[Quiet wind] [Wind intensifies] We want to be a part of the solution.

I love that line, "If you sit on the lid of progress, be prepared to be blown to bits."

[Swelling whoosh] - We need to move away from fossil fuel electric generation.

- I think most people's dream is to actually have some type of solar equipment on their rooftop.

The problem is being able to afford it.

- Clean energy's become politicized.

It's beyond me because it's an American story.

- How much solar and wind and geothermal to replace these?

[Laughing] -More than we currently have, right?

[Fast paced drumming music] [Drumming continues] [Energetic drum crescendo and emphatic end] [Playground whistle] [Music fades to indistinct children's voices] - When you think about the New York City we know and love, if you look at the National Climate Report, that's not going to exist in 50 years.

New York that we all know and love... communities will be ravaged by climate change, it'll be hotter than it's ever been precipitation will be more than it's ever been, We'll see sea level rise, of 25 to 75 inches.

These are scary outcomes.

[Low somber electronic whine] [Small frogs chirping] - When I see the grid being rebuilt, I'm of the mode that this should be 100% solar.

And I'm not saying that because I'm inspired by it or it's visionary.

It's like the most conservative thing you can do is to do solar in Puerto Rico.

Everything else is risk 'cause you're just gonna build the same grid back in 10, 20 years.

Another storm will come through and knock it down.

[Storm rumbles, harsh waves] [Light wind] - The big aha for me was when I literally saw projects that we had just finished, like an amazing, you know, strengthen and harden the lines and make them more resilient for weather events.

Those same projects, they become twigs and twine when Mother Nature moves in.

[Low somber whine continues] [Light traffic fades in] - Somewhere in there I started going, 'you know, really big building have really big utility bills.

Hmm.'

[Chuckles] How am I gonna address that?

This is Parker Village, and we are on the grounds of what's going to be Highland Park and Metro Detroit's first smart neighborhood.

[Quiet energetic percussion] The entire project is rooted in renewable energy, media, aquaculture, and technology.

[Quiet energetic percussion crescendo] - When I was a little boy here in Atlantic City, I used to watch the clam boats leave Gardner's Basin, and they would turn right.

And today if you go down there you watch the clam boats and they turn left because even the clams have migrated due to climate change.

Fisherman's Energy is a offshore wind development company founded by the commercia fishing industry of New Jersey.

These fishermen, who were stewards of the environment, saw an opportunity not only to protect their industry, but to protect our world.

[Quiet energetic percussion music] [Hopeful piano music fades in] - How are we able to finance that for especially the communities that have been most excluded and marginalized that are environmental justice communities in terms of being impacted by that dirty fossil fuel generation and yet being in the shadow of these plants, so to speak, and not being able to afford an alternative.

That's what we're looking to promote, that alternative.

[Hopeful percussion music] - When my husband and I came to Las Vegas from the East Coast in 1964, there were less than 100,000 people.

Now we're over 2.2 million but that has nothing to do with the 43 million visitors we get every year.

We've had wonderful time with our energy partner, Nevada Energy, who supplied the lion's share of the solar panels that made us a hundred percent renewable energy.

I think we were the second city in the entire country, if not in the entire world.

It is all about how people are gonna get here, stay here, live here, and be able to visit here.

And not create more pollution and filth, but make sure it's a clean way of living.

Believe me, you'd have to be totally brain dead not to understand this.

[Hopeful percussion fades out] [Upbeat piano fades in] [Light traffic noise] - My name is Ruth Santiago.

I'm a lawyer.

I do mostly community and environmental work here in southeastern Puerto Rico.

Salinas and Guayama, they border what is known as the Jobos Bay, and are among the poorest communities, the rural areas in Puerto Rico.

[Light traffic and wind] Also, they both house the most contaminating power plants in Puerto Rico.

[Light traffic] [Speaking Spanish] [Music crescendos] [Music fades out] [Light traffic] One of Malcolm X's top aides was a man named Earl Grant, and he said Malcolm X taught him, always make a record.

I first heard that when I was in my teens.

So I never go anywhere... without this.

My trusty dusty old digital camera.

And so I snapped some still photographs.

Wasn't sure what was going on, but I thought I should make a record.

A week later, I noticed that in front of the light pole here, a sign had been posted that no cars could be parked here.

