By Elizabeth McGowan for Energy News Network.
Broadcast version by Edwin J. Viera for Virginia News Connection reporting for the Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration

The hands-on solar panel lesson for rookies at Sankofa Community Orchard in mid-January might have been a bust if student Mary Lewis hadn’t shown up with her A-game — and her F-150 pickup truck.

When the team was short a power drill, Lewis scurried to her trusty toolbox. Then, for a tape measure. And yet again for exterior screws.

The 58-year-old’s preparedness proved integral to completing the installation of a six-panel array designed to power the water irrigation system at the urban agricultural venture on the city’s south side.

Lewis, owner of a home repair business, was one of 15 enrollees in a week-long class this month geared at diversifying the clean energy workforce. 

Richmond resident Richard Walker brainstormed the free solar training to ensure that Black residents and other marginalized communities aren’t left behind as renewable energy booms in Virginia. It’s a more recent offshoot of a nonprofit, Bridging the Gap, the 63-year-old founded more than a dozen years ago.

In June 2019, he debuted the training program as an environmental justice experiment in a church basement in majority-Black, rural Union Hill to counter Dominion Energy’s proposal to construct the Atlantic Coast Pipeline through Buckingham County.

“We’ve been remiss in educating folks about green energy in our neighborhoods,” Walker said about his early attempts to heal a rift over the gas pipeline in a community where his family has deep roots. “This is where people need to be exposed to these possibilities.”

He moved subsequent trainings to the state’s capital, where Walker has partnered with Richmond’s Office of Community Wealth Building and its Department of Parks, Recreation and Community Facilities.

Lewis, also a real estate agent and investor, is enthusiastic about sharing what she absorbs with her network of personal and business connections.

“This is something I believe in,” Lewis said. “Solar just seems like a natural next step.”

Lewis and her classmates spent most of the week of Jan. 10 hunkered down in a training room at the Annie Giles Community Resource Center near downtown Richmond sponging up photovoltaic fundamentals from newly minted instructor Duane Cunningham.

The intensive course covers the ABCs — arcs, breakers, and charge controllers — but also delves into the intricacies of components, sizing principles, mechanical design, performance analysis, and troubleshooting.

Last year, Walker hand-picked Cunningham because of the 46-year-old’s electrical engineering degree, IT-heavy background, and ability to translate technical gobbledygook into comprehensible concepts for laypeople. 

The California native settled in Hampton, Virginia, three years ago to begin work as a data center manager for a defense contractor affiliated with Langley Air Force Base.

Cunningham was receptive to Walker’s overture because overseas travel for the military through 2016 had exposed him to how countries as varied as Germany, Australia, and Kuwait were embracing renewable energy. The two met because Cunningham also volunteers for a separate, youth-oriented nonprofit in Buckingham County. 

Walker had recruited author and professional trainer Sean White, a Californian with decades of international experience, to teach the initial Solar 101 class in Union Hill. As well, White taught follow-up classes in November 2019 and last October.

Cunningham enrolled in the October class and absorbed every detail. To qualify to teach, he had to ace the gold standard exam offered by the North American Board of Certified Energy Practitioners. Passing it gives newcomers clout and access to jobs anywhere.

What troubles Walker is that of the 30-plus graduates in the first three sessions, Cunningham is the only graduate to even attempt the exam.

Enrollees have consistently been a cross-section of men and women ranging in age from their early 20s to late 50s. Some have college degrees and established careers, while others had struggled in the job market after being released from prison.

“That’s still part of the learning curve,” Walker said. “We don’t have a placement rate yet because the glitch is the folks we get in the training class don’t seem to have the confidence to take the test.”

‘I can see solar as a career path’

Cunningham is determined to alter that pattern. 

“I grew up in Compton, so it’s not foreign to me where they have come from,” Cunningham said about his early exposure to hardscrabble California. “I have family members who are incarcerated and friends who have lost their lives making bad decisions.”

Each day, he sandwiched pep talks between reviews that summarized lessons into bite-size nuggets and dissected sample exam questions.

“It all begins up here,” Cunningham said, tapping his temple. “They all have the ability to pass the test. I told them that if I’m going to give you 100% here, I need to know you gave yourself a chance.”

Student Reggie Davis is receptive to such an opportunity. He figures it’s kismet that the invitation to join Cunningham’s class arrived when he began noticing how rooftop solar was flourishing in his Richmond neighborhood.

For the last five months, the 53-year-old has honed his landscaping skills as part of the city’s workforce development program. It’s geared to help unemployed and formerly incarcerated residents transition to jobs.

“I’m grateful to be exposed to this,” said Davis, who buried his nose in his notes each evening as a refresher. “Now I don’t want to limit myself. I can see solar as a career path instead of just a job.”

He appreciated Cunningham’s willingness to apply solar lessons to real-life situations.

“Yes, we’re learning a lot, but once I got the verbiage down, it’s really not that hard,” he said. “Duane’s reviews made me more comfortable. He wanted this information to stick.”

