By Sarah Melotte and Elizabeth Miller for The Daily Yonder.
Broadcast version by Shanteya Hudson for Georgia News Connection for the Public News Service/Daily Yonder Collaboration

When Olivia Amyette was still a teenager, her grandfather suffered a stroke from which he would never recover. Her need to stay by his side during the worst of the Covid pandemic pushed her into a path after college that led to remarkable success as a clean energy entrepreneur in rural Georgia, where the sector is booming.

“I was very close with my grandpa. He was my best friend,” said Amyette. “I have him in my heart as I work.”

When Amyette went off to college to study computer science at Georgia Tech, she’d spend the weekends back home in Lawrenceville, a suburb of Atlanta, taking care of her grandfather. When it was time to graduate, Amyette worried she wouldn’t find a job in the tech industry that was close enough to home. It was the height of the pandemic and too much travel would put her vulnerable grandfather at greater risk of Covid. 

That’s when Amyette decided to start her own business.

“With the flexibility that comes with being an entrepreneur, I was able to get the closure that I needed,” Amyette said. “We were all there when he passed away. It was very peaceful.”

Jobs and business growth in carbon-free power and other green technologies is stimulating economies across rural Georgia, which is among the frontrunner states attracting these industries. That growth is leading to a scramble to find quality, affordable housing and add other infrastructure to accommodate booming workforces.

The industry’s growth is being fostered in large part by the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), a sweeping spending bill central to President Joe Biden’s economic legacy that aimed to curb inflation and address climate change and healthcare costs, among other things. 

“The overall success of the company would not really be likely if the IRA wasn’t in place,” said Amyette. “It drives the demand for solar.”

Amyette is the owner of two companies, Infinite Energy Advisors, a solar energy company in Cleveland, Georgia, a small town about an hour and a half northeast of Atlanta, and the Solar Knowledge Institute (SKI), a workforce development program that prepares workers for careers in the solar industry.

“I want to make sure that people of all backgrounds have access to high paying jobs, and solar’s a great field for that,” said Amyette. “It puts a lot of money in the workers’ pockets.”

Georgia’s Green Energy Sector Booms

Solar panel manufacturer QCells employs nearly 1,800 people in Dalton, Georgia, the center of a small metropolitan area in North Georgia, where it produces 30,000 solar panels a day, said company spokesperson Marta Stoepker. The company employs another 750 workers at a plant in the nearby town of Cartersville, population 23,100.

“We have people that come in right from high school, ready to learn,” said Stoepker. “But we also employ folks in highly technical positions, like engineers.”

Stoepker said a 2024 expansion at the Cartersville plant was powered largely by the IRA , which created tax credits to incentivize the domestic manufacturing of clean energy products. Stoepker said those tax credits gave QCells the confidence to increase their investments in solar. In addition to producing finished solar panels, the Cartersville facility also manufactures some of the materials that go into making the panels, like semiconductive wafers.

When the Cartersville plant is fully operational, Stoepker said QCells expects to produce 8.4 gigawatts of solar in Georgia, a power equal to about 16 million solar panels. In Waynesboro, Georgia, the Vogtle nuclear plant is capable of producing nearly 5 gigawatts, by comparison. 

Amyette’s Infinite Energy Advisors also benefited from tax incentives brought on by the IRA.

That’s because the IRA expanded the Investment Tax Credit (ITC) for certain clean energy projects, providing a credit for a portion of the cost to install a solar-energy system, whether it’s a rooftop array on a home or a large solar farm. The incentive provides tax credits from about a quarter to a third during the coming decade. 

Unlike some other states, Georgia doesn’t offer consumers one-to-one net metering, a system that provides homes and businesses with solar panels a direct credit for every bit of energy that’s added to the power grid, which provides a powerful incentive in other states to invest in clean energy. 

In Georgia, businesses like Amyette’s rely more heavily on tax incentives to grow solar investments. 

“If it wasn’t for the tax credit, I would probably say 90% of our clients wouldn’t make that move to get solar,” Amyette said.