I think it was two days later, I heard something and I came outside and I saw a large truck parked right here, and there was a workman taking out the guts of the street lamp, light, that was here.

And I moved right over to the side here and started taking still photographs.

And he looked up at me.

And I'll never forget.

Because it didn't look like a look of offense.

It looked more like... guilt.

Imagine how nice it was to have a street lamp directly in front of my home.

[Birds chirping] But I wasn't so much concerned with myself.

I was concerned about seniors and young people.

About 25 or 30 years ago, unfortunately, Highland Park, which largely had homeowners, got a lot of transients.

And housing stock went down, blighted conditions resulted, crime was inevitable, and it developed a reputation for being tough.

You can imagine how that reputation was exaggerated when we had no lights.

[Quiet, intense drumming] [Drumming fades to birds chirping] [Upbeat percussion fades in] Soulidarity began when the streetlights in Highland Park were repossessed in 2011.

And it left the streets dark.

Highland Park is in the heart of Detroit.

You have to pass through it to get to downtown, to get over to the east side, and it became a very unsafe place.

- We ran this crowdfunding campaign that raised over $6,500 to put up the first solar powered streetlight in Highland Park.

It was after we had done that that it started to become clear that this is actually one of the most important places we could be beginning to work o clean energy in this community.

Solar and wind and clean energy often feels disconnected to folks.

There's a sense that it's too expensive.

That it's not really for this kind of community.

Communities like Highland Park are being totally left behind by the clean energy movement.

And are being told by all these larger forces that this isn't for them.

- Adding the solar street lights would just be a huge step in just making a stance and setting a precedent that we won't be bullied by energy conglomerates.

[Industrial ambient music] [Jazz music plays] [Children playing] - This whole thing started when we went to a community meeting, 'cause we heard they were gonna put in another power plant in our area.

And at that meeting the gentleman from the company got up and said, "well, there's no way for you people to stop us.

We got it from a siting board.

We're gonna put this power plant in no matter what you do."

And at that point I turned around and said, "well..." I said, "that's news to us."

We were bearing the brunt of the pollution in this area.

We had the highest concentrations of asthma in our schools.

We had the highest throat cancers in 11105.

Even though that pollution doesn't discriminate, it's killing the people across the river also.

Most of the particulate matter falls here.

Our window sills, after a week, you can run your hand, and it's all black.

[Unsettling music] We found out about this, and we're saying, 'wow, we have all this pollution here.'

And you're gonna put another plant here?

How much could we bear?

I talked to our board members and I said I'd like to organize all the civic associations and co-op boards and condo boards and homeowners associations in the area and see what we could do about this because we're taking the brunt of it right now with all the power plants in our area.

[Unsettling music crescendo] [Unsettling music amplifies] [Waves crashing on shore] - Here we were We had our idyllic little life.

And then suddenly comes this unprecedented meteorological nightmare known as Hurricane Maria.

It came ashore with 200 mile an hour gusts.

It's like basically a 100-mile wide tornado.

[Ambient piano music] We had no electric, no water, no cell phone, no texting.

We had no internet, no wifi, no ATM service, no police presence, no army, no FEMA, no National Guard.

When you've got a magnitude of a hurricane that comes through and just starts snapping off all the telephone poles, it's a monumental task.

[Ambient piano swells] The daily life was a struggle to get water.

The generators, the people that had them, the gasoline lines were 8 hours long.

[Breeze and birds chirping] One of the primary challenges was hospital care.

Just on our street alone, the gentleman across the street he's got prostate cancer that's untreated.

We had the young lady dow the street with three children.

She lost her husband.

I had another lady a couple blocks away.

She went in two days before the hurricane.

They sat in the ER for two days and her mother died a day after Hurricane Maria.

And this is just in like two blocks.

So, um... [Moody ambient piano crescendo] [Waves crashing and gusting winds] [Ethereal piano music] [Music fades to wind] [Pensive steelpan music] [Waves crashing onto beach] - We use a tremendous amount of electricity all the time.

And in fact, we've used power every minute since October of 1978 when the plant came online.

[Birds and breeze] Renewable energy was something we were intrigued with and interested in.

Luckily, somebody from the power company came to us with the initial concept of wind power here at the Atlantic County wastewater treatment plant.

