Annika Hirmke Receives Wenner-Gren Fellowship for her Dissertation Research on Community Solar in Montana
Annika is a PhD candidate in the doctoral program of Geography at 鶹Ƶ working with Prof. Jill Harrison and Prof. Joe Bryan. Her dissertation project titled “Solar Possibilities: Community Solar Against Monopoly Power” investigates the promises of community solar in Montana where the renewable energy industry in Montana has picked up significant speed in recent years, but most projects built end up exporting energy and serving communities outside Montana. In this context, community solar promises accessibility and benefit to the communities in its direct vicinity and environmental organizers have increasingly pushed for these kinds of projects amidstescalating electricity costs, higher frequency of extreme weather disrupting the grid, and rising energy demand in the state.
The Wenner-Gren dissertation fieldwork grant funds research that advances anthropological knowledge. This prestigious grant will support Annika in conducting in-depth fieldwork for the remainder of the year, enabling her to build deeper community relationships, work with environmental organizers, and conduct research across the state and across several community solar sites. With the support of several other awards from CU and the Department of Geography (CARTSS, Beverly Sears, Dinaburg Memorial Fellowship, and the John Pitlick Field Research Award), Annika has already gotten started on this fieldwork and has learned a lot about the different community solar sites and statewide energy landscapes which the remaining research will build on.
The dissertation research includes an ethnographic study of three existing community solar projects and how these three sites fit into the larger energy landscape in Montana and beyond. While each of these sites are created by rural electric cooperatives (more directly governed by the membership they serve) and share the same basic structure of community solar, their experience and (re)imagination of energy and space differ in ways that shape the infrastructural problems they aim to solve and how they do so.1) Fergus Electric Cooperative (Lewistown): In “cattle country” this project serves an agricultural region and former gold rush area struggling with changing economic conditions and billionaires driving up the price of land. Community solar offers a path to economic survival through saved costs and to promote the use of renewables when climate change threatens their way of life. 2) Beartooth Electric Cooperative (Red Lodge): Historically central to Montana’s coal economy, now a tourist hub with little affordable housing for the workers that sustain its economy. Here, community solar offers possibilities to both sustain the people living there and conserve the landscape that draws tourists. And 3) Blackfeet Community Solar Energy Project (Blackfeet Reservation): This project entails a solar farm as well as jobs and job training for the solar industry and related fields for Native youth. It aims to address the longstanding structural neglect of Native tribes by rebuilding community and ecological relations. This site brings in considerations of energy sovereignty, economic development of the tribe, and restoring tribal ecological relations. Together, the three project sites provide an opportunity to investigate both the convergences and divergences of community solar projects in Montana and their particular geographical and historical settings.