Georgia ranked in the top five states in the nation for total clean investment from early 2023 to early 2024, with more than half of that $12.4 million going to manufacturing facilities, according to the Clean Investment Monitor, a database of clean energy and climate technology investment projects in the United States assembled by MIT’s Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research and the Rhodium Group, an independent research organization. 

That investment has created at least 17,421 clean energy jobs across the state, according to Climate Power, a nonprofit that tracks clean energy spending and employment. Rural Georgia has seen 13 projects resulting in over $2.23 billion invested and 3,479 jobs created in the two years since the IRA was enacted.

The IRA also supports local economies by creating workforce development opportunities to train future employees in the clean energy sector. That’s part of what made SKI, Amyette’s new workforce development business, a successful venture.

“The Solar Knowledge Institute grew out of what we at Infinite Energy Advisors saw as major struggles within the workforce and major gaps in how we can effectively address the demand for solar,” said Amyette.

SKI is the only apprenticeship program with a specific focus on solar energy construction that’s registered with the Georgia Department of Labor. SKI offers a two-year, 4,000-hour apprenticeship program, which includes a combination of classroom instruction and on the job learning. They also provide a-la-carte courses in topics such as sales, allowing students to tailor their education to their specific interest.

Apprentices are assigned a mentor for the duration of the program, something Amyette said is essential for developing a skilled workforce in the industry. Since it launched in 2022, SKI has trained about 24 individuals, half of whom came from the Cleveland area.

Rural Georgia Experiences Growing Pains

Many of these new investments are landing in communities where they’ll have an outsized impact. Between the QCells Plant and the Hyundai factory, Cartersville is expected to see 5,750 new jobs. 

In Dalton, QCells provided economic diversity to a town that had once been a hub for construction and flooring businesses, but whose economy was devastated during the 2008 recession. 

“It’s changed the whole character and texture of the community in Dalton,” said Mark McLaurin, with Climate Power, a strategic climate communications organization. “This is a place that was like a black hole for jobs, but now they’ve opened this huge facility that’s really kind of breathed life into this community.”

Dalton residents were excited about the job growth brought on by QCells, said Carl Campbell, executive director of the Dalton Whitfield Joint Development Authority and the vice president of economic development for the Greater Dalton Chamber of Commerce. 

“It was a good fit for us,” said Campbell. 

He said QCells hired 600 people within the first six months of opening their Dalton plant. 

“But we’re a little bit behind on housing,” said Campbell. “We don’t have those large scale home builders you see in bigger communities.”

New homes are being bought up and leased as soon as they’re available, according to Campbell. A lot of the newcomers had been commuting to Dalton and only recently were able to buy a house in the community. 

As much as the solar industry in Georgia is flourishing, the state is seeing an even greater share of investment in zero-emission vehicles. The state has attracted more than a dozen manufacturing projects for electric vehicles, school buses, and batteries since 2018, according to the Clean Investment Monitor.

That data doesn’t even include a Rivian plant proposed on a 2,000-acre parcel, which the automotive company initially expected to bring into production for its long-range electric SUVs by the end of this year, a plan that’s currently on hold. Georgia’s new Rivian plant will land on a site where four counties meet, and a joint development authority pooled land from all four to create the footprint for a sizable manufacturing facility expected to create 7,500 jobs. 

“My community doesn’t have 7,500 people, let alone 7,500 jobs,” said Monica Callahan, planning and development director for the nearby city of Madison, “That can be quite daunting to a planner—certainly a rural planner.”

Rapid jobs growth puts these communities in the challenging position of trying to figure out how to provide sufficient housing. Rural parts of the state already have experienced problems with housing quality, availability, and affordability. 

“You present people with what rent is affordable based on typical wages paid in the community and how that matches up with the rents in the community or homeownership, what it would take to buy a home, and there’s genuine surprise,” said Kim Skobba, a professor at the University of Georgia’s Housing and Demographics Research Center. “Like, ‘Oh, right, we do have a problem.’”

Skobba’s research, including a survey of 164 decision-makers in rural, small town Georgia, found community leaders often aren’t aware of the constraints in their rental housing supply, or how lower-income residents might be affected.