Energy costs, both natural gas and electricity are very volatile.

And we found that frustrating that we seem to have no control over that.

And we were around saying there must be a green way to do this, that fit our mission as an environmental infrastructure company.

- And over the course of a year, about 60 % of the power we need to operate the facility will come from the wind farm.

There are some days where it's producing more than we can use, and in those cases, the excess is sent back to the grid and sold on the open market.

RICK DOVEY: Still, years later, this is the only industrial sized wind farm in New Jersey.

[Steelpan music fades] [Upbeat string music] - NV Energy has been here for over 100 years.

We've been the provider to the city of Las Vegas and all of the customers here.

And thanks to Mayor Goodman and her leadership, she basically set the mark for us to match a hundred percent of the city facility's loads with renewable energy.

[Upbeat string music continues] I'm Josh Langdon.

I'm the maintenance manager here at Higgins Station.

[Industrial whine and hum] We're a traditional, what you call a combined cycle gas power plant.

We basically meet the demand of the customers by supplying energy.

[Industrial hum] In the power business, the actual demand of power is changing constantly.

We're talking a lot about energy demand in any given market or grid.

So this graph is over a 24 hour period early in the morning you're sleeping, you're using very little energy, as you wake up you turn on your coffee pot, your iron, your lights.

You get ready for work.

You'll see a nice peak here.

And then, after you leave your house, of course, you're shutting off all your electrical equipment, all your demand goes down.

and then throughout the day, right, as industry and various customers start using power more, you'll see that demand go up.

Here, as people get home, you'll see a small jump where people are using maybe their HVAC units.

When they get home, they turn those on.

So you will see a small peak and throughout the night as people go to bed, that demand will come down.

The interesting thing about renewables, if you have an intermittent supply of power, it's hard to meet this curve, especially when at the peak of the curve, the sun is setting, the sun's going down, you'll see a reduction in output from traditional solar plants.

Facilities like this operate 24/7.

We're always operating.

Any issues, we're addressing them.

It could be the middle of the night.

You think about any new technology, you need some assistance to really get that technology up and running.

You need to leverage, really, economies of scale.

Ten years ago a lot of these solar plants that surround us were non-existent or at least in their infancy or construction stages.

[Hopeful string music] Here in Southern Nevada, we have the very good opportunity to have the sun shining most of the year.

So we take advantage of that and we supply renewable energy to our customers, which they actually demand as well.

We've seen a huge change in the way we operate.

We have to operate to meet the intermittent nature of some of these renewable assets.

[Jazzy saxophone music plays] [Bus doors open and horns honk] - This paper is from 2008 in New York City.

So this is the part of Astoria where there are quite a few power plants all together.

The Poletti Power Plant was the dirtiest plant in New York City.

It was the single biggest polluter in New York City.

They were supposed to shut it down by 2010.

They started making noise like, "well, you know, maybe we're not gonna... what's really important?"

So this was a rally in front of the facility where the community came together to say, "no, we're not gonna take this."

So there are elected officials there, and then there's me and my husband and my very small child.

So, I mean, it's even like on days like this where you see the stacks there's nothing coming out of them.

There's still emissions coming out of there every day.

So early in this year when we had a rally, we made sure it was a cold day.

So it would crystallize.

You'd see the white smoke.

So then people would realize, 'oh, this is what we're breathing in every day.

This is the pollution that populates our neighborhood, that makes our kids sick, that increases our asthma rates.

[Quiet ominous percussion music] I'm excited the fact we got rid of Polletti.

It was a fight that was hard fought for this neighborhood.

Challenge we always thought was that if there was a opportunity to reopen it, they were going to take it.

We fought very hard with the power authority to make sure that it came down.

All of it was taken away by barge and truck.

But what we're left behind is still power plants that are adjacent to Section 8 housing, adjacent to environmental justice communities, Astoria Houses, Ravenswood Houses and Queensbridge Houses just a stone's throw away.

We still haven't won all the fights yet.

[Quiet ominous percussion intensifies] As a city we're gonna look to replace them anyway, right?

We're looking for requests for information on renewable energy sources to make sure we don't have to rely on these guys anymore.

We need to have solar... to be able to look out into the East River and see how we can harness wind... to make sure we can utilize geothermal where it makes sense.

