Fred ClarkSummary
This conversation on Pulse of the Bay explores the critical issues surrounding climate change and renewable energy initiatives in the Chequamegon Bay area. Host Fred Clark engages with Bill Bussey and Bill Bailey, who share insights on the work of the Citizens’ Climate Lobby, personal motivations for climate advocacy, the political landscape affecting climate policy, and local efforts to build resilient communities through renewable energy projects. The discussion highlights the importance of community engagement, innovative solutions like microgrids, and upcoming events to raise awareness and promote action on climate change.
Takeaways
Citizens’ Climate Lobby focuses on lobbying Congress for climate action.
Community engagement is crucial for raising awareness about climate change.
Political challenges make climate advocacy difficult but necessary.
Local initiatives can significantly impact climate resilience.
Renewable energy projects can be financially beneficial for communities.
Microgrids provide energy security during outages.
Community solar projects are vital for sustainable energy access.
Innovative technologies like bifacial solar panels enhance energy production.
Upcoming Earth Day events aim to mobilize community action.
Collaboration among local organizations strengthens climate advocacy efforts.
Resources
Citizens Climate Lobby – Chequamegon Chapter
US Department of Energy – Energy in Rural and Remote Areas Project
League of Women Voters of Ashland and Bayfield Counties
United Presbyterian Congregational Church, Ashland, WI
Transcript
Fred Clark
Good morning and welcome to Pulse of the Bay with the news and public affairs show from 97.7 FM WVCB-LP in Ashland, Wisconsin. We are the voice of Chequamegon Bay. WVCB FM is community radio. Our programming, the music, news, documentary and discussion strengthens our sense of place and connection among the communities along the south shore of Lake Superior. You can check us out at wvcb.org.
I’m Fred Clark, one of your hosts for Pulse of the Bay, a program for sharing the news, events, and in-depth discussions with interesting people of all kinds throughout the South Shore and Chequamegon Bay. And I’m here today with two very interesting people to talk about their work and work that we’re all involved in and all affected by around renewable energy and climate change, Bill Bussey and Bill Bailey. Bill and Bill, welcome.
Bill Bussey
Thanks Fred.
Bill Bailey
Thank you.
Fred
Absolutely. Bill Bussey is currently the chair of the Citizens’ Climate Lobby, Chequamegon Chapter. He’s got a long career as an attorney, a supporter of good causes. He was formerly the attorney for Bayfield County and a former Bayfield County supervisor and as i learned earlier a graduate of Harvard Law School. Bill glad you’re here.
Bill Bailey is the president of Chequamegon Bay Renewables or otherwise known as Cheq Bay Renewables. They are a 501(c)3 dedicated to local sustainable initiatives primarily but not limited to renewable energy.
Bill and his wife Gail Chatfield operate a long time greenhouse business, Bailey Greenhouses, or I should say they operated a long time greenhouse business. And from there Bill and his colleagues have moved into supporting renewable energy in many forms around our region.
And just as a way to get us started, you know, if we think back not even a year ago,
Climate Change was a priority, both for the federal government and for our state government and for all the communities that we’re familiar with. And in fact, under the Biden Administration and things like the Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and other initiatives, there were big investments in climate resiliency, climate readiness, and renewable energy throughout the country.
As we know, there was an election in January, in November last year, under the Trump administration, we’ve done a significant turn. And in fact, many if not most of the federal programs that were addressing climate change are now being re-engineered with other focus areas.
That’s not to say that climate change stopped happening. It’s still real. The greenhouse gases in the atmosphere continue to increase. And important work that people, communities, and organizations have been doing around the climate space continues to go on. And we’re going to talk to Bill and Bill about some of that work today.
So Bill Bussey, start by, if you will, tell us about the Citizens’ Climate Lobby. What’s it all about, and how do people get involved?
Bill Bussey
So, Fred Citizens Climate Lobby is a national organization of citizen activists concerned about climate change. And our principal focus has been to lobby Congress to take action on climate change. We do that through contacting Congress through emails, correspondence, telephone calls, meeting with staffs of our members of Congress at least twice twice a year and asking our folks to weigh in and make those contacts when important legislative issues involving climate are before the Congress. We also seek to increase
knowledge by the general public of climate change, the importance of taking action on it. We do that by writing monthly columns of our chapter for the Ashland Daily Press. We try to send out a monthly letter to the editor written by one of our members to all the newspapers in the 7th Congressional District. And then we also work to develop grassroots support in the greater Chequamegon Bay area and beyond.
meet with what we call grass tops folks, community leaders, local business, and area leaders. And that same process goes on nationally. There are over 400 chapters throughout the country. There are actually some international chapters, but ours focuses in American politics.