Davis, raised in Florida, New York, Illinois, and Louisiana, landed in Richmond in the late 1980s to major in business at Virginia Union, a historically black university.

That degree — and a starting spot on the basketball team — never materialized as a “detour” dealing cocaine and other drugs turned into convictions that sent him to state prison for close to 12 years.

“I’m through with that life,” he said. Since his 2003 release, he worked at Hewlett-Packard for a decade before starting his own lawn care business.

Davis knows that despite the solar industry’s earnest efforts to attract more people of color, it’s rare to find Black men such as himself in that workforce.

He praised Walker for punching through those barriers.

“We need people like Richard to not only bring us into a new world,” he said about his classmates, “but to bring them, the solar developers, to our world.”

Cunningham had helped to install the first three panels at Sankofa last autumn. Davis piggybacked on that start by applying his new knowledge to add another trio of flush-mounted panels atop a shipping container and a shed.

The farm, situated on roughly two acres of parks and recreation land near Reedy Creek, is designed to address social and racial imbalances from the ground up, said Duron Chavis, food activist and executive director of The Happily Nature Day, a nonprofit.

Enormous colorful murals serve as backdrops for dozens of fruit trees, fruiting shrubs, vegetable plots, and a beekeeping operation. The harvests are destined for the community. Gardeners distribute 4-by-6 foot raised beds and soil so neighbors can grow their own food too.

Chavis’ goal is to be a model of climate change resiliency by incorporating low-impact systems to collect rainwater, manage stormwater runoff, and harvest energy from the sun. 

Carving a niche in central Virginia

Personal setbacks motivated Walker, a professional mental health counselor, to invent Bridging the Gap as a job conduit for Virginians wrestling with addiction, incarceration, and chronic homelessness.

After serving concurrent, two-year federal and state prison sentences for cocaine possession and fraud years ago, nobody would hire him. And he faced such rejection with a bachelor’s degree.  

Walker opted to fold green workforce development and environmental justice into his nonprofit’s mission after watching yet another Black community — his own — be saddled with the threat of polluting fossil fuel infrastructure.

He can trace at least five generations of his family back to Union Hill, where free Blacks and former slaves settled in Buckingham County after the Civil War. It’s about 70 miles west of Richmond.

In January 2020, a federal appeals court put the kibosh on a compressor station that had divided neighbors when Dominion sited it in Union Hill. About six months later, the utility giant pulled the plug on the entire questionable pipeline project that would have bisected Virginia for roughly 300 of its 600 miles. It would have pumped hydraulically fractured gas from West Virginia to North Carolina. 

While Walker’s solar training went dormant during the pandemic, he couldn’t bear for it to be a casualty of COVID-19. 

A large grant from the Mertz Gilmore Foundation allows him to issue $1,000 scholarships to each enrollee. More recently, he’s attracted smaller sums from sources in Alexandria and Charlottesville and is intent on pursuing federal dollars.

If the General Assembly approves an $80,000 appropriation allotted to the Virginia Community College System as part of the state budget by Del. Jeff Bourne, a Democrat from Richmond, Walker would have access to that money for more training. 

Longtime backers include the Virginia Environmental Justice Collaborative, Virginia Interfaith Power & Light, and programs under the University of Richmond umbrella.

“I want to carve my niche in central Virginia as the program that provides free training,” said Walker, aware that competitors charge enrollees. “If I can get full-time instructors, what I can do is limitless.” 

Hiring White was expensive but gave the class credibility. Now that Walker has permission from White to adopt and adapt his original class curriculum, he can save some money and promote home-grown talent. As well, he has added a unit on energy efficiency to keep the class fresh.

To dovetail with the eight to 10 classes he proposes offering annually in Richmond, he’s collaborating with Bridging the Gap colleagues to open a Green Jobs Workforce Center this spring in Buckingham County’s Dillwyn, near Union Hill. Its wheelhouse will be training in solar, plumbing, electrical wiring, fiber optics, and heating and air conditioning.

“Solar has taken flight, but related jobs haven’t been open to communities of color and low-income Virginians,” Walker said about addressing inequities. “Training can lead to decent-paying jobs in these fields.”

Lewis, the recent graduate with an established career, isn’t intrigued by “getting on people’s roofs to install solar panels,” but is toying with the idea of sales.

Her desire to explore solar’s intricacies in Walker’s class was piqued because she put a four-panel, 100-watt system on her garage roof several years ago. She’s thrilled by the drop in her electric bill and, now, has the know-how to expand. Next, she wants to install a ground-mount system to power her house in Chesterfield County, south of Richmond.

In class, the go-getter peppered Cunningham with questions from her front-row seat.

“It has been a super class because it’s gone so deep and I’m kind of sorry the week is coming to an end,” Lewis said. “I wish I would’ve known all this 15 years ago because I’d be reaping the benefits now.”

Lewis is accustomed to navigating around obstacles. For instance, 15 years ago when she owned a dump truck company, she accepted a dare from one of her drivers to earn a commercial driver’s license. She practiced and studied until she passed the test. 