And renewable energy is the path forward.

This is our past behind us.

[Jazzy saxophone, music and traffic noises] [Breeze and duck honks] [Folksy guitar and violin music] I hate to use the word 'utility.'

I call us an energy transformation company, but sometimes for point of reference you have to call the industry class.

So we are the only, I still believe, benefit corporation utility in the world.

We are a very large utility for Vermont.

We serve 80% of Vermonters.

But really how we view ourselves is an energy transformation company.

We exist for the socioeconomic and environmental well being of Vermont.

That's why we fundamentally exist.

We knew that Vermonters care a lot about the environment.

We care a lot about the environment.

As I was transitioning to the role of CEO, we launched what was viewed at the time as a crazy ambition around clean energy.

Low carbon, low cost, incredibly reliable power to Vermonters.

That was all about dramatically ramping up local renewable energy options.

One of the things I'm really pleased about that the innovation team has done, really, way back in 2008, we were leading the consumer led revolution to solar technology.

But then we also fast followed with home storage solutions, which is a perfect complement to home solar solutions, and community storage solutions, which is a perfect complement to community solar.

[Folksy music continues] Building local renewable energy options, like a wind farm, at a much cheaper price than we ever could have, as I said, rented wind energy from somebody else.

We built it on behalf of the Vermonters we serve.

You know, at the time we were somewhere around 20 or 30% percent renewable.

We're now 60... 63% renewable.

We're now 90% carbon free in our portfolio.

And so that energy vision, what I call energy vision 1.0, was about dramatically leaning into the benefits of solar technology and accelerating a consumer led revolution to solar technologies in Vermont.

[Folksy music fades out.]

[Coquí frogs chirping] - The volunteers started rolling in.

They're living in tents, we're slapping mosquitoes.

That was sort of the beginning of it.

- Can I just get a, like a broad stroke overview of... how many systems we plan on installing, where they are, how we're breaking ourselves up amongst teams.

[Quiet energetic percussion music] [Coquí frogs chirping] As of yesterday, they were saying we have a 70% chance of getting a flight.

And that it may go out at 7 am And then I found out that it didn't, so... [Chuckles] 7 am passed today.

So anyway, just daily frustrations with logistics during a disaster zone.

We're working with several townships here in isolated villages.

Where we're at is trying to fly this cargo in.

We got 10 solar experts on the ground.

And are trying to get this cargo, 50,000 pounds worth of solar units.

It's in a warehouse in Miami now.

We're wealthy in expertise we're wealthy in materials, In the field, you know, turnkey value might be, you know, 3 to 5 million.

But we don't have, you know, much for capital.

[Rainfall hits car] [Thunder crashes loudly] There goes the cell tower.

[Laughs] They put up a provisional cell tower and its gonna be toast after that.

[Off-screen chuckling] They probably didn't ground it right.

There's no water and we're drinking from rainwater that we're capturing and drinking through live straws, so you can imagine how everybody's frustrated.

At Aguadilla Airport, the jet center is trading fuel for water.

The island is chock full of fuel.

No more gas lines.

There's tons of fossil fuels.

But there's no water for people.

So it's more like the machines can drink, but not the people.

[Jazzy upbeat saxophone] [Police radio buzz] POLICE DISPATCHER: 4148 19th avenue caller heard not seen.

[Police radio chirps] COP 1: What's going on, what do you see?

COP 2: The sky is lighting up bright blue.

COP 1: Sounds like a possible explosion.

DISPATCHER: Right, 10/4.

So you said the RFK bridge?

COP 2: Something happened on the other side of Randall's Island, and I'm not sure what it is.

COP 1: 14 has an explosion at the Con Ed plant.

DISPATCHER: You said at the ConEd plant?

COP 3: LaGuardia just lost power.

COP 2: That is the craziest thing I've ever seen.

[Police sirens approaching] - Right in the middle of the holiday season, Astoria was rattled by a cosmic light that could be seen as far away as Jersey City.

Marine Terrace, right here.

The building shook.

Everyone asked "Are we safe?"

It's time for a greener future here in Western Queens.

So we're gonna ask the city to come up with a plan with renewable, solar, wind, battery storage, to be able to close the 24 plants citywide.

(from crowd) - Woo!

- Awesome.

