Interview with Dahvi Wilson of Apex Clean Energy

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: we're back with our continuing conversation with people on the front lines of community engagement and i'm here today with a friend of mine of many years dobby wilson who's vice president for public affairs at apex which is a utility scale wind and solar developer it's an independent company it has 4.5 billion dollars of clean energy investments made in 20 to 30 states and i'm delighted to have dobby here particularly because in the analysis that we did apex's program which she runs is perhaps one of the best in the industry right now so dobby welcome thank you great glad to be here one of the things we heard from people as we were producing the original analysis was that wind opponents organize online and then they show up in the room do you see that reflected [00:01:16] Dobby Wilson: in the experience of your staff absolutely and in fact most of their pages are public so we also know when they're organizing to show up in the room which can be very helpful it's definitely a source of information that we track very closely because opponents to the project do use facebook as an organizing tool um but but yes uh they do and what's what i feel like is particularly powerful about the facebook platform for those who are fighting wind is that they very quickly become connected to other groups that are fighting wind elsewhere in the country and what we see is a negative news story from any project uh around the country will get picked up by groups fighting wind elsewhere in the country over and over and over and over and over again so bad news from any one of our projects hurts every other project um and this this anti-wind network is so well connected that um that they've learned how to leverage that it's expensive to hire somebody to help protect a project on the public acceptance side but if we fail to do so and we don't get a permit as a result you know that that cost will far outweigh any cost of of hiring a resource to help um and then there's there's just uh another another theme that we've started to see is just delay so even if you're not even if they're not killing a project uh they're they're often delaying a project significantly any thoughts you want to share about the proper use of digital tools in overall community acceptance efforts sure so i would say that generally speaking our industry is evolving and growing in regards to community acceptance in general so real investment in community acceptance is is not universal um and it's it's still uh it's still growing apex has made a very large investment in this space and so it's given us more capacity to try new tools when it comes to digital your digital uh makes sense as a tool as part of a community engagement strategy however it's definitely a tool that takes time uh takes resources and definitely takes a strategy to implement well [00:03:46] Speaker 1: to the outside observer of what apex does with community acceptance what features are out there in the public but perhaps don't jump out it at somebody that you think are hallmarks of [00:04:00] Dobby Wilson: a successful program i think the most important thing that we've learned over the last several years working on community acceptance is we have to proactively go find our supporters we have to motivate them to engage and we have to help them engage and it's not enough to invite them to our events to get get educated it's not enough to expect that the people who really care will show up it really is up to us to identify folks who may not even realize this issue relates to them and motivate them to come out and support i think that in particular this kind of recruiting element this ability to go find people and figure out who who is sympathetic to what you're talking about is is actually one of the biggest values um it's almost like failing to be on social is a is sort of a uh you're giving yourself a disadvantage if you're not there [00:05:11] Speaker 1: davi wilson of apex thank you so much for joining our ongoing conversation around not just for nimby's they'll first ever look at the use of digital tools in building community acceptance for wind and solar and solar projects thank you davi thank you very much [00:05:28] Speaker ?: thank you very much