This story introduces our weeklong series Power by the People: Clean Energy from the Grassroots.

Americans technically have a democratic say in the energy decisions that power their lives, pollute their communities, and dictate economic development and jobs. 

But, much like democracy at large, the American energy system often fails to answer to the voice of the people. Well-resourced incumbent utilities and energy companies wield tremendous influence, and they regularly co-opt the entities meant to oversee them for the public good.

If you follow the news coverage about the clean energy transition, you may get the sense that the people driving it are all entrepreneurs, executives, venture capitalists and politicians. It’s true that boardroom decisions to eliminate carbon emissions and invest in new clean technologies play a crucial role in the shift from fossil fuels, as does sweeping legislation. But there’s a quiet revolution happening at the ground level in communities across the country (most of which don’t have the luxury of million-dollar marketing budgets). People who’ve been marginalized and harmed by old energy paradigms are finding ways to access clean energy for themselves and solve long-standing problems.

To document this bottom-up revolution, Canary Media is dedicating this week’s coverage to Power By the People. We scoured the country for stories of communities seizing control of their energy destinies after utilities and government bureaucracies failed to deliver what they needed. The availability of cheap solar, batteries and other tools gives communities new options to cleanly power themselves, and neighborhoods across the country are availing themselves of this opportunity.

We also found instances of communities exerting democratic power through existing but often overlooked channels in the political system. These profiles, deep dives and case studies show what’s possible when people get organized and push for an energy system that serves their needs. Maybe you’ll see an idea that could work in your own neighborhood.

We hope you check out all the Power By the People stories coming out this week, plus a podcast and a live virtual event Wednesday. To get you started on this journey, we’ve distilled five major takeaways from our series on grassroots energy democracy.

Clean energy can unlock ​“energy sovereignty”

Tribal lands have too often been the site of destructive energy extraction, leaving Native communities to deal with pollution and environmental losses while the profits and energy were shipped elsewhere.

Our week of coverage kicks off on Indigenous Peoples Day with this story about a growing movement among Native communities to build and control their own clean energy. By reclaiming energy sovereignty, they aim to protect ecosystems and sacred places, and to ensure that energy development benefits rather than exploits the people living on that land.

“If this transition isn’t done by Native people for Native people, it can be just as extractive as fossil development,” said Chéri A. Smith, founder and CEO of Indigenized Energy and a descendant of the Mi’kmaq Tribe of present-day Maine and the Canadian Maritime provinces. 

One particularly ambitious plan in the Pacific Northwest would replace 5,311 megawatts of Snake River hydropower capacity with Native-developed solar and energy storage on tribal lands. Doing so would facilitate breaching four dams to restore fish populations devastated by their construction.

The amount of installed and operating projects is still limited, but it is poised to increase. A group called Nimiipuu Energy, formed by the Nez Perce, has installed 750 kilowatts of solar and 1.7 megawatt-hours of battery storage capacity across seven individual sites. But the group’s next phase of development calls for 30 megawatts of solar and 120 megawatt-hours of battery storage, on the way to building 500 megawatts by 2027.

Meanwhile, the Navajo Nation is working on several massive solar developments to inject clean electricity onto the grid where coal plants once burned but have since shut down, leaving economic losses in their wake. The Navajo Tribal Utility Authority is developing more than 900 megawatts of utility-scale solar. A public benefit corporation called Navajo Power is working on 750 megawatts of solar and storage. These are all major contributions to American utility-scale renewables construction.

Native energy efforts are further bolstered by last year’s infrastructure law and this year’s Inflation Reduction Act, which dedicate billions of dollars to tribal climate resilience and adaptation. The projects underway today are just the beginning.

Clean energy can be a tool for urban industrial revival that actually benefits the community

Community organizers in Brooklyn’s Sunset Park, an area hit by deindustrialization of the once-bustling port, pulled off a stunning reversal (as detailed in this piece and this companion podcast episode from Canary’s Maria Gallucci).

An abandoned marine terminal in that neighborhood could have been turned into high-end housing and retail, hitting the workers in the surrounding area with higher property values without delivering high-wage jobs. It could have lured a new factory, offering better wages but subjecting the neighborhood to even more air pollution. Or it could have stayed vacant, providing little value to anyone.

Instead, after years of organizing and advocacy, community groups like UPROSE worked with the city to woo Norwegian energy giant Equinor to revitalize the site as the staging ground for its massive new offshore wind developments.

