Testing Approaches to Community Engagement for Large-Scale Solar: Gathering Hard Data on Best Practices

As local permitting for large-scale solar becomes increasingly difficult, many developers are deploying a variety of community engagement practices to inform stakeholders and gain support for their projects. While plenty of anecdotal evidence floats around the industry, little hard data exists on the practices most likely to lead to greater community support. Join representatives from SI2 and UCSB as they discuss their ongoing research on community engagement practices and upcoming experiments designed to identify causal relationships between developer practices and community support.

As part of these experiments, developers will have the opportunity to volunteer their projects for in-kind project consulting on their community engagement practices, including pre- and post-engagement community sentiment analysis.

Speakers:

Shawn Rumery, Senior Program Director, Solar and Storage Industries Institute (SI2)
Matto Mildenberger, Associate Professor of Political Science, University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB)

Original Air Date: May 26, 2026

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