That same tenacity is motivating her to sign up for the North American Board of Certified Energy Practitioners exam. Walker’s program covers the fee and students have 10 tries to pass the 85-question, multiple-choice exam.

When reached by phone the week after the class ended, Lewis was headed to a church to replace a bathroom urinal. She’s been diligent about studying, she said, and is scheduling a test appointment later this month.

“When I start something, I’m going to finish it,” Lewis said. “I’m just not a quitter.”

Wet weather this spring has improved drought conditions in Minnesota and southern Canada. However, experts remain on alert for increased wildfire activity and other climate changes affecting people's health.

Poor air quality was a frequent topic last year in the upper Midwest, as smoke pushed down from Canadian wildfires. Researchers said climate change is fueling hotter and drier summers, making forests more susceptible to large fires.

Dr. Bruce Snyder, co-founder of Health Professionals for a Healthy Climate, worries about a repeat summer of thick, hazy smoke in the air creating unhealthy conditions.

"When that happens, people have more respiratory disease; people who have chronic lung disease tend to get sicker," Snyder explained. "There's a lot of downstream consequences for people all over the world, but certainly here in Minnesota."

Snyder noted the transition to cleaner energy sources is complex, but acknowledged pollution events place more emphasis on the need for less reliance on fossil fuels, due to their contributions to a warming planet. The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency said the state has had 46 air quality alerts since 2015, and 34 of those were because of wildfire smoke.

Snyder emphasized it is not just air pollution from wildfire smoke to worry about. He pointed out there are other ways a person's health can suffer from climate change.

"We've got many more dangerous insects -- ticks, mosquitoes, and so forth," Snyder stressed. "This is having a profound effect on our wildlife. But also, we're seeing a lot more progressively rising rates of Lyme disease, of West Nile virus."

Year-over-year statistics may vary, but state health officials say the median number of Lyme disease cases has risen in the past decade. Snyder added adverse health effects of climate change can be much harder for populations lacking stable housing.


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Conservationists in Maine said reinstated protections of the Endangered Species Act could help wildlife already struggling to adapt to climate change.

Economic impacts will no longer be considered when listing certain species as threatened or endangered but the threat of climate change will be a factor.

Anya Fetcher, federal policy advocate for the Natural Resources Council of Maine, said so-called "blanket rule" protections will also be revived.

"This is basically, while they are considering whether they should become endangered, they're going to continue to protect those species as if they were," Fetcher explained.

The Trump administration removed protections for threatened species along with other key aspects of the law. Fetcher acknowledged the new rules are likely to be challenged by Congress similar to other climate and environmental regulations.

Conservation powers will also be extended to federally recognized tribes, allowing them the same opportunities to protect wildlife, including some of Maine's most iconic species such as the piping plover and Canada lynx, which are losing critical habitat to development and a changing climate.

Fetcher pointed out one-third of Maine's species are vulnerable to climate change, including more than half the state's birds.

"Our wildlife is part of what makes Maine so special," Fetcher asserted. "Protecting critical habitat and the incredible wildlife that we have here is vital to our economy as well."

Fetcher added the Endangered Species Act has been helpful in protecting species such as the bald eagle, once on the brink of extinction but now a common sight in Maine. Nearly 500,000 public comments were considered in the new rule-making process.


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PacifiCorp's updated energy roadmap throws a lifeline to Wyoming's coal industry but critics said the new Integrated Resource Plan is a major setback for community health and the climate.

Rob Joyce, director of the Wyoming Chapter of the Sierra Club, said the plan would add 100 million metric tons of climate pollution by 2042. It also slashes near-term investments in cheaper wind and solar, and makes a huge bet on behalf of ratepayers to install unproven and expensive carbon capture devices on existing coal-fired power plants.

"To be increasing emissions, increasing investment in fossil fuels, and putting hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars towards carbon capture when we're not 100 % sure if that is actually even going to work is really dubious," Joyce argued.

PacifiCorp, the parent company of Rocky Mountain Power, plans to extend the life of the Jim Bridger coal-fired power plant in southwestern Wyoming until 2039. The plan also pushes back the retirements of Utah's Hunter plant by at least 10 years, and the Huntington plant by at least four years. PacifiCorp said it should deliver significant near-term cost savings to ratepayers.

The plan also added more natural gas to PacifiCorp's energy portfolio. Joyce worries Wyoming ratepayers, already tapped by state lawmakers to pay millions for a carbon capture compliance surcharge, will end up on the hook.

"We're going to have to cover the costs of the volatility of new gas resources," Joyce pointed out. "The company is saying between $500 million and $1 billion per unit that they put carbon capture on. Those are all things that they pass on to the ratepayers."

Joyce noted with a looming 2030 deadline to significantly reduce fossil fuel pollution in order to avoid the worst effects of climate change, now is the time to invest big in wind and solar. He added by delaying the expansion of clean energy resources, PacifiCorp is leaving billions of dollars in Inflation Reduction Act incentives on the table.

"Right now we know that solar and wind and even battery storage are cheap and getting cheaper," Joyce emphasized. "Those are investments that the rest of the country is making to save ratepayers money."