Other services, from schools to hospitals to broadband internet access, can also all be limited.

Within Madison, most of the vacant land zoned for residential development is owned by just four or five property owners—and they’re not selling. The city won’t provide sewer services outside city limits and requires anyone with a septic system to be on at least 1.25 acres, making for steep land costs for any new housing. 

So most of the housing is expected to be built closer to Atlanta and Augusta, each of which are about an hour’s drive away. 

Callahan saw the same with Kia in West Point, where its automotive manufacturing plant is expanding to add a line for electric vehicles. Most of the housing for those workers is not available in West Point, a western Georgia city with a population of about 3,500.

“It doesn’t pressurize just the community it’s next to, it pressurizes about a 45-minute radius around the site,” Callahan said. “We live in a country where people are willing to get in a car and travel about 45 minutes to work.”

Other forces are squeezing the rental market. Hedge funds are picking up properties that might have a reasonable mortgage of around $850 per month, and renting them back at $1,600 a month. “That is a dramatic change,”said Callahan. 

Community Leaders Plan for Better Housing

State leadership in Georgia has aggressively pursued this economic growth, promoting the state as pro-business and as having land available for large-scale projects for at least a decade. Gov. Brian Kemp has long talked up the state’s resources and workforce, available for the likes of the 1.5 million-square-foot Anovion Technologies facility, which will make battery components in southeastern Georgia. In 2023, the state had acknowledged the gap between the jobs created by this type of development and housing shortages and it began to invest in expanding in new homes as well.

In 2023, the General Assembly began funneling state money to the Rural Workforce Housing Initiative to provide 0-3% interest construction loans. The program has since awarded $46 million to housing and infrastructure loans, including single-family homes and multi-family senior apartments, as well as projects to improve water and sewer capacity to make way for new housing developments.

“These grants are the first step in meeting the needs of communities experiencing incredible growth as we continue to see new opportunities come to all corners of the state,” Governor Brian Kemp said in the press release announcing the first round of grants. 

That funding overlaps with some of the new clean energy projects. Dalton-Whitfield County Joint Development Authority received $1.5 million for street and stormwater drainage construction for 39 new homes. The Stephens County Development Authority received $478,400 to build a sanitary sewer lift station to allow constructing 318 housing units near an expanding regional industrial park; SungEl has announced plans to begin manufacturing batteries in the City of Toccoa, which is also contributing to the project. 

Whether the grant fund can scale to the size of the need remains to be seen. 

“It’s part of the solution. It will help us in areas that need infrastructure. It will help us in the most rural areas,” said Callahan. “It’ll help the most challenged among us.”


Sarah Melotte and Elizabeth Miller wrote this article for The Daily Yonder.


get more stories like this via email

A massive carbon capture project proposed for the Midwest has another permit under its belt after Minnesota regulators gave their approval Thursday. The controversial plan is seen as a major test of the technology.

The Public Utilities Commission signed off on a permit requested by Summit Carbon Solutions for a 28-mile route of underground pipelines in northwestern Minnesota. They would be part of a multistate maze of pipes capturing emissions from ethanol plants for underground storage in North Dakota.

Abigail Hencheck, an attorney representing the Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy and the Sierra Club, wanted a "no" vote, noting they are skeptical of the climate benefits being touted.

"We have serious concerns that these broader emissions outweigh the amount of carbon that's captured and sequestered here," Hencheck explained.

In neighboring states, the project also has resulted in tense debate over safety issues and landowner rights. Despite the approval, the center said it is glad the Commission added conditions the organization feels will provide some protections if the project becomes operational. The company said the decision balances economic opportunities for local communities with environmental stewardship.

Christina Brusven, an attorney representing Summit, told the Commission by making ethanol plants less-carbon intensive, they are going to help rural areas thrive with a project the company will carry out responsibly.

"We know that the project will be constructed by a skilled union workforce following industry-best practices and agency-recommended mitigation measures," Brusven outlined.