There are 18 chapters in Wisconsin. One distinguishing feature of our organization is that we’re nonpartisan and we lobby both sides of the aisle and we do it politely, politely, respectfully, and persistently, even with members of Congress that disagree with us, don’t share our views. We politely keep pushing on them too.
Bill Bussey
So we’ve been doing that for some time. How do you join up? Well, you just go to CitizenClimateLobby.org and click on Join Now. You insert your name, address, phone number, email. And the National CCL Office will let me know that you signed up. And you’ll be hearing from me. And you’ll be a member of the Shawampian Chapter Citizens Climate Lobby.
Fred
fantastic. And so you’re a chapter of, as you said, a national organization. Who was the founder, or who were some of the people involved in?
Bill Bussey
So the founder was a fellow out in California, I’m forgetting his first name, Saunders. It was founded in 2007.
It was shortly after the documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, featuring Al Gore’s slideshow presentations on climate change came out, and it was Marshall Saunders was his name, and he was taken by this. He’d worked on other initiatives, lobbying Congress in the past with this respectful approach, and he felt that this was an approach that was needed to address climate.
Fred
Sounds really powerful and for visitors and residents in Bayfield, think you’ve seen citizens climate lobby members down on the corner of Rittenhouse Avenue collecting survey information.
Bill Bussey
That’s right, for the past three summers we’ve been down on the main intersection of Bayfield next to Grunkies Inn with a poster coming from the Yale program on climate change communication, which does a survey every year to determine where people fall in America on a spectrum of concern about climate change anywhere from alarmed down to disengaged. And we would seek input from passers-by by having them put a pin in the circle that best represented their views on climate.
Fred
Good to know. So you’ve personally been involved since 2014? Yes. And what personally motivated you to put so much of your time and energy into this issue? Was it an experience that you had?
Bill Bussey
So, you know, I think I first became aware of climate change as a major environmental issue back in 1992 Yeah, that was a year of the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro sponsored by the United Nations Concerns about climate change biodiversity and the need for global sustainable development All receive significant coverage. That was also the year that Al Gore’s book Earth and the balance came out
And so that led to my involvement locally in the Alliance for Sustainability, which was formed in 1994 and for over two decades promoted sustainable development in general in the Chequamegon Bay area. And then when Al Gore’s slide light shows were highlighted by the Inconvenient Truth documentary in 2006, that really heightened my concern and interest in climate
Bill Bussey
But so when in 2013 I was approaching retirement from my law practice here in Bayfield, I saw that Al Gore was giving one of his presentations down in Chicago. And I thought, well, this is one I want to go to. Went down to Chicago. It was a great conference. A number of folks there from Wisconsin, all of whom told me about Citizens Climate Lobby. There was a very active chapter in Madison. They said, you’ve got to get involved in this. So I went back home and I called the the state CCL leader and following spring in March of 2014 we established the Chequamegon Chapter of Citizens Climate Lobby and we’ve been going ever since.
Fred
Well, great effort and it’s open to all, correct?
Bill Bussey
That’s correct.
Fred Clark
And so in the years that you’ve been involved, as we noted earlier, we’ve seen an about face at the federal executive level around climate change. And in fact, the words climate change aren’t even being used by many programs at this date. But nevertheless, reality goes on and communities responding to climate impacts continue to need to do that. But what’s your experience in terms of policymakers’ understanding of climate since the time started till today. Is it growing? Are we seeing more awareness, more willingness to take good actions?
Bill Bussey
My first observation is that this is a very tough issue to make progress on politically. Given the extent to which our society, our civilization has evolved to rely on fossil fuels, I guess that’s not surprising. As we know, climate change, unfortunately, but again, not surprisingly, has become an extremely partisan issue. That’s made it very difficult for concrete accomplishments at the congressional level. If you look at surveys such as the ones that the Yale program does, concern among the general public about climate change has increased substantially.
