that legislation's impact, particularly from a rural perspective, the federal government hasn't invested in rural power at this level in a hundred years, not since we electrified the country in the 1930s.
For all of us who are alive today and particularly who are in our professional careers, this is likely the biggest and the last major investment we'll see in clean energy infrastructure in our generations, so really, understanding it and using it for all its worth is not just an opportunity that we have, but I would argue, an affirmative responsibility. Certainly, in the spirit of loving our neighbors, but also to use a phrase that my friend Ari Wallach talks a lot about it's an incredible opportunity for us to all be great ancestors to the folks who will come after us.
Hilary: I love that. How can community leaders in rural areas in Georgia, for instance, actually engage with the IRA, which is far away in Washington DC?
Michelle: I'm so glad you asked that because I know that, particularly when you're not caught up in doing work with the federal government every day, stuff that happens in Washington can seem far away and maybe even irrelevant to your day-to-day life. The reality is that the federal government, especially when it comes to clean energy, does three things. Number one, it sets goals.
Number two, it sets the rules of the road, and then number three, it provides resources. The resources may be grants, funding, financing, or it may be technical assistance, and the Inflation Reduction Act has all three, but none of it will hit the ground, if you will, without innovation and vision, and also a lot of hard work by local leaders and local innovators and visionaries. One of the hopes that I have with Rural Renaissance is that local leaders will find an idea in there that piques their interest or that can provide a solution to a really challenging local problem in their community.
That at this particular moment in our history, they'll be able to find an opportunity through the Inflation Reduction Act or through all the private sector investment that's out there, investing in everything from EV charging infrastructure to energy efficiency, to community resiliency projects to bring that opportunity back home to their hometown so that the hundreds of billions and trillions of dollars, when you count the private investment, that'll come alongside and will actually be making the places that we all grew up places that future generations of our families can really live and thrive to, or for the growing number of people in America who would prefer to be in a smaller town or in a rural community, they'll be able to go back home too and create a new home and create a new life and do it in a way that they can thrive.
Hilary: At Groundswell you've been outspoken about making sure that minority-owned businesses and women-led businesses are able to participate in the clean energy shift. What needs to happen for that to be enacted on a larger scale?
Michelle: I'd like to approach that from the perspective of my own experience.
Hilary: Great.
Michelle: I'm a woman in business, just turned 50 this year.
Hilary: Happy birthday.
Michelle: Thank you so much. Came up to the 1990s and my own experience has been as a woman working in traditionally male-dominated industries in building and construction and manufacturing and also in the energy sector. I have had a lot of really wonderful mentors throughout that period, men and women who I looked up to who've really helped me to grow not only as mentors but also as sponsors.
People who don't just give you good advice, but who grab you by the hand and say, "Hey, come with me, I've got this opportunity that you would be perfect for. Let me help you go after this." That doesn't happen enough. There are definitely points in our lives and aspects of each of the experiences that we carry with us or aspects of the biases implicit and explicit in the environments that we operate in that make it hard to move to that next level.
Make it hard to break into business, make it hard to get financing. Make it hard to be taken seriously. I've certainly experienced a lot of that myself as a woman in business too.
I think that there are three things that each of us can do as individuals because there's systems that have to be transformed and rebuilt, reform based on better values, but each of us participate in those systems. Our actions every day make a difference too.
I would say number one, every one of us, whatever gender, whatever ethnic background, whatever race, whatever lived experience we bring to our work, we have to know our worth, and we have to make sure that we are recognized for our worth as individuals because we make ways, not just for ourselves, but for others. Number two, we have to sponsor others to come along behind us or to come along beside us because we know what our experiences have been with those challenging moments have been too. You know what? Every person we can pick up and pull forward or pull alongside us, we're making it easier for somebody else.
I've never been one of those people who was like, oh, well, 10 miles uphill in a snowstorm to school every day, I don't want anybody who comes after me to have it as hard as I had it. I want people to have it easier. Let's make it easier for other people in the process. Third, once we get into leadership roles, lead like we care, whereas women in business, lead like a woman. Recognize that people need parental leave. Recognize that people need opportunities to care for their children or to care for elder family members whatever the case may be.
Make our workplaces kinder and make our workplaces aligned with the values that we want to propagate in the world and learn and implement our own experiences. Don't force other people to go through the same trauma we did. As leaders, we have the opportunity to do that too. I think that taking that action as individuals are important ways to challenge these systems and structures that propagate inequities in our industries, in our marketplaces, and in our workplaces.
Hilary: You dedicated Rural Renaissance to Curtis Wynn, who's the former CEO of the Roanoke Electric Cooperative. I suspect that you're thinking of him, in part, when you talk about these mentors who have brought you along with them. How did Curtis shape how you think about energy and equity?