Alexa Avilés, a city council member who represents Sunset Park, says residents began to envision a world in which they didn’t have to choose between well-paying jobs at polluting factories, or derelict spaces but cleaner air. ​“We felt like no, we want oxygen and a good wage,” she adds. ​“We deserve both.”

Equinor and partner BP will invest $250 million to modernize the shipping terminal and make it a low-emissions facility. They also will fund training for local residents to work in the emerging offshore wind industry — something that benefits both the community and Equinor, given that an American offshore wind workforce is essentially nonexistent so far.

It’s the rare junction of urban revitalization, industrial planning, clean energy and community engagement. Not every American city can host an offshore wind hub, but there are plenty of other forms of clean energy that can play a similarly multifaceted role elsewhere.

Not all ​“clean” energy is just and equitable

In our report on the accelerating push for energy sovereignty by Native American tribes, you can read about how technically clean, carbon-free hydropower has too often devastated Native communities. For example, dams on the Snake River have decimated the fish populations that Native communities depend on for subsistence. Even the use of existing hydro facilities to store clean energy — a potentially valuable tool in the grid decarbonization effort — can cause water flows incompatible with healthy fish habitats.

“There’s a way to make this energy transition beneficial to the environment, not just for climate impacts, but for a much more sensible and sustainable way to operate the river system,” said Jeremy FiveCrows, communications director at the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission. 

Compared to hydropower, solar panels entail far less disruption to the environment, but they can perpetuate inequality if access is limited to a select few.

“Relatively wealthy people who want to go solar are doing it, and everyone else is left with this expensive and unstable power grid,” said Cathy Kunkel of Puerto Rico–based environmental group Cambio PR. That group works with a nationwide network of rooftop solar cooperatives called Solar United Neighbors to help communities band together and collectively buy solar at more favorable rates and terms (catch the full story on Tuesday).

Efforts such as these put decision-making in the hands of more people than traditionally would be involved in solar deployment. Community-led projects will be more attuned to the local impacts of energy development. In some cases, that will slow or stop projects that may otherwise get built. But it also broadens the coalition supporting the ongoing transition to clean energy, which is valuable for the political durability of this decades-long mission.

Neighbors do better when they work together

The rough-and-tumble world of capitalist competition doesn’t exactly encourage the practice of helping your neighbors.

But our story on community-driven solar cooperatives reveals something important: When neighbors band together to obtain local clean energy, they perform better in the marketplace and become a powerful force for advocacy.

Solar United Neighbors (SUN — see what they did there?) assists groups of people around the country who want to create their own solar cooperative. By pooling their demand and buying as a bloc, neighbors get better pricing than individual consumers would — typically 10 to 30 percent cheaper than the individual rate. This also helps the solar installers who often pay a lot of money to sign up customers, and who save on their operations by mobilizing to do a bunch of work in the same neighborhood. 

So far, more than 6,000 households have installed solar through SUN-assisted co-ops across numerous states and Puerto Rico. That’s just a sliver of the national population. But it’s a proof of concept that consumers getting engaged in clean energy don’t have to do so as atomized, lonely individuals. Indeed, they do better financially as team players. And once the solar is installed, co-op members have remained coordinated to advocate for their shared interests in clean, localized energy.

Other collective efforts to install clean energy have yielded a similar combination of financial and organizational benefits. For the majority-Black community of Highland Park, Michigan, the status quo energy situation was unacceptable. Utility DTE Energy literally ripped out all the community’s lampposts, leaving the streets in the dark. Then DTE jacked the rates multiple times and cut off power to Highland Park families that fell behind in payments, even in the middle of harsh northern winters. But this increasingly expensive grid service still suffers from multiday blackouts.

Fixing these structural problems required political organizing to demand change from the powers that be, said De’Angelus Garcia Jr., a local organizer. But the people of Highland Park also chose to build their capacity to make change on their own.

“Being able to resolve our own issues is one of our guiding principles,” said Garcia, who works with the Soulardarity collective. The group is building community-owned solar as a way to deliver cheaper and more resilient power than what the utility offers. (Find out about this and other community resilience campaigns around the country in a piece by Canary’s Jeff St. John.)