However, the Minnesota group CURE argued the environmental assessment tied to the process was inadequate. The project does plan to rely on federal tax credits from the Biden administration for this technology. One of the commissioners asked what would happen if the incoming Trump administration scales back clean energy incentives as promised. Brusven acknowledged they would have to reassess their plans.

Advocates and lawmakers want New York's Power Authority to amend its draft plan to build at least 15 gigawatts of renewable energy.

The current draft calls for building 3.5 gigawatts with an expectation the projects will not move ahead. It comes as reports showed the state will not reach its 2030 climate goals at the pace it is currently developing renewables.

Andrea Johnson, a member of the Public Power Coalition, said money is a major reason clean energy development has slowed in New York.

"Private developers are dependent on their investors and there's been issues with the supply chain, and rising costs that they're citing," Johnson observed. "They're basically saying to NYSERDA (the New York State Energy Research Development Authority), who issues the renewable energy credits, 'it's not enough,' so they're canceling the projects."

She pointed out many of these projects are expected to rebid. Another reason is the state needs to build up its transmission infrastructure which has led to a long queue of projects waiting to be connected to the state's electrical grid. However, the RAPID Act, passed in the budget bill, is intended to make clean energy projects' permitting and interconnection more efficient.

The state of New York has many avenues for developing clean energy but Johnson feels the state is at capacity with hydroelectric power. Only last year did the state's first offshore wind come online off the coast of Long Island. She said the power authority must provide greater consideration to clean energy projects at different scales.

"That can mean distributed energy, working with communities rooftop solar. We see a huge opportunity to work with SUNY (State University of New York) and CUNY (City University of New York) campuses," Johnson pointed out. "So, public institutions such as CUNY, SUNY, NYCHA (the New York City Housing Authority), MTA (the Metropolitan Transportation Authority) and municipalities across the state are existing customers."

Johnson thinks the power authority can develop projects on brownfields and other state-owned lands with fewer uses. Building the projects could help the Renewable Energy Access and Community Help program, which reduces energy costs for low-income communities but it only happens if clean energy projects are being built.

By Seth Millstein for Sentient Climate.
Broadcast version by Edwin J. Viera for Connecticut News Service reporting for the Sentient-Public News Service Collaboration

We talk a lot about carbon emissions in the context of climate change, but some of the most dangerous emissions aren't carbon at all. They're methane - a colorless, odorless glass that's primarily produced biologically and warms the planet much faster than carbon dioxide. The Biden administration took some good first steps to reduce America's methane emissions - but will President-elect Donald Trump build upon these steps when he assumes office, or claw back the progress that's been made?

Understanding Methane Emissions

Methane is one of the three main greenhouse gasses, along with carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide. The Earth and its various ecosystems produce methane naturally; freshwater lakes, wetlands and permafrost are the primary natural sources of methane. It's also the main component of natural gas.

However, a 2021 United Nations report found that currently, roughly 60 percent of methane emissions are anthropogenic, or the result of human activity. Agriculture produces more methane than any other sector around the world, and around 90 percent of anthropogenic methane emissions come from one of three sources: agriculture, fossil fuels and waste.

The line between anthropogenic and naturogenic (naturally-occurring) methane emissions can be blurry. For instance, a major source of methane is cow burps (and, to a lesser extent, farts). While cows are obviously "naturally-occurring," animal agriculture is not, and neither is the amount of cows we've brought into existence. The sheer amount of methane produced by cows is the result of our domestication of them, not any sort of natural process.

Similarly, methane is the main ingredient in natural gas, and natural gas existed long before humans came around. But it's the extraction of natural gas that actually causes this methane to enter the atmosphere, and natural gas extraction is a human activity.

Semantics aside, one thing is certain: There's a lot more methane in the atmosphere than there would have been had humans never existed. And that's not good.

Why Is Methane a Problem?

Like other greenhouse gasses, methane contributes to climate change by warming the atmosphere and the planet. But it works a bit differently than carbon dioxide, the most common greenhouse gas.