Michelle: Curtis Wynn built the utility of the future at Roanoke Electric Cooperative, and he's now the CEO of SECO Energy down in Florida. I know he is going to do it again there. He is just such extraordinary personal integrity and vision, and also patience to see a vision through. For those of you who aren't familiar with Eastern North Carolina up towards Roanoke, and out towards the shore, it's a very poor area and just tremendous multi-generational poverty too.
In fact, more than 90% of the persistent poverty counties in America are served by rural electric cooperatives. Curtis was able to take every single aspect of a clean energy economy, efficiency, EVs, community, solar energy, resilience, and broadband, and put it to work in service to helping people to reduce their utility bills and to helping them to live better.
The inspiration that I take from not just what he did but the spirit of Curtis' work was a really important part of what inspired me to write Rural Renaissance.
When I'm talking to other utility leaders, when I'm talking to other folks and our sector about what's possible in the back of my mind, I've got that mental picture of the first time I rolled up at Roanoke Electric Cooperative [laughs] and saw all the great stuff they had put in place for the community out there in Eastern Carolina.
Hilary: Do you think we can get where we need to go with the electric cooperatives that are in place now?
Michelle: Today, there are more than 900 rural electric cooperatives across the country and they are and were designed to be energy democracies. Some of them aren't living up to that promise and--
[crosstalk]
Hilary: Why is that?
Michelle: There are a lot of really well-documented examples of rural electric cooperatives that aren't holding transparent elections for their boards because the rural electric cooperative boards are meant to be composed of their members and democratically elected by their membership. In some cases, rural electric cooperatives aren't making the bylaws accessible. Folks don't know how to run or how to get elected or how to vote, or they're shenanigans with the voting process itself. They're even examples of some co-ops where co-op board members have essentially passed on a board seat from father to son. These are a lot small organizations, but oftentimes the board seats are compensated.
In rural communities, where economic opportunities are thin, there can be some powerful motivation, but the bones are beautiful and even if you're living in a community where you've got a rural electric cooperative with tremendous promise, but that isn't living up to that promise because the governance isn't right, the governance isn't connected to the seven principles that all rural electric cooperatives.
In fact, all cooperatives everywhere ascribe to which include democratic elections. There are a whole host of resources to be able to get back to those good foundations, that's because we're electric cooperatives. We're built on a lot of good foundations from the beginning and a lot of good values. Very importantly, though, and I think that this is also important to acknowledge is, we have to know where we came from to be able to inform where we're going and we're electric cooperatives were created during the New Deal, and that was also the same time that policies like redlining became the law of the land. Structural racism was built into our legal infrastructure at the time.
The trajectory that many cooperatives were on cooperatives were today, many particularly in the South, the boards are 90% plus white and male, which is very not representative of the demographics that many cooperatives serve. That was a trajectory that many cooperatives got on at their formation as well because of the racist policies that were the law of the land at that time and that persisted for many, many decades, and we're still working to unwind.
Honestly facing that history and understanding that where we came from is part of how we got here, is also a way that communities can heal and can make sure that as we move forward that we're building local energy futures that are equitable and then also are inclusive of everybody in the community in terms of making those decisions about where we're going and how we're getting there together.
Again, similar in many ways to being alive and working at a time where we have the Inflation Reduction Act, as a set of tools and resources to work with. It's also a real privilege to be alive and to be in positions of impact at this time where we can face our histories and build a better future.
Hilary: What is your relationship with these cooperatives at Groundswell, of course, are very upfront about your mission to improve the livelihoods and well-being of-- Especially the lower and moderate-income families. Are you well received or is that tense at times?
Michelle: We have collaborative working relationships across the spectrum.
I would say, not just from the perspective of the work that I have done throughout my career, but something that I would encourage others to consider as well, particularly folks who are getting stuff done, who are doing projects and programs, is don't let the perfect be the animated good make progress and keep it moving because success yield success and you're likely to run into hard problems.
You may run into folks who don't like what you're doing, but that's okay, not everybody's going to like you all the time, and by showing a good result, you have the opportunity to change minds by talking to people who don't agree with you. You also have the opportunity to learn something yourself. It's just part of what it means to be a member of a society and what it means to be someone who's ultimately deeply committed to service and to not letting your love for your neighbor be constrained by whether or not you agree.
Hilary: What solutions have you found to be most effective for bridging that gap for folks who are renting their homes but need to lower their energy cost?
Michelle: That's one of the hardest problems to tackle but there's a wonderful solution there that's actually very similar to the work that Hannon Armstrong has done in the commercial space with energy savings performance contracts, where you have upfront improvements paid for with savings over time.