[Loud bang] [Ominous synth music fades out] - There are 80,000 kids in the City of New York with asthma.

4,000 are hospitalized every year.

I know my own son's regimen of taking a pill and a vitamin and an allergy medication and then something to settle his stomach, cuz he just took all that stuff.

And then he eats breakfast.

Then he'll, you know, go off and watch TV and we'll argue about... whether he brushed his teeth, whether he washed his hands, all that fun stuff.

And then I put a mask over his face and he has to take to Budesonide.

And that's just when he's healthy.

And he's lucky in that he doesn't have an emergency inhaler.

His triggers are cold and hot.

[Handball thwacks] Some kids, through just life, walking up a flight of stairs, their lives can be in danger just like that.

This is the world that they're inheriting.

We need to make this a stronger rallying point for all of us.

We need a greener new deal for our city and our state and our country.

[Faint traffic and playground sound] [Dramatic synth music fades out] [Hopeful string music] RUTH SANTIAGO: Throughout the island, as you go westward, you see that the poles and the transmission towers were knocked down, but the solar equipment held up much better.

[Hopeful string music] The Coquí Solar Project is something that we've been working on with Junta Comunitaria del Coquí, like the Coquí Community Board.

We've been trying to promote renewable energy and specifically rooftop solar for our community, which is so heavily impacted by the fossil fuel generation in Puerto Rico more than any other.

[Speaking Spanish] Before Hurricane Maria, we had started the project, the meeting and planning with the University of Puerto Rico professors.

We had planned to do the pilot project at the community center going to the lab over at the university.

We made connections with the Technological Institute in Guayama.

We did the first training session.

We did about 70 inventories in that first session and had started trying to raise funds to do that.

And it was very slow before the hurricane.

[Hopeful string music] [Uplifting metallic strings music] - It feels fantastic.

It's just like vindication for... for some of the naysayers.

[laughs] (Offscreen) - What do the naysayers say?.

- Oh my God, it's been all kinds of...

I don't even want to give it any energy.

It's just been, you know, the craziest of things.

A lot of unnecessary chatter instead of, "hey, here's somebody trying to do something good.

Maybe if I help, then we can ensure the success of it."

What I'm trying to do here in Highland Park is because of my love for Highland Park.

I was born and raised here.

I grew up here.

My parents came here as one of the first few Black families in Highland Park when it was affluent.

[Birds chirping] This used to be an elementary school.

[Faint drumbeat] Growing up here, I saw when this city was simply gorgeous.

I'm not a miracle worker.

I'm not God, none of that kind of stuff.

So, I can fail.

Instead of sitting back waiting to see or hope that I fail realize that if I am successful, this is a win for the entire city.

[Birds chirping, motor running] So help me make it successful.

Help me make sure that it's successful.

[Uplifting steelpan music] [Ocean breeze] - Wind power, we got all that water out ther Put a couple of wind farms in.

You go to Atlantic City, you go to Borgata, there's six towers there, blowin' all the time.

You know, why can't we do it?

Why can't we do it?

- We looked at data centers.

We looked at fulfillment centers.

We looked at colleges and universities who are starting to get rid of their fossil fuel investments and maybe they're looking for investments in green energy.

We've looked at all kinds of other places to get a power purchase agreement, either in state or out of state, if necessary.

I'm optimistic that in the near future, we'll sign a power purchase agreement that will satisfy the Department of Energy requirement that we have that.

[Hopeful piano music] They have 117 boxes on their application, and we have 116 of them checked off.

The 117th is who's gonna buy your power.

[Ocean breezes] [Inspirational guitar and piano music] WALTER MEYER: We are getting more intense storms more frequently.

The grid creates vulnerability.

Our overall program is not just trying to get power on.

We're actually racing against resiliency and climate change, so it's a planetary effort.

Puerto Rico is the first time that everyone in the world is looking at the scale of a state or small country.

So Hurricane Maria came ashore in the southeast corner near Yabacoa and tracked over the island.

Now there have been small cities and islands in the Pacific that Tesla has take off grids and no one's taken an area or a population the size of Connecticut, for example.

And the reason that's significant, because in a country of the United States with 50 states, if you can take one state off the grid, then it's only 49 other states to go and then you've got a whole country off the grid, [chuckles] you know, so... [Inspirational guitar and piano music] Sonnen Batteries, Tesla, Tabuchi, I mean, everyone has donated materials to us We have 2,000 panels donated from Ubiquiti Networks.