Control of the energy system may seem beyond the reach of ordinary people, but levers exist for more democratic participation

Governance of monopoly utilities can seem wholly out of reach to the average person, but individuals have more power than they realize. On Wednesday, we’re publishing an explainer on public utility commissions, the often-overlooked gatekeepers of the clean energy transition.

The PUCs in each state — usually made up of just a handful of individuals — determine what power plants and transmission lines get built, how electric vehicle chargers proliferate, and what utilities owe to communities that long hosted the coal and gas plants that are now shutting down in the shift to a low-carbon grid. The commissions wield enormous power, but most people remain in the dark about how they operate or even about their very existence. 

These regulators operate in arcane, legalistic ways that can be inscrutable and exclusionary to regular people. But a small cadre of advocates keep close tabs on them on behalf of the broader populace, and they have advice for people who want to get involved. When nobody pays attention to these commissions, shifty things can happen. But when communities get organized and weigh in on issues of energy justice, it can change the outcome for the better.

And the regulators are chosen through democratic processes, either elected directly by the people or appointed by politicians who are elected by the people. So if a community is fired up about getting cleaner, more resilient energy, they can mobilize to ensure the people regulating the energy sector get the message.

Be sure to check back every day this week for our Power by the People special coverage.

This article is part of our weeklong series Power by the People: Clean Energy from the Grassroots.

To Robert Blake, a tribal citizen of the Red Lake Nation of Ojibwe people, solar power isn’t just a tool to escape energy poverty. It’s the key to ​“energy sovereignty” — a way for his people to regain control over their own energy decisions and continue to be stewards of the land they’ve lived on for centuries. 

Blake’s solar company Solar Bear — pronounced Gizis-o-makwa in the Ojibwe language — has led the construction of the tribal nation’s first two solar installations, a 70-kilowatt system on the roof of the Government Center in the town of Red Lake, Minnesota, and a 240-kilowatt system at a workforce development center named Oshkiimaajitahdah, or New Beginnings, in the nearby town of Redby. It’s planning 20 more commercial-building solar systems, along with a 13-megawatt solar farm. 

Solar power is cheaper over the long run than utility electricity in the area, which is important for a community where the median per capita income is about $10,000 and 45 percent of children live in poverty. ​“We see a high density of energy poverty,” Blake said, with families often forced to choose between paying their power bills or buying food.

Solar development also means economic opportunity. The Red Lake Indian Reservation, with a population of about 5,500, has an unemployment rate of 24 percent. Most of the available jobs are linked to tribal government, and most revenue is generated by Red Lake’s casinos. ​“We wanted to create jobs, entrepreneurship opportunities,” Blake said. 

The ecological benefits of solar power are significant too for a tribe that has lived on the same 1,260 square miles of land since the 18^th century. High levels of mercury from more than a century of coal power plant emissions have polluted the nearby Great Lakes and have been detected in the fish in the community’s namesake body of water, Red Lake, home to the country’s largest and oldest commercial walleye fishery. The tribe has fought the construction of fossil fuel pipelines across its land, which bring the risk of catastrophic explosions and oil spills as well as worsening climate change. 

Blake views the fossil-fuel energy system as part and parcel of an ​“extractive and predatory” economic system, one that threatens not just the communities and ecosystems directly harmed by it but the entire planet. Native people can now ​“take back these profits, take back these resources and start taking care of the planet and taking care of our communities,” he said. 

On the Red Lake reservation, that means creating a tribal utility and other structures to manage the tribe’s own energy affairs, he said. In March, for example, the Red Lake Nation won federal approval for the first-ever Tribal Energy Development Organization, a structure that gives it more freedom to negotiate land leases and energy agreements.

This article is part of our weeklong series Power by the People: Clean Energy from the Grassroots.

Mohammed Nasrullah had always wanted to put solar on the roof of his Houston, Texas–area home. But it was the opportunity to join a neighborhood solar cooperative that finally made that plan a reality. 

“We really care about the environment,” the former NASA employee said. He and his wife are both certified Texas Master Naturalists, volunteering their time to preserve the ecosystem surrounding their home near Galveston Bay. 

“Going solar was on our list,” he said. “[But] we didn’t have time to sit down and do our own research” on how to find a reputable solar contractor or how an investment in solar would pay off in a state with no solar net-metering laws. 

