In August, the VLS team behind the Farm and Energy Initiative—a collaboration between the Institute for Energy and the Environment and the Center for Agriculture and Food Systems— announced the launch of their new website. Directed by Staff Attorney and Assistant Professor Genevieve Byrne, the open-access resource helps farmers, researchers, and policymakers craft solar siting policies that build a renewable energy infrastructure while also preserving farmland. Many students contributed to the initiative, including Carlson Swafford JD/MELP’20, who shares his insights.
When I learned about the Farm and Energy Initiative (FEI), I jumped at the opportunity because it touched so many points I wanted to address. My work with the FEI has been really useful because my project—analyzing solar siting on agricultural land— focused on questions at the nexus of economic and environmental change, including development pressure, existing activities, ecosystem services, and planning. Renewable energy generally provides a fascinating case study that illustrates how small policy shifts can change revenue flows and alter the economics of downstream projects significantly.
Our work revealed how complex the question of renewable energy siting can be. The work showed me how farmers could diversify operations in a way that provides more financial stability while also decreasing inputs and environmental harms. However, the work also raised many ancillary questions that have driven me to explore other policy areas, including local and impact investment pathways, producer and consumer cooperatives, securities reporting and regulation, zoning, open-source licensing, the sharing economy generally, energy cropping, and most recently, renewable natural gas.
Working with the FEI is like a thread that you can’t stop pulling. You may pick up the thread on a farm in Windsor County, Vermont, only to look up and discover that you’re discussing the Paris Agreement. On the way back home, you’ll talk about FERC, regional energy and compliance markets, state-level planning, and local zoning and implementation. All in all, the FEI helped me examine how the economy at large interacts with the biosphere, listen to the pain points environmentally and economically, and dream up ways to make it all flow more freely.”
— CARLSON SWAFFORD JD/MELP’20
Visit the site at : FARMANDENERGYINITIATIVE.ORG