The Hispanic Federation flew them down.

There's been a lot of collaboration happening.

It's been quite beautiful.

The only means of communication here, everybody would go to the bakery and they would sit around and they would talk and trade information.

And 'I'm from this humanitarian group, and if you need this,' so there was a pooling of resources and we quite by chance, ran into Fernando.

And he was the tarmac director.

And he says, if the army doesn't grab them, FEMA will, national guard...

He goes, ”I'm the guy, “I will make sure that it's gonna go into hangar number five.” We have been taking those panels on brigades.

Those all went to people's roofs.

These panels... And with these stainless steel brackets, we can probably withstand about 180 mile an hour wind.

Also, there's a byproduct, which is, it's also cooling the roof.

So it's lowering the temperature below this roof by about 8 to 10 degrees.

[Uplifting music] JENNIFER BOLSTAD: One of the places that we were able to energize was a woman-owned bakery.

The woman had started this bakery about a decade ago.

It was kind of the only beacon within a really isolated community.

On a lake, with really steep cliffs we saw houses that had slid down the cliff.

[String music swells] She felt like her community was fairly isolated even long before Maria and that people just needed a place they could go every day and get their bread and thei coffee and their basic supplies that was within the community.

Her business was one of the things that lent some hope and sanity and normalcy to the people living there.

So we were able to give her some panels and a battery backup and a plug-in so that she could run more of the systems for her business and start to address more of the needs of her community.

Just in the short time that we were there, the people stopping in and seeing what was happening demonstrated, I think, the scale of what we're trying to do which is helping those people and those businesses and those hubs and centers that can help a big web of people around them.

SOLAR INSTALLER: Una, dos, y tres.

[A click followed by a sustained beep] Ready?

- Click.

[Low electric buzz] - Now?

[crosstalk] Yes?

Now?

- There it is.

- Whoa!

[Click] GROUP: Yay!

- Tres, go.

Woo!

There it is.

(speaks Spanish): Ven.

Ayyy!!!

Cafe!

[Giggling and chattering] Very few people here have enough money to do even a solar kit without some kind of loan.

From the beginning, we've been talking about financing these things through the local credit unions.

They've had two sessions on organizing a co-op within the Coquí Solar group.

The credit unions here are co-ops.

That is the lender for poor people here.

[Upbeat instrumental music] We were not able to get funding until after the hurricane to do the installation for the community center pilot project.

-Did that make it easier to get funding?

- Absolutely.

Right away.

It was amazing.

In the aftermath of the hurricane when we didn't know where to turn, my mother's a diabetic, and although insulin can be kept outside the refrigerator, but it's risky.

It might get damaged and she might take something that's not good for her.

It feels very much better.

And it might be a life saver.

[Emphatic music end] [Wind in trees] So one of the really important things for us is working really closely with customers and communities, and I think that's also an extension of being a benefit corporation.

When we built a wind farm, I was really clear, I actually went to the community and I told them we will not build a project here if you don't want it.

[Folk guitar music] We actually encouraged the town to actually take a vote on how they felt about having a wind project.

And we took a lot of time to educate them so that they realized what the real impacts were gonna be.

They could make their own decisions.

[Folk guitar music] The town voted overwhelmingly to support it.

And in fact, the town, I think it was a year after it was built they felt like they wanted to take another vote.

The support of it was higher than the vote before it was built.

We are doing what 80% of our customers say they want but that kind of means there's 20% that maybe don't want that, right?

Whether it's energy transformation or shopping malls, I mean, you're going to have people that don't want to see a change, right?

I think that it's really important to approach things from the perspective of do the vast majority of your customers want?

What do the vast majorities of your communities want?

And then to always try to do it in a way that incorporates those who have differing views.

[Wind in trees, bird squawks] [Folk guitar continues] [Bird squawks] [Upbeat instrumental music] [Traffic whirs] JUAN SHANNON: I do want to thank everybody for coming out and allowing us to utilize you for this knocking the bugs out of our system and creating the very first Energy Sustainability and Tech Fair here in Highland Park.

[quiet vocal cheers] - And it means a lot to me.