Substantial majorities of Americans are concerned about climate change, are in support of a number of actions at the federal level to address it. But when it comes to the voting booth, Climate change still doesn’t rate highly as an important issue. So you might have somebody that says, yes, I’m worried and concerned about it, but all these issues are more important to me. And so that concern’s not reflected in the election outcome. And we have this partisan divide in Congress.
As you point out, there’s been 180-degree reversal from the Biden administration. know, we lobby, Citizen Climate Lobby lobbied very hard for the Inflation Reduction Act which is of course the hugest bill ever passed to address climate, but it passed strictly along partisan lines, both in the Senate and the House. And now with this 180 degree turn, the current administration is looking to undo the climate provisions in that bill.
Bill Bussey
There is some exception to that. are 21 members in the House, Republican members, who have written to Speaker Mike Johnson saying there are some good things in the Inflation Reduction Act, tax credits for clean energy that have helped our states. More recently, were four senators, Republican senators, who have written Senate Majority Leader Thune that there are good things in the Inflation Reduction Act that should not be revised. So there’s some hope there, but this is a very difficult struggle, and one just has to keep at it and keep at it because the issue is so serious, we can’t afford to ignore it.
Fred
Well, and something that I’ve heard in a lot of conversations is that climate change is such a large issue, and it can be an abstract issue for some people, that maybe what we need to do is break it down into some components.
Creating more resilient communities that are better prepared to deal with these extreme weather events, you know, is one important piece of that, right? And if communities around Bayfield and Ashland County are looking at their watersheds and their waterways and where the streams are crossing the roads and trying to reduce vulnerability to disruption from storms and likewise renewable energy, which we’ll talk about, has a lot of initiative and energy and a business case behind it. So are you seeing more receptivity to people talking about climate related things at that level?
Bill Bussey
I think so, and especially around the Chequamegon Bay area, where I think we’re more tuned into the potential adverse impacts. We’ve experienced some of them, major flooding in 2016, 2018 that came close to isolating Ashland. So I think the awareness is increasing here and at the state and federally, if you look at national polls, especially as these things start to impact people more directly and local and regional actions are needed to address them.
Fred
Yeah, yeah, good to know. You know, there was an encouraging bill that passed the Wisconsin state legislature last session that was authored by Republicans that provided funding through the Wisconsin Emergency Management for communities that want to plan forward into trying to develop and get ahead of climate related events. And I think so there’s some encouraging news there.
Yeah, so we’ll shift here a bit. And Bill Bailey, you are someone with a diverse background as a greenhouse grower and then more recently as a, I guess what I’d say, as a rainmaker for renewable energy in lots of different forms around this region. So maybe you could start just by telling us about your path and sort of what brought you to the work that you’re doing today with renewable energy?
Bill Bailey
Thanks. Yes, I was in the greenhouse business for 35 years and one thing that’s really obvious about greenhouses that they take a lot of energy. Our value of the roof is two. If that means anything to you. So we were pumping millions of BTUs an hour into the place to keep it heated. And twice, I’m showing my age here a little bit, but twice in my lifetime we had energy crisis. Once in the late 70s during the Carter administration and once more recently in 2000.
It was 2008 during the housing bubble and the 2008 crisis you think well, that’s housing what’s it have to do with energy well Boots on the ground my energy bill went up 300 % And I was paying 80 cents a gallon for propane and all of a sudden it was 240 and there goes my profits out the window and This is midstream in the middle of the growing season. I can’t raise my prices. It’s already locked into contracts and stuff.
So I just had to eat that year, but I decided I need to do something about this either I need to go out of business and find another line of work or I need to keep my energy bills under control. So the first thing we did is we put in wood gasification boilers. And that knocked down my heating bill 80%. Wood gasification is basically burning wood, but in a very sophisticated way that incinerates all the particulate matter. It comes out very clean, et cetera.
Fred
And Bill, was this at your facility in Bayfield County?
Bill Bailey
Yes. Yeah.
We also put in some solar thermal to heat hot water and we put in solar PV to make electricity. And this all didn’t happen in one year. It was over a period of several years. But by 2013, we had reduced our electric bill by 90 percent, heat bill by 80 percent. And it dawned on me, hey, this stuff, this stuff really works and we need to tell people about this. everything paid for itself in five, six, seven years because the reduction was so drastic on both the heat
and the electricity.
