Insights
Resources for the Future Webinar: Obstacles to Energy Infrastructure, Part 1
July 2025
2025 has seen a dramatic shift in the federal government’s approach to America’s energy. The current policy debate over America’s energy future is taking place in the context of surging demand growth, dramatic shifts in approach between presidential administrations, and a rapidly evolving congressional conversation over clean energy incentives. Resources for the Future (RFF) is hosting a series of webinars to discuss the critical need to build more energy infrastructure more quickly, policy efforts to facilitate this need, and the many remaining obstacles to growing energy infrastructure. On Thursday, July 17, RFF hosted a kickoff webinar featuring a panel of experts discussing these issues.
Dahvi Wilson, Panelist
Scaling Clean
September 2023
"There really is not a great way to decrease the amount of human resource that you need to put on community engagement. It is just a very high intensity type of work... It takes a lot of people. I don't think there's way to automate this or shortcut having real people out on the ground building real relationships. There just isn't a low human resource way to do that. So that will be a little bit of a learning curve for the industry."
Read more...
Dahvi Wilson
Clean Power Hour
May 2023
"The title of this panel includes the word 'NIMBY,' which many people may feel is an offensive term. I think the reason why there's pushback on that term is that people see it as dismissive, and they want to point out that there are very real things that people are thinking about that shouldn't be dismissed.
So, I've been thinking about what term I'd use instead, and I think the term 'NIM-C' might be a better fit, because people out there are not really saying, 'Not in my backyard.' They're really saying, 'Not in my community.' They are concerned about their communities and what they see as the impacts their communities will experience from these facilities.
"These projects do have very significant, life-changing economic benefits for these communities. But when you're locked in a discussion with a community about their identity - who they are, their core values - conversations about money feel cheap. The challenge for us all to figure out is how do we get into a more honest conversation about costs and benefits."
Dahvi Wilson
Exploring Wind Vermillion
"In early 2020, Apex Clean Energy, a Charlottesville, Virginia–based clean energy company, undertook a rare— and perhaps unique—experiment in collaborative decision-making, seeking a suitable community with which to engage to determine whether and how to site and build a wind energy project in that community...
​
"The experiment sought to create a space for mutual learning, rooted in an intent for deci- sions to be reached deliberatively and collaboratively, both within the community and between developer and community. It also hoped to find a way to ground these decisions in evidence and experience, rather than unsubstantiated rumors, fears, and claims. Finally, the experiment aspired to demonstrate that the offer of transparency and shared control would generate enough trust to make a true partnership, however novel and tentative, possible."
​
Exploring Wind Vermillion
Patrick Field, Consensus Building Institute
Mallory Huggins, Keystone Policy Center
Brad Sperber, Keystone Policy Center
Dahvi Wilson, Apex Clean Energy
Aspen Ideas: Climate
2023
"There are burdens associated with these projects. These are large facilities and you see them. But there is not evidence that there are health burdens or that there are significant environmental burdens associated with these projects. So really, we're trying to have conversations that can get down to factual information, answer people's honest questions in communities about appropriate tradeoffs and sense of place, and I would argue that most of the processes we've been involved with alongside local governments aren't really well designed for those kinds of conversations."
Dahvi Wilson
NPR Morning Edition: February 2022
"I think for a long time, and maybe still in some places, developers thought, they just needed to give better information. But it's not really about that at all. It's about who you trust and if anybody's going to believe you if you're a company."
Dahvi Wilson