“Luckily,” back in 2020, ​“a friend of ours who went solar told us there was a local co-op being formed in our area,” he said. The co-op was supported by Solar United Neighbors, a group that has enabled homeowners around the country to switch to solar energy. Nasrullah and his wife joined the co-op, and then the nonprofit, known as SUN to its members, helped them and about 50 other homeowners learn the fundamentals of rooftop solar contracts and pool their purchasing power to get a better price on their panels. 

But all final decisions — whether to take the plunge and install solar, which contractor to choose, which retail electricity provider to contract with and the like — were up to the members themselves, Nasrullah said. 

“There’s no membership fee or anything. There’s no real commitment to buy solar,” he added. Co-op members selected from among themselves a four-person team that worked with SUN to devise a request for proposals to give to contractors. Throughout the process, ​“these folks from SUN were there to answer questions. […] They were so helpful along the way, through installation and operation.” 

“It has been almost 18 months now that we’ve had our system, and I still pick up the phone and talk to folks at SUN,” Nasrullah said. The topics of those conversations range from the latest opportunities for solar-equipped homeowners to switch retail providers and earn more money from their solar power, to checking in on the next co-op opportunities arising in the Houston area. 

“They have a list of what co-ops are open right now for people to sign up,” including four that are being supported by the city of Houston, he said. ​“But if there’s no co-op in an area, they also have a link on guidelines for somebody to [go solar] on their own.”

This article is part of our special series Power by the People: Clean Energy from the Grassroots.

Some of the most powerful gatekeepers of the clean energy transition are almost completely unknown to the public. 

I’m talking about public utility commissioners. In every U.S. state, these individuals regulate for-profit monopoly utilities, also called ​“investor-owned utilities,” on behalf of the public. More than two-thirds of U.S. electricity customers are served by investor-owned utilities, so there’s a good chance that a public utility commission (PUC) is overseeing the energy decisions where you live. But too often, their operations are cloaked in arcane language and procedures, and they remain inaccessible to the very communities they are tasked with serving.

That’s a problem because these utility regulators wield tremendous leverage over how quickly or slowly a state can transition from fossil fuels to clean energy for the power sector, transportation and buildings. They can approve or block the stuff that needs to get built to deliver a clean, electrified future, from renewable plants and batteries to transmission lines to electric-vehicle charging infrastructure. They also get to decide matters crucial to a just transition, such as what a utility owes to coal-plant communities after those facilities shut down.

“It’s these folks that really are holding all the cards,” said Logan Burke, executive director of the Alliance for Affordable Energy and one of the few people advocating for customers at the utility commission in Louisiana. ​“Nobody knows who they are, and that has to change, especially if we’re going to make any real headway in reducing energy burdens and greenhouse gases in our state.”

Numerous obstacles dissuade people from engaging with their PUCs. For one thing, their regulatory proceedings tend to be extremely boring. If you’re hoping to skip the meeting and just look for information online, well, many PUC websites take their design cues from the early-2000s internet — and don’t even ask about mobile optimization.

This article is part of our special series Power by the People: Clean Energy from the Grassroots.

You don’t have to be a senator negotiating a revolutionary climate bill in secret to boost clean energy. Engaged community members also have the power to encourage wind, solar and battery deployment, as Canary Media’s Power by the People series has set out to document. One underappreciated approach is engaging with electric utilities. 

But for all the importance of utilities in our daily lives, they can be as opaque as an egg. This article cracks them open — and breaks down what they are, how they’re governed and how regular people can influence them. 

Let’s start by defining an electric utility in general, and then we’ll get into definitions of the different types of utilities and related entities.

💡Electric utility

Not all electric utilities are the same, but at their core, they’re all organizations that deliver electricity to customers. This service has three components:

1) Utilities secure power from generation resources such as coal- and gas-fired power plants, hydroelectric dams, nuclear power plants, wind farms and large solar arrays. In some cases, the utilities own the plants. In areas where the electricity sector has been restructured (or, as it’s sometimes misleadingly called, ​“deregulated”), utilities buy power from independent power producers that compete in the wholesale electricity market. 

2) Utilities distribute electric power. They generally own and operate the long-distance transmission lines, local distribution lines, transformers and utility poles that make up the grid.

3) Utilities sell that power to customers. Under the traditional utility model, customers had no choice about whom they could buy electricity from — if you lived in a utility’s service territory, that utility was your supplier. But in many states today, this ​“retail” part of the utility business has been opened up to competition from other companies.

