A Chippers land enhancement woodlands project. Chippers is proud to sponsor this page and believes in encouraging and promoting environmental stewardship and protecting our green spaces above all else. Kudos to these Dartmouth students and Vital Communities for collaborating and taking steps to create real-world solutions to climate change issues.

Every year, Dartmouth College offers a two-term capstone class called the Senior Design Challenge, that combines interdisciplinary education with human-centered design to solve challenges identified by partner organizations in the Upper Valley. This year, a trio of students is working with the Upper Valley Adaptation Workgroup (UVAW) to find grassroots solutions addressing the problem of climate change on an individual level. The team hopes to build a technical solution that will have a real impact on the local community and, in some form or another, similarly engaged communities around the world.

Seniors Abby Drach, Gabby Hunter, and Jade Bravo wanted to do something about climate change. Jade is an environmental studies major; Abby and Gabby, who are majoring in psychology and cultural anthropology respectively, are passionate about sustainability and interested in finding creative, bottom-to-top solutions to the problems people face daily. Despite their disparate majors, the human-centered approach the class inspires drew them together, and their interests fit with the challenge proposed by UVAW, a group of individuals and organizations that meets under the Vital Communities umbrella and seeks to build climate-resilient communities in the Upper Valley. The challenge, as given to the students, was to answer the question: “what else can I [as an individual in the Upper Valley] do to combat climate change, and where do I start?”

The challenge, “to catalyze community-wide activity to mitigate and adapt to climate change” as stated in UVAW’s proposal, inspired the trio, and they set about interviewing residents of the local community, with support from Earth Sciences Professor Erich Osterberg and Vital Communities Climate Projects Coordinator Ana Meija. Starting from various climate-conscious sources including UVAW’s Climate Change Leadership Academy and a Building A Local Economy meeting, the team interviewed twenty-eight residents of Norwich, Hanover, and Lebanon. The questions were fairly broad, says Abby: in terms of pro-environment actions, they asked people “what behaviors they do daily, what they wish they were doing, and what’s preventing them from doing that,” among other topics.

The students’ results may not sound surprising, but they are certainly informative and highly useful. Analyzing the results of their interviews, they distilled their findings into four insights: first, that people often rely on community-based actions and resource-sharing mechanisms for change; second, that the decisions people make are based on individual motivations and priorities; third, that though money can be a barrier, people with resources intentionally invest in and explore tools ranging from electric vehicles to solar panels and weatherization; and fourth and perhaps most importantly, that individuals want to be more resilient than they are, but they often lack sufficient information and can be overwhelmed by the information that is available. That may sound confusing, but in short, it means that people want to find more ways to address climate change locally, and they do when they have the opportunity and support, but they may not know what to do.

Dartmouth students Abby Drach, Gabrielle Hunter, and Jade Bravo

This is where their work will continue in the second term of their project, which Abby is excited to begin. Their task, she says, will be to build “a decision-making tool to help people to choose and undertake the actions that make most sense for them.” Though this is a project focused on the Upper Valley and different populations may require different solutions, the team is hopeful this is a project that can ultimately be applied to numerous communities in Vermont and beyond. They are grateful to the friendly and helpful community members they interviewed – “you definitely can’t find that everywhere,” Abby notes enthusiastically – and expect that, with slight modifications, this sort of activity could be applied in communities elsewhere and the results could have broad and meaningful impacts on our world.

Still, Abby knows there are challenges. In analyzing their data, the team developed personae to broadly define their target audience: a retired person with free time and a desire, perhaps partially realized, to get involved in her community; a young professional doing what he can with limited impact and time; parents with young children who are conscious of the climate crisis but lacking the discretionary income to be able to do much more than make it through the day; and of course the environmental experts who understand the issues but may not always know the best solutions for the wider community. “We may need to choose one persona to focus on, or we may need different solutions for each of them,” Abby says, but they still hope to find effective solutions for as many people as they can, and use the community, or other people, as bases of knowledge or resources for building those solutions. As someone with a keen passion for sustainability (she is particularly interested in clothing sustainability) Abby hopes her experience will be applicable to her future endeavors; in any case, her work in collaboration with the Upper Valley community has already made steps towards meaningful change.

How do you combine responsible investing, concern for the environment, and a desire to effect meaningful change in your local community? Norwich resident Norm Levy may have found one answer that you haven’t considered yet.

After working as a physician at Dartmouth-Hitchcock for 25 years, Norm retired in 2013 and began wondering what to do next. Aside from “for fun” projects – including wine tastings – he wanted to focus his ability on good works that would yield results in Norwich and the Upper
Valley. Starting from a passion for increasing sustainability efforts especially among lower-income members of the community, Norm started looking for a way to support local weatherization programs.