I hope to see you at the next one, 'cause we are just going to keep building, making this bigger and bigger, and greater and greater.

[Applause] JACKSON: If we can solve the problem of streetlights with clean energy that is owned by the community, that creates a really powerful story.

It solves an immediate need and it builds the foundation to talk about what is a city going 100% clean energy look like.

People see it as like, 'wow, I have solar panels on my house now.'

To say that you have free energy means that they're part of this green movement now.

They got a little piece of it.

SHIMEKIA NICHOLS: But I would definitely be satisfied if we could just make Highland Park a model city for being 100% clean solar.

Sometimes when you hear about a place or read about a place, you only have a certain amount of time to tell the story, so people get the impressions of places that they've never been to, and that's their only impression of that place.

Highland Park, just like Detroit has had this reputation like, oh, if you go there, it's so dangerous and it can't be further from the truth.

REBECCA BRATSPIES: Renewable Rikers is a plan to turn Rikers Island into a hub of sustainable energy.

We're gonna take about a hundred acres of the island and put solar panels on it, and the good thing about the island is that it is above the 500 year flood level, so it's a great place to locate this kind of facility.

We're gonna also pair that with battery storage because solar energy needs battery storage because the sun isn't shining 24/7.

[Electronic music intensifies] We're transforming the island from its role in incarceration and putting people in jail into something positive.

And we're gonna connect that with removing old, dirty peaker plants from the communities that were most affected by incarceration on Rikers Island as a kind of restorative justice.

for those communities.

COSTA: Closing Rikers will not only create a social justice revolution, but it will create an environmental justice revolution in the city of New York by allowing us to take that land and turn it into a real benefit to a cleaner grid and betterment of neighborhoods.

[applause] Good evening everyone.

[scattered responses] My name is Costa Constantinides.

Tonight's about how we power a city in the 21st century.

It is time for us to think how we can get climate justice for the same communities that were torn apart by the criminal justice system Rikers Island should be closed for a myriad of social justice issues.

We know that the isolation of that island has created so much injustice for so many communities.

[applause] We strongly feel that we can replace Rikers Island with renewable energy.

We can have a solar farm there that can replace the energy of all of the peakers in New York City.

[Soul saxophone music] Alright, good morning everybody.

Thank you-- I'm only gonna be a council member for eight years.

So this long of my life, I'll be a council member.

I wanna do as much good as I can, for as long as I can, while I have this opportunity.

And then it'll be somebody else's turn to sit in this chair and do this work.

But I want to make sure that I leave the world a little bit better than I found it.

[Activists chanting] We all have to do our part.

There is always a new challenge.

We're gonna continue to push forward.

We're going to pass our retrofit legislation, and then we're going to move on to dealing with the grid and cleaning our grids.

And every journey is that you climb a mountain, then you get to the top of that mountain and you see another mountain.

[Soul saxophone music] I'm never gonna stop.

[Soul saxophone crescendo] - Hi, my name is Alejandro.

-And I'm Nicole.

- And we're from Solar Libre [Coquí frogs chirping] [laughter] TOM: At Solar Libre we've had the opportunity to do a hundred installations on the island, and the learning curve has been vast.

Nine inches here.

(speaking Spanish) [Inspirational guitar and piano music] You know, many companies you walk in and they have these impressive strategic documents and plans and nobody looks at them and they get dusted off every once in a while.

And then it's sort of like, Oh my gosh, are we doing that?

It's funny because when I joined the company, one of the first things I said, actually when I was here, was this system has been around for forever, like, What, like something, has got to come to disrupt this?

This is an industry so ripe for technological disruption.

Then you combine that with a consumer desire and concern around clean energy.

In our case, it's about innovating for Vermonters.

It's about transforming ourselves.

Ane you can't innovate and transform for Vermonters if you're not willing to innovate and transform for yourselves within your own organization and so...

Yes, so I am a firm believer of culture is the most important thing to focus on.

We're very excited to be a part of it.

We've never been about sitting on the lid of progress.

We're all about accelerating progress in a way that can be transformative.

[Guitar music continues] [Strong quiet wind] NEWS ANNOUNCER: The city of Las Vegas made an announcement last month that kind of got lost in the hubbub of the holidays.

It's energy sources are now 100% renewable.