So we started out with an open house in 2013 and we invited our local utility, Bayford Electric Cooperative to come and they showed up, which kind of surprised me. But what surprised me even more is they brought Dairyland Power with them. And Dairyland Power is the generation company that supplies power to Bayford Electric. And so I think Dairyland just happened to be in the neighborhood. I don’t think they made a special trip. But it caught my attention that hey, these are cooperatives, They’re involved.
A couple months later we were presenting to the Utility board and community solar was brand new at the time this is 2013 and we say you guys ought to do this you have to do a community solar project and they actually ended up doing it a couple years later.
So all in all, that’s kind how we got started in the energy thing.
By 2016, we created Cheq Bay Renewables officially. It got to be such a…passionate endeavor that I decided to go ahead and retire and do that full time. But one thing about Cheq Bay renewables is its 100 % volunteer, just like your radio station. And so doing that being 100 % volunteer we don’t ask for any financial anything for the work that we do. Currently in 2025 we develop lots of solar projects but it’s all free. And over the last decade that’s built a certain amount of trust to the various municipalities and communities that we work with. And I think that right there sets us free and sets us apart from a lot of salesmen, salespeople.
Fred
Sure, and builds a lot of credibility from the get go. So just going back to your initial sort of investments in 2013, at that time was there financial support for you making those kind of moves or was that all money that you had to invest with your own risk?
Bill Bailey
No, there was a good business model even back then. And solar prices had dropped about then. That was kind of the start of where solar was actually a good business decision. And that’s what kind of surprised me when we did it. There were things like the tax credits were in place, the 30 % tax credit. As a business, we could depreciate the property, which is about another 20%. So half of it’s paid for just through tax credits. Then we did happen to get a USDA REAP grant that paid for twenty five percent of it at the time. And there also is net metering by the electric co-op. Anything that we overproduce and put back to the grid, get full retail value for it.
Fred
So when you stack up those incentives, the payback period gets a lot shorter?
Bill Bailey
All of these investments that Solar PV specifically paid for itself in probably about five years.
Fred Clark
Yeah, that’s great to know. Just on a personal note, I put solar on my home last year, and I did so on the faith of Bill’s advice and encouragement. an example of what a nonprofit group like Check Bay Renewables can be good for.
So lots of advances in technology since then, and just the different, multiple ways in which our grid can be made more resilient and more efficient and maybe more, what’s the word, insulated from the risks of sort of full dependency on power plants?
Bill Bailey
You know, the business model has stayed pretty much the same. There has been some improvements. For example, we’re using bifacial panels now. One of our installations at our local nursing home was the first large installation where we actually measure and track the data and see the difference between a bifacial panel and a regular panel. And a bifacial panel is where you got glass on both the top and the back. And so the reflected light off the ground, especially in the snow in our climate, it hits on the backside of the panel and creates electricity from the backside too. And so we’ve documented in this last winter about a 10 % increase. And as we get another year or two of data, we’ll refine that a little bit more and see exactly what that is.
Fred
Okay, and a bifacial panel is not twice as expensive as a single face panel?
Bill Bailey
They’re a little bit more expensive, the economic advantage of producing more electricity off-site.
Fred Clark
Yeah, okay, so it’s worth that investment.
Bill Bailey
And besides the panels What we’re trying to do with our new projects is future proof the sites especially with our municipalities and this kind of relates to climate change and the resilience factor and that is we’re adding batteries and controllers smart controllers to create a microgrid. So we could talk a little bit about a microgrid what a microgrid is. Basically, there’s an isolation switch between the utility and the building and so when the power goes out that switch opens and that the renewable energy generation and the battery and the controllers they operate as if the power was on. the power stays on even though the utilities off. So that disconnect is called islanding. And so that building operates without the grid. then during normal times when the grid is operating that switch is closed. And that same system that battery and those controls and the solar offer economic benefits as well. So it’s kind of a win win situation is if everything’s going great you get great economics. But if things go bad then you’re still operating with power and we’ve been putting these in an essential buildings throughout the two counties.
Fred
So in a place like a county courthouse, if you’re islanded, you’d have some combination of renewable energy, battery storage, and perhaps a generator that collectively are sort of feeding the system that you need.