Carbon dioxide makes up almost 80 percent of all greenhouse emissions, whereas methane constitutes just over 11 percent. In addition, methane dissipates rather quickly; it only sticks around in the atmosphere for around a decade, whereas carbon dioxide can linger for up to 1,000 years.

This might have you thinking that methane isn't that big of a deal, at least insofar as greenhouse gasses go. The problem is that methane traps much, much more heat than carbon dioxide - so much so that, over a 100 year period, methane has 27-30 times the global warming potential of carbon dioxide. Over the course of 20 years, it has 80 times the warming potential.

In addition to warming the environment, methane also makes the air dangerous to breathe, because when sunlight interacts with methane, it forms a pollutant called tropospheric ozone. Although tropospheric ozone only stays in the air for a few weeks at most, it can be fatal; it's estimated that up to a million people die every year from respiratory diseases caused by ozone pollution, and methane is a major contributor to this.

How Do Farms Contribute to Methane Emissions?

Around one-third of all anthropogenic methane emissions come from livestock. There are two main reasons for this.

First, there are the burps. A number of animals produce methane as a natural byproduct of their digestive systems; these animals are known as ruminants, and they include not only cows but also sheep, goats, yaks and more. When ruminants burp, they release methane into the air. These are called enteric methane emissions.

The other main source of livestock-related methane emissions is the animals' manure - or, to be more precise, the manner in which farmers store the animals' manure.

Manure management is a significant component of livestock farming. One of the more common ways of storing manure is to put it in large lagoons or pits; this prevents it from leaking into nearby soil and waterways, and also allows farms to more accurately monitor and track their farms' manure output.

Over time, however, the top layer of manure in the lagoon hardens, which prevents oxygen from reaching the manure below. And this is a problem, because when manure is placed in an oxygen-free environment, the microorganisms that produce methane thrive and proliferate, thus increasing its methane emissions. That's exactly what happens in manure pits.

These two factors - enteric emissions and manure (mis)management - account for 80 percent of agriculture-related methane emissions. The other 20 percent comes from rice farming. Rice is a semi-aquatic plant that requires a layer of standing water to grow; this water prevents oxygen from reaching the microbes in the soil, allowing them to reproduce and create methane in a manner similar to manure in a lagoon.

The problem of livestock-related methane emissions is exacerbated by the fact that global meat production has been on the rise for the last 60 years, on both an absolute and per-capita level. This makes reducing these missions all the more important - but how?

How Can Farmers Reduce Their Methane Emissions?

A number of solutions have been proposed, and in some cases implemented, for reducing methane emissions.

Many of these involve new or emerging technologies. There are feed additives that reduce the amount of enteric methane production in ruminants' stomachs, for instance, and manure aeration systems that allow oxygen to flow into stored manure on farms. One company is even developing a methane-trapping mask for cattle to wear while grazing.

Other methane reduction strategies are decidedly more low-tech, such as selectively breeding animals to produce less methane. Simply making livestock farms more efficient on the whole can also have an impact, as this results in increased output with no corresponding increase in methane emissions.

All of these solutions, however, face obstacles. Fernanda Ferreira, Director for Agriculture Methane at Clean Air Task Force, tells Sentient that one of the biggest challenges in methane mitigation is the simple fact that production facilities and logistical operations vary wildly from farm to farm.

"Let's look at the U.S.," Ferreira says. "When you think about goats, sheep, beef and dairy farmers, you have a little over a million farmers. So we're talking about one million different ways of managing these animals. Even if you zoom in into one specific region - let's say the West, or a state like California - there will be variation."

This variation, Ferreira says, complicates efforts to implement methane mitigation technologies on a wide scale, because every farm is a unique operation with slightly different needs, capabilities and restrictions.

"When you zoom in, you have a lot of variation of how farmers handle these animals," Ferreira says. "And this is directly linked to the challenge of adopting [methane reduction] technologies."

Another major challenge is cost. Many of these solutions are expensive, and the cost of implementing them falls on the farmers themselves. But while methane reduction benefits all of humanity in the long run, it doesn't offer farmers any benefit in the short run. As such, farmers largely aren't incentivized to adopt these technologies.