In the residential world, there's a structure called Pay As You Save, and it's an unbilled tariff mechanism for financing, energy efficiency, improvements to homes and apartments, and it works for renters and it works for people who own their home as well because not only is the energy efficiency improvement financed on bill not as debt but as a rate, if you will, as additional rate that gets tacked onto your bill, that repayment obligation follows the meter, not the person so if you move, then whoever moves in after you who's enjoying the benefit of that energy efficiency improvement is going to be the person who picks up responsibility for repayment as well.
I'll tell you, what we ran into though, and what was true in Roanoke and true in Washita, Arkansas and other places that have implemented this, is that certainly working in a rural context, you have much deeper energy burdens than in urban context, and Groundswell publish research that docents this, including looking at the county level in Georgia and North Carolina.
That's because rural housing is older, it's less efficient and it's also, typically, a little bit bigger, you're renting a single-family home, you're not renting a small apartment in a building that was built in the 2000s, with current building code so, for example, an energy burden of greater than 6%. If you're paying more than 6% of your total household income for your electricity and your heat in your house, you're considered to be energy burdened. It's not unusual at all to find rural energy burdens for low and moderate-income households that exceed 20%, 30%, or even 40%.
These are folks who are paying more to keep the light and heat on than they're paying for their rent or their mortgage, and when you're living hand to mouth like that, there's nothing extra at the end of the month that you could spend on weatherization or a new air conditioning unit or the stuff that really improves the efficiency of your home but more than that, other repair and maintenance issues are rampant.
In my hometown, with the SOUL program that Groundswell implements, which is based on that pay-as-you-save model, more than 50% of the homes that we visited to assess, for being able to move forward with weatherization, other energy efficiency measures, had such significant repair and maintenance issues, we couldn't even do insulation.
Hilary: Wow.
Michelle: More than 50%.
Hilary: That means that they're living in these places that are already not winterized or weatherized.
Michelle: More than that, and I don't share this to be sensational but about half the homes that we visited had very severe repair and maintenance issues, like a hole in the roof that had such a big water leak that family couldn't afford to repair. They just closed the door and didn't use that room anymore. Or water leaks and plumbing leaks in the bathroom that had rotted out the floor to where the toilet was beginning to fall into the crawl space. Or there was one woman's home that had some structural foundation issues to where the kitchen wall had pulled away from the roof line and you could see a good half an inch of light running all the way down her kitchen that just leaked water, water poured in when it would rain.
That's not uncommon, and those kinds of housing issues are rooted. Certainly, in my hometown in histories of housing segregation where, for instance, in LaGrange where the textile mill housing that was built for Black and African American employees in the 1940s was never up to the level of quality of the housing that they built for white employees, which also wasn't great, by the way.
That's the housing stuff that you're working with, but you're working with housing that's even for all its problem, it's somebody's home and so you have to respect that and an incredible challenge but a challenge, again, that rural electric cooperatives are very well suited to be able to tackle because they're non-profit utilities, they can use all sorts of interesting sources of funding and financing.
Their business model is to serve their members not their shareholders. Their business model is geared for this too but the challenge is to find sources of really [unintelligible 00:31:32] investment in housing. How can you fix people's houses so that you can then get to energy efficiency and catch up on what the years have taken away. In doing that, also enable rural families to continue to keep the property in the family.
If it's grandma's house, then it can be granddaughter or grandson's house too in subsequent generations. We find that solving for the housing equity challenge is something you have to move through to be able to get to the energy efficiency. Once you get to the energy efficiency, pay as you save is a great approach.
Hilary: Groundswell has played an important role in getting these communities much closer to where they need to be to participate in the green energy economy. One of the projects is establishing resiliency hubs. Could you tell us what those look like?
Michelle: Absolutely. The most important word there is community. These are places, typically, for the projects that we build that are on church rooftops are located on faith-based community centers that combine solar and energy storage so that they can keep the lights on when the power goes off, or provide a place that people can stay warm or stay cool in extreme weather.
These are not places that Groundswell is determining. We're not saying, oh, we need a community resiliency hub here. Or the city of Baltimore who's long been our partner isn't saying, "Hey, these are the places we're going to put community resiliency hubs." These are places where community members have said, "Hey, this is where we want a resiliency center and these are the services that we want there." It's really an expression of energy resilience with solar and energy storage that's connected directly to community needs.
That's also prioritizing the needs of our most vulnerable neighbors. Those may be elders with chronic health challenges, people who are living in neighborhoods that are under-resourced or that have historically been marginalized and that suffer the highest energy burdens and the most power outages. That is absolutely where we want to be partnering with the community to put a community energy resiliency hub.
Through our work, with the city of Baltimore over the course of about the past five years, we've built a bunch of them. We got more coming. We've been really grateful to partner with Hannon Armstrong and extending that work. We recently began replicating it in Montgomery County as well. We're in the process of assessing about two dozen potential community resiliency hub sites there too.