Bill Bailey
Exactly, they all integrate. It depends on this particular site. Generally, the batteries are sized ideally to hold the entire load to begin with. And then when the stated charge of the battery gets to a low set point and the generator kicks on and the generator charges the battery up and covers the load of the building. But then when the battery gets to a high set point, like 90%, 100 % charged, then the generator will shut off. And so that’s an advantage of the old systems where the power went out, the generator would kick on, and it would run 24-7 till the power came back on again, or till it ran out of fuel. Or in this case, the generator just kicks on and cycles, the fuel lasts a lot longer, and then if it happens to be sunny, the solar will charge the batteries and the generator doesn’t need to kick on at all. So it extends the life of the generator, it uses less fuel, there’s just a win-win, and they work well together.
Fred
So the system relies on renewables to the extent possible and then fuel is the sort of second?
Bill Bailey
Exactly.
Fred Clark
And so I’m curious with the sort of attractive investment of solar right now or renewables in general for homeowners and businesses, what are the utilities needing to think about in terms of storage? As more and more renewables come online that they’re feeding into their system, do they have to have a way to store that energy when there’s excess in the afternoon on a sunny day?
Bill Bailey
Most utilities don’t worry about storage. They just kind of like to sell electrons. But storage does benefit the grid and the way it benefits it is when you do have a peak event like for example it’s hundred degrees in August. The solar systems and the batteries will help shave that peak off. The storage also helps the grid during you’re putting less energy back onto the grid so you’re keeping more of it behind the meter and that is just basically flattening the demand of the grid overall every day of the year. So there’s lots of benefits for storage. It’s expensive still. Battery prices are coming down, but it’s still not common right now, especially for utilities to put in battery storage.
Fred
Okay, all right, sounds good. Well, so you’ve had some really interesting projects in recent times with Cheq Bay Renewables. You want to just tell us about what are some of those looking like this year?
Bill Bailey
Sure, we got kind of a combination of small projects and big projects. So let me first talk about some of the the fun small projects. One good example is the Bayfield Rec Center right here in town. The Rec Center just put what, a quarter of a million dollars into energy efficiency. The building is 40, 50 years old now and they needed some repairs. The siding was falling off and then they found some rotten wood underneath and the salt, the chlorine, everything.
It’s kind of a harsh environment, but they sealed everything up. And so they spent all their money, but at the same time, it’s a great time to put solar on. So we had some community members that came to me actually and said, you haven’t done a community project for a little while, about one year. And so I said, why don’t we try to put solar on the rec center? Well, it’s always been in the back of my mind. So we did that. We got a really good quote, a price from a contractor, Jolma Electric in Ashland, and we set out there to come up with $125,000 to pay for it since the rec center didn’t have any money.
So we got some grants to private foundation to pay for half the panels. We got another private foundation in California that kicked in 20 grand. We’re gonna use the tax credits, part of the Inflation Reduction Act, a nonprofit and municipalities can use the 30 % tax credit. And we needed to come up with $38,000. We were short to pay for the whole thing. So we went out to the community and we started a GoFundMe site which they could donate to or they could send a check to the rec center or they could send checked at Cheq Bay Renewables or whatever and we tried to sell panels solar panels yeah one at a time $350 for a panel.
Fred
Or you could buy a panel that would sort of have your name on it?
Bill Bailey
If you bought a panel you got your name on a plaque and we got the plaque We’re gonna put up on the wall when the projects done Okay, we raised the full amount thirty eight thousand dollars And so the project is now under construction and it’s 100 % funded Yeah, and that’s just one one example of a fun local project.
We did the same thing with Northern Lights nursing home and Washburn. That’s a $175 thousand dollar project with 120 kilowatts of solar, okay. We almost raised all the money there. I think out of the 175, the nursing home had to come up with about $9,000.
Fred
And when you say you almost raised it, that was from different foundation sources, what kind of funding paid for that?
Bill Bailey
Yes, the same thing as what what i just described in the rec center we got a lot of the panels donated from different companies one no comas energy out of minneapolis donated a bunch of panels for northern lights okay the community raised twenty thousand dollars we also got some other grants focused on energy is in these grants too so just a lot of different funding sources you just stack them all up till you get it paid for
Fred
So looks like that’s been a big part of your work with Cheq Bay Renewables is just knowing where to look to sort of pull together that package.?
Bill Bailey
That package and knowing the contractors, knowing the utilities and putting it all together. It’s basically development. Free development.
Fred
And I should note that we’re sitting here at the outback space of Honest Dog Books, and if we had a window big enough, we could see the Jolma Electric crew working right now at the Rec Center putting up those panels. Yeah, exciting.