In the U.S., there are three kinds of utilities: investor-owned utilities, publicly owned utilities, and member-owned or cooperative utilities. Data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration shows that as of 2017, investor-owned utilities served 72 percent of all utility customers.

This article is part of our special series Power by the People: Clean Energy from the Grassroots.

A sprawling concrete lot overlooks the blue-gray bay in Brooklyn, New York, a smattering of weeds bursting through the cracks in the pavement. Cargo ships and orange ferries breeze by the lot’s empty piers. Behind them, the torch of the Statue of Liberty shimmers in the distance. 

Farther up the shore sits a recycling facility, a cement plant, garbage transfer stations and three fossil fuel ​“peaker” power plants. Truck-clogged Third Avenue and an elevated crumbling highway separate the gritty waterfront from the steep residential streets of Sunset Park, a mainly working-class neighborhood of Asian, Latino and immigrant communities. 

This stretch of waterfront once bustled with the unloading and collecting of cargo, including imported cars and thousands of tons of Nigerian cocoa beans bound for chocolate-making factories. But in the 1990s, shipping activity shifted to other ports, leaving the piers vacant.

For Elizabeth Yeampierre, the empty space holds enormous potential — a chance to build something better than what came before.

This article is part of our special series Power by the People: Clean Energy from the Grassroots.

As a longtime resident of Highland Park, Michigan, De’Angelus Garcia Jr. has seen his community undergo a big transformation. A decade or so ago, the city was at the mercy of an energy system that left it without heat in the winter and in the dark at night. Now it’s an active participant in building a fairer, more sustainable energy future. It’s also a powerful example of how on-site, community-organized energy infrastructure has an extensive ripple effect of benefits for the communities themselves, the energy companies that often neglect them, and society at large. 

That transformation got started back in 2011, when DTE Energy, the utility serving Highland Park and the greater Detroit area, repossessed more than 1,000 streetlights because the city government had failed to pay the utility bill. It was the latest civic injury for a community of 11,000 that’s faced high unemployment and decaying infrastructure since the auto industry abandoned it between the 1950s and the 1990s. 

“People were walking out of their homes to see DTE workers uprooting streetlights,” said Garcia, who was born and raised in the Detroit metro region that includes Highland Park. ​“It’s one of those things that either makes you feel hopeless or makes you rise to the occasion and defy the odds.”

Neighbors opted for the latter, starting a crowdfunding campaign to raise funds to install community-owned, solar-panel-charged streetlights that operate independently of DTE’s grid. That initial response has since grown into Soulardarity. The nonprofit, for which Garcia serves as communications director, has built its community organizing strategy around what it calls its ​“blueprint for energy democracy.”

“What Soulardarity really champions is equity in systems,” Garcia said. The institutional racism that has held back public- and private-sector investment in communities such as Highland Park translates into neglect or harassment by the monopoly utilities that serve them, he said. 

Nearly half of Highland Park’s residents, 88 percent of whom are Black, live below the federal poverty line. DTE Energy has pushed through a series of rate hikes over the past six years, and utility bills can claim from a third to a fifth of a typical Highland Park family’s income. 

Of the 45 percent of Highland Park residents who have reported having trouble paying their bills, one in four have had their electricity shut off for lack of payment — two-thirds of them during harsh Michigan winters. Meanwhile, DTE has come under fire for the unusual practice of sending unpaid bills to debt collectors who have threatened residents with further financial or legal hardship.

Highland Park residents have also experienced multiday blackouts from a DTE Energy grid that’s faced criticism for poor reliability, most recently after thunderstorms in July left about 600,000 customers without power, some for up to five days. Some customers face life-or-death consequences when they lose power for their medical devices or lack heating or air conditioning. Those who are less vulnerable still lose medicine or food without refrigeration, Garcia said, which means ​“we’ve lost the value of the service we’ve made payment for.” 

Reversing these entrenched inequities requires political organizing to demand change from the powers that be, he said. But it also requires building a community’s capacity to make change on its own.

“We’re a member-based organization,” Garcia said. ​“We work with individuals to identify the needs of the Highland Park community and hold ourselves accountable to doing what the community needs.” 

A two-tiered approach to enacting energy democracy

Soulardarity’s approach to energy democracy is guided by the particular needs of the Highland Park residents, but Garcia sees its ​“multilayered strategy” being adapted by communities across the country that are struggling under similar circumstances. 