It's the first large city in the U.S. to hit this goal.

[Whipping wind and clanking] MAYOR GOODMAN: That's the wind.

Unfortunately, we are at 40 mile an hour winds up here, so you're gonna hear a lot of creaking.

[Upbeat instrumental music] INTERVIEWER: this announcement that Las Vegas went 100% renewable.

MAYOR GOODMAN: December 31st of 2016, a couple of months ahead of schedule.

INTERVIEWER: And what was the response?

- Oh, awesome.

And the media was just thrilled to death.

A lot of people, of course, around the country were "What do you mean by that?"

"Do you mean your whole city is renewable energy?"

No, we can't do that in the private sector.

We have to entice the private sector to participate for themselves.

Then you become city, county wide and that makes that difference.

But all we can handle is that of which we're in charge, which are our buildings, our parks, our lighting and areas like that.

[Upbeat instrumental crescendo] [Whipping wind] [Hopeful steelpan music] [Seagulls cawing and waves crashing] [Intense ocean waves] PAUL GALLAGHER: Our application lingered in the Board of Public Utilities for for three, three and a half years.

And eventually it was denied.

We had the participation of the ratepayer advocate who supported our project.

The Supreme Court really rejected our petition and our hopes of building that project.

The way it was configured originally was over.

[Distant chattering crowd] We disagree with the decision the BPU made.

We think they didn't use the price we submitted.

They used a different price.

We have a DOE grant from the federal government for 50 million dollars to build this project and the state of New Jersey decided that wasn't credible.

They wouldn't factor that into our financials.

And therefore, they found our price too high and our finances wanting, and that we didn't meet what is called net benefit test to the state.

If you accepted the fact that the DOE was in fact credible, as I certainly believe they are, then our price was okay, we met net benefits, and we showed financial integrity.

[Dramatic melancholy music] Our project does depend on the federal support.

And that was the way we proposed it.

That's the way it's going to be financed.

And the BPU denied us on those grounds.

[Ocean waves crash, seagulls squawk] [Dramatic melancholy music fades] RICK DOVEY: I went to my sister's house over the weekend.

There is a door next to her driveway where the coal used to get.

poured down to the cellar.

That house probably was built in the 30s.

It had oil then after coal.

Now it has natural gas.

Maybe they're gonna have solar.

Maybe they're gonna have something else.

Maybe they're gonna have a battery.

Here's a home It's internal energy system has evolved in just that period of time, three times and probably will three more times in the next 30 years.

[Moody instrumental music] [Ethereal instrumental swells] RUTH SANTIAGO: We put out just yesterday, a plan, a proposal, it's called Queremos Sol, "We Want Sun."

So we got together a few groups to create a vision.

And a plan, an energy plan for Puerto Rico on the basis of people in Puerto Rico.

(speaking Spanish) Yeah, so we're making our own proposal on how we think energy generation should happen in Puerto Rico.

[Swelling hopeful music] With the help from the UPR, the University of Puerto Rico faculty and the community and social sectors Together with the PREPA union and the managerial staff at PREPA, which is interesting because they want a transformation to renewable energy.

We're all asking for a transformation of the grid because we have all seen that this is what people want and need.

More importantly, right, people need to have, now that the technology is available.

To have energy closer to where they can manage it and become prosumers, [Indiscernible chatter] I just want to make my pitch for maintaining optimism in the face of global climate change.

The only way that I can continue to work in the space of climate change is to foolishly or otherwise maintain that optimism.

Something as simple as lifting three solar panels onto the roof of a bakery and then wiring it down into some batteries and plugging it into someone's panel and then saying, now I can run X, Y, and Z that I couldn't do.

There's a lot of very tangible optimism in that.

We are the only hospital open 24/7 in this area.

As long as the grid is unstable, we'll be generating power for the emergency room component of the hospital.

This is not big enough to run the entire hospital, but at least the emergency room will always be stable.

More so than a gas generator, a fuel generator, or than the grid, which has been up and down.

- I think, you know, holding on to that optimism is a necessary objective for anyone who's working in the space of climate change.

Because... Once it gets to be just pure gloom and doom then we all just throw up our hands and say, "too bad, there's nothing I can do."

And that stops our progress.

[Ethereal instrumental crescendo] [Energetic music] (Speaking Spanish) ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