Bill Bailey
That’s right. So besides the small projects, we’ve got big projects too. So I don’t know, do we have time to talk about those? All right, so you mentioned earlier about some of the grants we’ve got. We’ve got actually three big grants. We’ve got two Department of Energy grants. They call them ERA, energy and rural and remote areas. And we also have an EPA grant, the Climate Pollution Reduction Grant.
And these grants are kind of scary a little bit because they were funded during the Biden administration, but all the funds have been allocated and committed. We are proceeding on. So far, our context with both the EPA and the Department of Energy have been positive. So we’re just going to go with that for now and hope for the best.
The projects are all completing their preliminary design and we are entering what we call phase two, which is the final design and selecting and contractor and that’ll take six, eight months or so before we start construction.
So let me just briefly talk about the two DOE grants. One of them is in Bad River. The total project is $17.6 million, so much bigger than the Rec Center. It’s what we call a mini grid, which is in between a micro grid, which we talked about earlier and the main grid, macro grid you might say. So this is a mini grid. The situation is that Bayford Electric has got a line that feeds the entire reservation and we’re gonna put that isolation switch on that line and so we’re gonna basically micro grid or mini grid the entire community.
Fred
So that means all of the residential housing at Bad River as well as the Tribal Offices?.
Bill Bailey
Yes, everything. Everything with five megawatts of solar and one or two megawatt hours of battery. So that’s a very aggressive, big project.
The other big one is in Bayfield County. It’s a combination of about 30 projects, a couple of them in Red Cliff, two microgrids in Red Cliff. The county has got eight microgrids and then the rest of the microgrids are all in small towns throughout Bayfield County. And these would be the smallest microgrids.
You know, usually there’s a town hall that uses very little electricity, but they might have a town garage associated with it. We put in solar enough to cover the two buildings, master meter both buildings, and put in a battery and smart controls to go with it. There’s a little EV charging involved in all these projects too.
Fred
And with that project with 30 different sort of satellite projects, guess, within that, are there economies of scale and efficiency that you can have one master contract that would cover a lot?
Bill Bailey
Exactly and and we we might split it up a little bit I mean like one of the projects is to double the existing microgrid at the Bayfield County Jail and courthouse and it’s a pretty sophisticated project and that might be a standalone project Okay, the two Red Cliffs projects are fairly big projects 30 KW at their health clinic and 150 KW at their new transportation building and those might be a second standalone project But probably all of the town projects and maybe even the county highway garages that are involved might be just a single single contract with a single request proposal.
So yes, we definitely are achieving an economy of scale. We’ll release all the request proposals even if they’re separated, like I just described, all at one time. So if a contractor is willing to come in and do all of them, he certainly can regional contractor come in, but they also will use, usually use local workforce too. We did this once before in 2020 with another project where the main contractor came from Dubuque, Iowa, but he used the local electricians to do a lot of the work. So they team up.
Fred
Yeah, and it would seem that project management oversight is really critical in something that complex. Who plays that role?
Bill Bailey
Part of the grants all of these grants have hired what they call energy specialist Red Cliff has hired an energy specialist Bayfield County has hired one and Bad River is hird one. So there’s three different employees that basically are gonna do what I’ve been doing for the last decade But I’m kind of obligated to 2030 and that’ll be my second retirement
Fred
Okay, you’re taking a break!?
Bill Bussey
Right.
Fred
Well, what a great note to go out on when you finally do! Wonderful. And if I understand correctly, this project that you just described, these two were really Wisconsin’s sort of best opportunity to capture that federal funding, correct? Of every possible project in the state, the State Office of Sustainability and Clean Energy landed on these?
Bill Bailey
That’s interesting – yes I kind of need to backtrack a little bit. Yeah talk about that one grant because the one that I talked about with Bayfield County and includes Red Cliff actually the applicant is the State of Wisconsin. It’s the office of sustainability and clean clean energy, right? But they are a pass-through agent. They’re not taking any of the money. Yes zero, which is totally incredible to me and they do have another agency the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation that is getting a portion of it to oversee like a third party what we’re doing to try to replicate it throughout the State. So that’s the State’s involvement, but they basically pass it through to Bayfield County and Red Cliff to all these projects. So it’s a great model we hope to replicate.
Fred
Well, that really requires knowing how government works and getting people to work together. that’s, yeah. Well, congratulations. We will stay tuned and we’d love to hear updates on that as that work unfolds. Right. Yeah. So it’s kind of tying this together, Bill and Bill. One of the things you all are collaborating on is a special event coming up. Would you like to talk about that?
