Why do communities oppose plans for energy transition? 

My research focuses on understanding how different environmentalist goals (broadly understood) come into conflict with one another in a moment of climate crisis. 

Calls for a just energy transition emphasize that decarbonization needs to be accompanied by broader changes in the ways in which energy systems are planned, sited, and governed, what scholars and activists are increasingly calling energy democracy. How does the urgent need to decarbonize our energy infrastructure come into conflict with the mandate to increase public participation in energy planning? My work focuses on the role of scale and expertise in shaping how controversies over energy infrastructure are framed, contested, and mediated.

My doctoral dissertation explores high-voltage transmission lines as a mechanism for decarbonization, following two case studies in northern New England: the Northern Pass project in New Hampshire and the New England Clean Energy Connect (sometimes called the CMP Corridor) in western Maine. Both of these projects intend to carry hydroelectricity from Quebec to Massachusetts to meet the latter's ambitious climate targets, yet neither has yet been built amidst intense local opposition and "utility-on-utility violence" within the New England grid. Common explanations for community opposition have tended to focus on climate NIMBYism, or the Not-In-My-Backyard movement, which implies that opponents are irrational, ignorant, or dangerously self-interested in their resistance to new transmission development, while accepting a priori that any new transmission infrastructure will inevitably be resisted because of its visual impacts. This narrative - that transmission is regionally-necessary but unavoidably locally-unwanted - ignores the multi-scalar technopolitics of grid planning and governance. How did transmission development come to be understood as "the public interest?" And what happens when that "public interest" is contested? My doctoral dissertation develops a spatial justice framework to understand how the socioecological transformations of energy transitions are displaced from urban centers of consumption to rural peripheries of production and circulation.

I previously worked as a research assistant on an NSF-funded project at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. This project uses land use as a lens to examine the trade-offs and synergies between different social and environmental goals in Massachusetts, with a growing focus on ground-mounted solar development. Ground-mounted solar has become a leading driver of deforestation and loss of farmland in Massachusetts, resulting in moratoriums against further solar development in many towns and stalling expansion of solar generation in the state. Guided by a stakeholder working group consisting of civil society actors from across Massachusetts, the project uses survey data, semi-structured interviews, and policy analysis to develop frameworks for integrated land use planning in the state.

My doctoral dissertation evolved out of my undergraduate high honors thesis at Dartmouth College, which explored community opposition to the Northern Pass project in New Hampshire using semi-structured interviews and policy analysis. This research generated a single-author peer-reviewed article in a 2020/2021 Northeastern Geographer special issue.