From urban centers like Detroit, New Orleans and New York City to remote rural and tribal communities, neighbors are banding together to raise money to install solar panels and energy-efficient appliances to reduce energy costs in homes, apartment buildings and businesses. Community groups are organizing with nonprofits to finance community solar projects that can share low-cost, carbon-free power among those who can’t afford solar on their own, and they are winning assistance from government agencies to deploy batteries that can provide backup power for schools, churches and community centers when the grid goes down. 

But this ground-up work has to be accompanied by broader efforts to change the regulations and policies that have left communities like Highland Park without affordable and reliable power, Garcia said. ​“Being able to resolve our own issues is one of our guiding principles. One of the ways we do that is by championing policy as well.” 

Soulardarity’s solar streetlights project is a good example of this two-tiered approach, Garcia said. Crowdfunding has supported the installation of 17 solar-charged streetlights so far. Another 15 will be installed soon with support from grants secured this summer. And Soulardarity has a long-term plan to replace all 1,000 through a proposed $10 million public-private partnership. 

DTE’s own plan to replace the streetlights it removed is to deploy underground electrical lines and charge monthly electricity and pole rental fees to Highland Park. But Soulardarity’s research shows that solar-charged streetlights could actually be a more cost-effective solution — if the city can arrange effective financing for installation and ongoing operations.

Canary Media’s chart of the week translates crucial data about the clean energy transition into a visual format.

Communities around the U.S. are taking the lead to build clean energy projects designed to benefit their own residents, as we’ve been reporting this week in our series Power by the People: Clean Energy from the Grassroots. But some kinds of community-led clean-energy efforts can only succeed if the right policies are in place, and policies vary widely from state to state. So which states are most effectively supporting communities in their quest for clean energy? California and Massachusetts top the list, according to a scorecard from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, while Kentucky and Louisiana are at the bottom.

The Institute for Local Self-Reliance has assigned each state a community power score from A to F based on whether it has 10 different kinds of policies that support local clean energy. The scorecard gives the greatest weight to four types of policies: community choice aggregation, shared renewables, net metering, and carve-outs for distributed energy and solar in renewable portfolio standards. States get points docked if they have passed laws prohibiting cities and counties from banning gas hookups in new construction, as 20 states have done. 

Community choice aggregators are local government bodies that procure electricity for residents and usually offer cleaner and/​or cheaper power than investor-owned utilities. Currently, 10 states have policies that allow community choice aggregators to operate. As of 2020, Illinois and Massachusetts had the largest shares of residents served by community choice aggregators, followed by Ohio and California. 

A range of policies can enable community solar and other types of shared renewables. Massachusetts and New York rank the highest for making shared renewables projects possible. 

Many states have renewable portfolio standards, also known as clean energy standards, which require that increasing percentages of electricity come from renewables. The scorecard gives states credit if their standards require a certain portion of that clean power to come from solar or distributed generation sources; such requirements are called carve-outs. Vermont, Maryland, Oregon and Nevada rank high on this metric. 

States also earn points if they have ​“customer-friendly” net-metering policies, which make it easier and more lucrative for rooftop solar owners to share power with the grid. 

All in all, write the report authors, ​“4 states excelled, 9 states and the District of Columbia saw above-average scores, 9 were average, 15 were mediocre, and 13 states received failing grades.”

On October 12, 2022, Canary Media hosted a roundtable discussion, moderated by Maria Virginia Olano, with three grassroots leaders who are working to democratize the clean energy revolution in their communities:

• Yesenia Rivera, executive director at Solstice Initiative
• Chéri Smith, founder and CEO at Indigenized Energy Initiative
• Arturo Massol-Deyá, executive director at Casa Pueblo de Adjuntas

The conversation was part of our special series, Power by the People: Clean Energy from the Grassroots. Two of the panelists are featured in stories in the series. Smith’s work is highlighted in this story about Indigenous entrepreneurs and leaders who are embracing clean energy as a way to combat energy poverty and increase economic opportunity in Native communities. Rivera’s former work with Solar United Neighbors, a nonprofit helping people collaborate to rooftop solar systems en masse, is featured in this story.

Learn more about Massol-Deyá and Casa Pueblo’s work in Adjuntas, Puerto Rico in this special series on the island’s grassroots solar boom, reported by Maria Galluci.