It has been an honor to participate in the 2022 Tadler Summer Fellowship Program! This summer, I continued my policy-based internship at the Center for Economic and Policy Studies at the Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service, where I worked on two projects intended to serve the Commonwealth’s localities.
The first project, the Community Flood Resilience Initiative, partnered with Lenowisco Planning District Commission (PDC) in Southwest Virginia and Southside PDC and the City of Martinsville in Southern Virginia to analyze these communities’ current flood risk and capacity for mitigating the hazards induced both by nuisance and severe flood events. Over the course of the summer, I learned a great deal about project management as I helped coordinate an internal team spanning the Cooper Center, UVA’s Department of Engineering Systems, and UVA’s Department of Environmental and Urban Planning at the School of Architecture.
This summer’s tragic flood disasters, which devastated several vulnerable communities in Southwest Virginia, powerfully and soberingly reminded me of the public service imperative to account for and act upon the current and future needs of under-resourced localities. As this project continues into Fall 2022, the UVA team eagerly anticipates providing actionable, regionally tailored plans to our partners, with which they can take robust steps to respond to increasing flood risk and qualify for major flood resilience programs beyond those offered by Virginia’s Department for Conservation and Recreation.
My second task for the summer has been developing a white paper on emerging financial assurance best practices for localities with regard to utility-scale solar facilities’ eventual decommissioning. This paper seeks to help localities lower the fixed costs associated with solar development while still protecting their financial interests, particularly in insuring against the risk that a locality bears the cost of decommissioning an abandoned or end-of-life utility-scale solar facility rather than the project’s developer or owner. Working on this report gave me a fascinating lens into Virginia’s energy market, as well as state and local legal frameworks for renewable energy. To compile this report, I analyzed state laws, local codes, and existing decommissioning plans, interviewed field experts, and evaluated decommissioning and financial assurance processes in comparable markets.
My experiences this summer have been deeply meaningful in encouraging my eagerness to work as a public servant. While these projects were associated with different sectors of environmental responsibility, they taught me an important and far-reaching lesson: Communities facing similar problems or concerns are often situated in quite different contexts from one another. Effective solutions can impactfully benefit each unique community by recognizing these differences and altering their recommendations accordingly.