Hilary: That's fantastic. I understand congratulations are in order because Groundswell has been selected for an award by the US Department of Energy to build these hubs across the state of Maryland, where, of course, Hannon Armstrong's located, it's also where I live. How will that allow you to expand?
Michelle: We are so excited about this program going statewide. The Maryland Energy Administration has long been a leader nationally, and Baltimore is the leader nationally and community resiliency hubs but what we will be able to do through this DOE research grant once it's been awarded, is partner with our collaborators at [unintelligible 00:34:53] to create a whole community-driven metrics framework to determine what is resiliency. What is your level of resilience? Has the community's resilience been improved by deploying these technologies and by creating that metrics and measurement framework which will develop in Baltimore test in Montgomery county?
Then, ultimately, test into rural community on the eastern shore as well, we'll be able to really pair that with the incredible resources that the State of Maryland puts into community resiliency every year so that community members will have an even stronger voice, a consistent, steady measured voice both in determining where resources go, but also in measuring the impacts, measuring the benefit at the end of the day. Make sure that those benefits are improving and increasing over time and God willing, to be able to replicate that same kind of approach in other states.
Hilary: Finally, I want to touch on broadband technology. You have said that everyone who envisions a clean energy future for their community needs to become a rural broadband advocate and those are two goals that we don't often hear paired. Could you explain what you mean by that?
Michelle: Broadband technology is clean energy technology. You have to have broadband to deploy a smart grid. It's an absolute necessity. It's also very similar in many respects to where rural electrification was in the 1920s, where you had a national market at the time who thought that electricity was a luxury good for those who could afford it or something that was useful for industry but it wasn't a utility in the sense of being something that everyone needed and everyone should have access to. That's where we are with broadband today. Rural broadband has also been facing a lot of similar challenges.
This bogus argument that it costs too much per mile, like that last mile's too expensive. I'm sorry, farmland. You don't get to have rural broadband because the infrastructure's just too expensive. Bogus argument was in the 1930s with electrification and many rural co-ops are showing how it is today.
A lot of the incumbent, broadband and internet service providers have very aggressive lobbying operations who've gone after what are practical monopolies for themselves at the state level, including driving policies like prohibiting rural cooperatives from going into the broadband business or requiring rural cooperatives to lease internet service providers their polls at a super, super discounted rate but then prohibiting those same cooperatives from being able to provide service to their customers.
There's just a lot of shenanigans, I would say. Getting educated about it, especially if you're in the energy industry or if you're in a rural community and you want to see everybody in your community have the educational and the health and the business benefits of broadband is get activated and make sure that you're asking your state leaders to pass the policies or roll back the policies that are necessary to roll back to enable everyone to have access to this incredibly important service.
Because not only is it key for kids, rural kids who had to weather the pandemic like on some WI-FI connection, sitting in a parking lot at a Starbucks.
[crosstalk]
There was a just a lot of terrible stories out there about the hardships but to quote one mayor from North Carolina, nobody wants to do business where the internet sucks. If we really want rural businesses to thrive, if we want people to be able to work remotely from rural communities, where they prefer to live, we got to solve this problem. The energy industry has a lot to do with it because we need the same infrastructure for smart meters and smart appliances and for bidirectional EV charging and all the aligned technologies that are rolling out now too. We might as well solve two problems with the same solution. We can chew gum and walk at the same time.
Hilary: Let's hope we can.
Michelle: Maybe we've done it before. We can do it again and make sure that everyone has real broadband too.
Hilary: Great. To wrap things up we'll switch to the hot seat which is rapid-fire fill in the blank questions. I am energized by?
Michelle: I'm energized by the possibility to make a lasting transformation in our lifetimes. Even if we don't live to see it, we can make a better place now.
Hilary: When I need to recharge I?
Michelle: I pray and I read my daily devotional. It's how I start my day every single day. This is my second year doing the Bible in a year devotion with Nicky Gumbel online. That's something that I revisit throughout the course of the day, every day to recharge and re-center myself too.
Hilary: Finally, to me, climate-positive means?
Michelle: Climate-positive means giving more than you take.
Hilary: That’s wonderful. Thank you so much for joining us, Michelle. I’m inspired by your team’s success at Groundswell and really excited by the partnership with Groundswell and the Hannon Armstrong Foundation.
Michelle: Thank You. It's been a blessing-
Hilary: If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, please leave us a leave a rating and review on Apple and Spotify. This really helps us reach more listeners.
You can also let us know what you thought via Twitter @ClimatePosiPod or email us at climatepositive@hannonarmstrong.com.
I'm Hilary Langer.
And this is Climate Positive.