Solar investment in rural communities gives them a much-needed economic boost. As the Vice President of Community Outreach and Development, Kim Jawanda is bringing green energy capacity far and wide.
As the world inches closer to 1.5 degrees of warming above pre-industrial levels, our need for renewable energy is at an all-time high. Kim Jawanda of Hodson Energy, a company that develops utility-scale solar projects all over the country, aims to accelerate the transition to renewable energy using her urban planning and international diplomacy experience.
Lena Goings: Hi Kim, can you share a little about your work at Hodson Energy?
Kim Jawanda: Of course! My title is Vice President of Community Outreach and Development, so I do a lot of stakeholder development. I work with the landowners who we’ve secured the land from, who are usually our biggest advocates, and then I work with the different town agencies; planning commissions, board of supervisors, the cities. I try to get buy-in from community groups, from the county commissioners, and the different officials at the local government level so we can move our solar projects forward.
LG: Why is your work so important?
KJ: Everybody uses energy for everything, for lights, for cooking, computers, and you’ve got to get that from somewhere. Very recently, Artificial Intelligence started getting popular, along with data centers and electric vehicles, and those are all huge users of energy, which the grid can’t support right now. We have a very high demand for energy so we need to improve the grid and get more solar projects up and running. I mean, we all know about fossil fuels, right? We can’t keep using those. It’s time for solar.
LG: I feel like it’s a no-brainer to accelerate solar, but I’m sure there are a lot of issues that might come up at the same time. What are the challenges you’ve faced?
KJ: A solar project is not something that happens in a day, and it takes a lot of creativity. Often you’re dealing with rural areas in the United States where you can’t even use the term climate change. Usually our language is around property rights, how you can do what you want with your property. Farmers are in a position now where their offspring don’t want to be farmers, they’re moving away to the big cities, and so a farmer is left with a thousand acres, two-thousand acres, and he’s not sustaining himself. So solar energy can really help these towns and the people living there and we just have to show them how.
LG: How do you show people that solar projects will help them if they have preconceived notions about it or don’t particularly care about the green in green energy?
KJ: Well, there are a lot of reasons to start solar projects even if you don’t think about the carbon footprint impact, and that is what we tell people about in these communities, because we’re not just doing this for the environment —that’s part of it — but we’re also helping the communities. A lot of the time we’re helping the communities financially, which is really important in rural areas.
LG: How do solar installations help communities?
KJ: When we do these solar projects, we’re able to directly pay townships large sums of money that they aren’t able to get from anywhere else. So 13, 15, even 18 million dollars over a course of a certain number of years can go to the schools, or can go to repairing the roads, and really bring revenue to the towns. We say, “where else are you getting this money, and how are you going to improve your schools, your public facilities, if you’ve got no revenue coming in? Here, this project can bring funds right into your county.” We also talk about the possibility of job creation, which is super important,or how solar is a reliable source of energy for the future.
“Solar energy can really help these towns and the people living there, we just have to show them how.”
Kim Jawanda, Vice President of Community Outreach and Development at Hodson Energy
LG: How so?
KJ: Some of these communities, like one I worked with in Virginia, have to deal with so much load-shedding. I live in New York, and when I flip the light switch, the lights go on. Unless I know maybe a storm is coming, I don’t expect to not be able to use the lights in my home. This is not the reality for some of these communities, where they may have no power ten days out of the month. Nobody should have to deal with that, and when you get solar projects into these communities, a lot of these problems are mitigated. We don’t have to really market our services, we just tell them how it’s going to help them, and if there’s trust in the relationship, they agree to do it.
LG: That’s amazing. What do you do to cultivate trust and good relationships with people in a setting like development?
KJ: Good relationships are paramount for this type of work so you have to think about trust with everything you do. To me, everything is about people and the relationships you build.You build a good relationship and you can move a project forward. I’ve always been very social, I’m a people person, and I think that helps, but I’ve had the training as a planner, I’ve worked at the United Nations, so I understand the different levels of government and how to interact professionally. I think that experience and the academic degrees were very important to give me that credibility.
LG: What’s the most important thing you’ve learned over your career?
KJ: I think the biggest key that I’ve learned from working in so many different countries is respect. Remaining humble, showing respect, being flexible, learning to adapt to different environments, and listening. You have to really hear the pain points and then talk to them. Not “Hey look I got an answer for you, this is the way.” This has been a problem with developers in the solar world over many years. We run into it when we go into these communities where bad developers have been prior to us. We’re now dealing with that outcome, and we’re going to have to overcome that, to build back the confidence. So I think when you’re open and honest and you show integrity, and respect, you earn respect and trust, because it really comes down to trust. If they believe what you’re going to say, you better make sure that you can honor what you say. So I think that diplomacy aspect comes in from there. I’m genuinely interested, I’m fascinated by people’s different stories, because we all have stories.
Read about how students at Winsor School in Boston, MA, led the charge to add solar panels to their school.