Starlake Village comprising a 14-home cluster

He joined the Norwich Energy Committee, through which he met with personnel at Twin Pines Housing Trust (now Twin Pines Housing) and organized free energy audits for moderate-income residents living in the Twin Pines-built fourteen-home cluster on Starlake Lane. The Energy Committee also promoted yearly Solarize campaigns, focused primarily on individual homeowners. Through these campaigns, he learned about community solar arrays, and that while some offer solar panels for users to purchase directly, others may be financed by a single funder who would then be able to sell the electricity they produced. He also learned that most projects were financed through Tax Equity Financing: incentives to private investors that go far beyond the 30% federal rebate offered to individual homeowners and are unavailable to non-profit organizations and municipalities. Typically these incentives would yield a full return on investment within five years and begin making profits. Finally, he learned about a community solar project in Colorado that was required to allocate 5% of its output to low-income customers, leading it to partner with non-profit organizations in order to meet this requirement.

Norm saw an opportunity to propose a partnership with Twin Pines and local installer Norwich Solar Technologies to finance and build a solar array on land adjacent to the Starlake housing cluster that would provide electricity to Starlake residents with no upfront costs to them. As the private owner of the array, with the puckish name Norm & Sun, LLC, Norm could access all of the tax benefits and control the cost of the service. He chose to share his benefits with the homeowners, charging them 25% less than their previous electrical bills and extending by two years the date by which he would recoup his initial investment and begin making a profit. The end result was a solar array generating electricity for at least the next fifty years.

As this was new territory for Twin Pines, the homeowners, and the property owner of the proposed site, there were a lot of concerns and
suspicions to overcome. But after numerous meetings with all parties involved, the land for the array was transferred to Twin Pines Housing, who in turn made it available to Norm for his project. The homeowners provided their yearly electrical costs, and Norm worked with
Norwich Solar Technologies to determine the amount of solar production needed to cover the expected usage. They ultimately chose a 65 kilowatt DC array, sufficient to cover the needs of the fourteen homeowners, an adjacent neighbor, and excess to extend a similar discount to Cover Home Repair in White River Junction. Norwich Solar Technologies designed and constructed the array. Now, just a few years after beginning the project, Norm’s project has “flipped the switch” and begun providing electricity as of July 1.

Starlake solar array on land adjacent to the Starlake housing cluster

The result is a win for everyone: for the planet and the environment, it’s a reduction in carbon dioxide generation; for Norm, it’s a responsible investment with an impact on his local community and a clear return once the project finishes paying for itself in a few years; for the residents able to take advantage of the solar electricity, it means clean energy, a reduction in their energy costs, a consistent, rather than fluctuating, bill, and money in their pockets that they can use as they wish. In addition, Norm wanted to make the project as accessible as possible, so instead of withdrawing payments directly from his customers on a set day, he provides a year of monthly payment vouchers to them. “I know people get their money on different schedules,” he says, “so this lets them pay when they are able.”

Norm hopes his story will inspire others of similar means and with matching interests. For new investors interested in following Norm’s model, it’s a huge win in that they can now learn from his model, simplifying their process substantially. Norm also reports that since the beginning of his efforts, local installers like Norwich Solar Technologies have seen the value of facilitating such private/non-profit collaborations, creating more options and opportunities.

Norm, who also buys LED bulbs in bulk and hands them out to people in the community in order to convince them to switch over to the more comfortable, sustainable, and cost-effective option, doesn’t see himself as a hero but as a member of his community with the responsibility to support it and the means to improve it. “It’s just fair, and I can afford it,” he reasons. Even when federal dollars go into weatherizing or solarizing a few homes, the benefits ripple out, in the form of lower energy costs for everyone, more resilient communities, a cleaner environment, and greater social cohesion. Now he hopes others will follow in his footsteps. “I didn’t want to encourage others to do it until I did it. Well, I did it. You can do it too.”

An investor-funded community solar array may seem like an odd opportunity, and that’s precisely why Norm wants others to know about it. “Financial advisors won’t tell you about this sort of thing. They’re looking at the conventional investment opportunities, with bigger programs.” In contrast, this is a local project with immediate and long-term benefits. The money customers save cycles back into the local economy. Without the ongoing energy production costs of other sources, solar arrays will pay for themselves and earn profit after the first seven years, meaning investors could then repeat the process elsewhere.

Norm is happy to talk with other investors who are interested in pursuing a similar project and in sharing his model; he can be reached at nblevy@icloud.com. He warns that the rebates will be shrinking over the next few years, though, so start now! In the meantime, he continues to seek creative and mutually beneficial solutions to providing clean, efficient energy in Norwich and beyond.