Lastly, there's the simple fact that a lot of this technology is still in the research and development phase. As of this writing, only one synthetic methane-reducing feed additive has been approved by the FDA, and that approval only came six months ago. Other proposed additives are prohibitively expensive, not very effective or come with other drawbacks. The methane-trapping cow mask also has several logistical issues, and has been criticized as a potential form of greenwashing.

What Has President Biden Done About Methane?

In 2021, the Biden administration unveiled the U.S. Methane Emissions Action Plan, a 20-page document with various initiatives and proposals for reducing U.S. methane emissions. They include incentives for farmers to reduce their methane emissions, new regulations aimed at doing the same, and the formation of an interagency task force to collect methane and use it for "on-farm renewable activities."

"The U.S. Methane Emissions Reduction Action Plan provides the framework for the work on agriculture methane emissions," Ferreira says. "The most important outcome that it supports is the deployment of climate smart-initiatives, such as the use of methane-reducing feed additives and the implementation, more broadly, of manure management practices."

In 2023, the Biden administration announced The National Strategy to Advance an Integrated U.S. Greenhouse Gas Measurement, Monitoring, and Information System (yes, that's the official name). This set of policies is geared at improving the tracking, monitoring and reporting of greenhouse emissions, both inside and outside of the government.

These two action plans, Ferreira says, are important first steps in tackling the methane problem-head on. In addition to all of this, the Inflation Reduction Act, passed in 2022, contained funding for a selection of "climate-smart" agricultural practices, including some aimed at reducing methane emissions from farms.

The Inflation Reduction Act also expanded the EPA's authority to regulate methane emissions, and created the Methane Emissions Reduction Program for the purpose of doing so. The Biden administration allocated $1 billion to this program in 2023, and in December, introduced new limits on methane emissions via the EPA.

However, these initiatives only apply to the oil and gas industries, so they won't have any effect on agricultural methane emissions.

What Will Trump Do About Methane?

Methane emissions weren't a central focus of the 2024 campaign, or even a tertiary one, and President-elect Trump made no policy pledges regarding methane. However, actions that he took as president during his first term strongly suggest that he'll seek to undo the Biden administration's progress on methane reduction.

During his time in office, Trump withdrew or weakened a number of federal regulations aimed at tracking and reducing methane emissions, including Obama-era rules that required oil and gas companies to monitor and fix methane leaks at their facilities and take steps to reduce methane emissions on public and tribal lands.

After Trump's 2024 victory, the Biden administration finalized a rule that fines oil and gas companies for their methane emissions, and there's been widespread speculation that Trump will scrap this rule once he assumes office.

Trump, who once said that climate change was a hoax perpetrated by China to make U.S. manufacturing less competitive, withdrew or weakened over 100 environmental regulations during his first term. Nothing he's said or done indicates that he's changed his tune on climate matters since then, so it seems likely that he'll continue rolling back environmental protections, including those aimed at reducing methane emissions.

While this would be unfortunate, Trump is just one person, and America is just one country. There are plenty of other leaders around the world, both in the private and public sectors, making efforts to curb methane emissions.

Canada, Mexico, Japan and several other countries have made significant investments in methane reduction as part of the Global Methane Pledge, for instance. In addition, almost 100 mayors around the world have pledged to reduce their cities' emissions in accordance with the Paris Agreement, which Trump withdrew the U.S. from. Meanwhile, Bill Gates has invested millions in a feed additive company aimed at reducing enteric methane production in livestock.

There are, in other words, plenty of opportunities for global action on methane that don't involve the U.S. president.

The Bottom Line

Reducing methane emissions is no easy task; there are technological, financial, logistical and even dietary hurdles. But given methane's rapid-fire warming potential, overcoming these obstacles isn't optional, but necessary.

Our planet won't remain liveable for future generations without a sharp reduction in methane emission. The Biden administration took some good first steps in bringing about such a reduction, and hopefully, more steps from other world leaders will follow, even if the Trump administration rolls back progress on the issue.


Seth Millstein wrote this article for Sentient.


get more stories like this via email