Bill Bussey
We have a special event to celebrate Earth Day. It’s actually going to be on April 26th, the Saturday afternoon of the 26th, which is a few days past the actual Earth Day of April 22nd. We thought Saturday afternoon would be a good time. And this is going to be an event. It’s entitled Our Power, Our Planet, which is the global theme for Earth Day this year. And our power refers to renewable energy and the critical role it’s going to play in the well-being of our planet going forward. And so we’re holding this event. It’s going to be a march, a program, and then some fellowship and discussion afterwards.
It’s going to be at the United Presbyterian Congregational Church at Vaughan and Third in Ashland, starting with a march. The march lineup will start a quarter after one. The march will start at 1.30.
We’ll march through downtown Ashland with our giant five foot in diameter earth balloon that we used in the Apple Festival Parade. We’ll return to the church which is such a wonderful venue for a program which will start at two o’clock.
And that program will be to highlight and celebrate the great progress that our area has made in renewable energy development, as Bill has just described, and all of which are the great majority of which probably wouldn’t have happened without him. So we want to celebrate and highlight that success in our area.
We’ll have a panel led by Bill of folks who have participated in those developments. That’s a major part of the program with a great slideshow by Bill showing photos of a number of the developments. We’ll have a keynote speaker who will be Angela Stroud, our state representative. We’ll be delighted to hear from her.
And we’ll want to make the point just by getting a huge turnout to this event, the point that you made at the beginning of this session, Fred, that climate change didn’t put itself on hold on January 20th and is not just waiting for us to resolve these serious issues that we’ve been confronted with. It continues and we can’t lose sight of the fact that we need to continue this transition to renewable energy at all levels of government, locally, state, national, globally. And we got to press on on that despite all the other struggles we’re involved with today.
So we want to make that point and folks by attending the march and or the program can help us make that point. And then we’ll have discussion and fellowship and treats in the church basement afterwards from three to four. We hope we get a great turnout.
Fred
Yeah, wonderful to hear. And the details about this program are also on the WVCB website among other places. So everyone’s welcome. You know, I’ll just say that the Citizens Climate Lobby is, as you said, open and welcoming to everyone with a stake in the various ways climate affects our lives. And you organize a monthly call. You want to talk a little bit more about that?
Bill Bussey
Sure.do. Our chapter, again, is open to folks of all persuasions, political views. We’re welcoming in that respect. We do have a monthly meeting normally on the second Tuesday of each month. We meet via Zoom. It’s easy to do, normally 5.15 to 6.15. And we’re pretty good about limiting it to an hour so folks can go to dinner.
I wanted to mention, on the event, it’s been co-sponsored by Chequamegon CCL and the League of Women Voters of Ashland and Bayfield Counties and the United Presbyterian Congregational Church, which is an EarthCare certified congregation and has solar panels providing much of its energy. So this is a great community effort and again, all folks from all over, from any organization or not, are invited and encouraged to attend.
Fred
Great to know. And again, we’ll have the details on CCL and Cheq Bay Renewables and this event and some of the other things we’ve talked about today on the show notes for folks to follow up on.
It just occurs to me while we’re talking that it’s hard to walk around any community in this region these days without seeing evidence of renewable energy in action, whether it’s a air-sourced heat pump on the side of your house or solar panels on a roof or any of the many other ways that we’re looking create a more resilient
Bill Bussey
Some EVs going around too.
Fred
That’s right, that’s right., it’s an exciting time. So, well Bill and Bill, thank you so much for visiting with us and telling us and listeners about the work that you do. I hope that you’ll have an opportunity to come back again in the future and keep us updated on important work.
Bill Bussey
Thanks, Fred.
Fred
You bet. And for our listeners, on behalf of everyone at WVCB, thank you for being with us on Pulse of the Bay. Special thanks to our producer, Corey Scribner, and many other volunteers working hard to establish this small but mighty community resource. Check out our programming and our events page at wvcb.org. And if you find this work valuable, please consider an online donation to support this all-volunteer effort.
So until next time, from Honest Dog Books, we’re signing off.
But let’s all remember to do our part to help all of our communities thrive, to protect and conserve our lands and waters, and be kind and caring to the people around us. Thank you.
Corey James Scribner
Don Scribner