Written by: Louis Chenot
Edited by: Sonja Colford
Melanie La Rosa, a media professor and filmmaker at Pace University in New York, has a unique vision for the future of renewable energy. Her latest documentary, How to Power a City, features seven stories across six locations in North America in which individuals have taken the initiative to install renewable energy infrastructure.
La Rosa’s own journey to making a documentary about green energy is an unusual one. Despite studying political science at the University of Michigan, she found herself intrigued by its solar car racing team (“We didn’t even have solar power on houses, let alone cars”). This triggered a life-long interest in the intersection of engineering and sustainability, with La Rosa remarking, “I uncovered an internal engineer in myself that I didn’t know I had.”
While she originally wanted to include some of these more technical details in her documentary, she found that it was the human stories of leadership and perseverance that were the most compelling. She explained, “I thought for a while it was innovation, and I thought I was gonna make a technical film, but it’s leadership.” This people-centric focus is at the heart of what makes her documentary unique. She noted, “We have the technology, but people who want to use it have to still be really motivated to find it, to figure out how to make it relevant within their community.”
The project began on a Brooklyn sidewalk when she was asked by a salesman, “Do you want to switch to wind power?” While enthusiastic, she found herself asking, “What does that involve?” The lack of a satisfactory answer to this question started her down a ten-year path creating How to Power a City with a small crew, and lots of help from her students who worked as production assistants. Her work shines light on how renewable energy projects actually get started, demystifying the power grid for ordinary citizens. The most important thing, she says, is motivation, which is the common thread between what drove her to keep making the documentary despite setbacks and what drove the people she follows in it. “You have to be driven by something internal, like a motivation, or a passion, or a curiosity,” she explained.
Following her start in New York, she explored a wastewater treatment plant with a five-turbine wind farm in Atlantic City. After this, the Pace Energy and Climate Center put her in touch with Mary Powell of Green Mountain Energy, a company that is recognised as “one of the most innovative in the world, not just for utilities.” It has achieved this status for its work on a renewable energy buy-back program, which led it to carry out one of the largest commercial green power purchases in New York City (Zeller, 2011). These connections kickstarted a runaway train of research into a range of other sustainable energy projects across the US. That’s not to say the process was easy. La Rosa says that one of the hardest aspects was finding the connection between locations that “did not have the same resources, did not have the same motivation, and did not have the same geography.” She overcame this barrier by incorporating the ideas of Solutions Journalism, a style of reporting that focuses on “how people are trying to solve problems and what we can learn from their successes and failures” (Solutions Journalism, 2024). Doing this allowed her “to highlight their similarities without drawing out their inconsistencies.” The connection she found was leadership, and the film provides a model for how individuals can take power into their own hands in order to transform their communities in the absence of governmental action.
How To Power a City features a variety of additional locations across North America, from Las Vegas, the first city to hit 100% renewable power for its public services, to Puerto Rico, where many successful solar power projects were able to be built after the catastrophic impacts of Hurricane Maria in 2017, even as larger forces tried to direct the island to use natural gas (Next City, 2023) (Kusnetz, 2023). Looking forward, La Rosa believes that leaning into these kinds of individual-led projects will only become more crucial in light of faltering governmental commitments to climate change.
She is currently working on writing a book about the post-production process of How To Power A City. After that, she says she plans to “unpause some new ideas”, including a possibly archival project focusing on the origin of renewable energy in the 1970s, which she jokes was full of “hippies with long-hair.” Standing in stark contrast to the present day which is characterized by “everyone wearing suits”, this project would trace the transition from obscurity to the mainstream that the field of renewable energy has experienced over the past fifty years.
How To Power a City will be screened by the McGill Centre for Innovation in Storage and Conversion of Energy (McISCE) at the Montréal Museum of Fine Arts on November 19th, 2024. La Rosa hopes that the documentary will “make it seem so much easier” to kickstart local renewable energy projects within communities like the one at McGill.
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References:
Kusnetz, N. (2023, January 26). Puerto Rico Hands Control of its Power Plants to a Natural Gas Company. Inside Climate News. https://insideclimatenews.org/news/26012023/puerto-rico-hands-control-of-its-power-plants-to-a-natural-gas-company/
Rapin, K. (n.d.). The Grassroots Movement That Built Puerto Rico’s First Community-Owned Microgrid. Next City. Retrieved November 14, 2024, from https://nextcity.org/features/grassroots-movement-puerto-ricos-first-community-owned-solar-microgrid
Solutions Journalism Network. (n.d.). Retrieved November 14, 2024, from https://www.solutionsjournalism.org/
Zeller Jr., T. (1294320924). Green Power for the Empire State Building. Green Blog. https://archive.nytimes.com/green.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/06/green-power-for-the-empire-state-building/
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