Custodians of the Solar Landscape.
Designing & Assembling Participation
In order for drawings and image to act to their fullest ability in engaging and enabling participation, they required careful mediation between their speculation, communication and interpretation. Participants needed to feel a familiarity with the landscape, whilst being able to recognise the potential for a new infrastructure to evolve within it. Thus, participation needs to be designed into drawing and images, rather than being after-the-matter.
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Rather than conducting the participatory process, as the architect, I design the participation. The resultant participatory drawings require the skill of the architect - equipping the community with the necessary design, information, and visualisation tools to empower them as custodians of this solar landscape.
The Community Energy Co-Operative Workbook:
The question of how people would participate and how their contributions would be collected in order to inform the future of this research came into play. A book of “exercises” that provoke and engage participants, no matter what their background is, would allow for contributions and interpretations to be suggested whilst also allowing the participation to be elective. These “exercises” could take the form of sketching over maps, creating maps, offering solutions to how an energy co-operative could work, how agriculture could work alongside the solar farm etc. In order to participate, one simply uses a pencil on paper to engage with and contribute to the research.
The Community Energy Co-Operative Workbook, aimed to gain insight whilst instigating an informed curiosity and conversation surrounding the implementation of a community solar farm, immersing one into the various perspectives involved. The format takes that of drawing exercises and questionnaire style provocations – allowing one to fill the shoes of select personalities affected by the solar farm whilst contributing to interpretations on such projects. This workbook is a design tool with which the audience of the exhibition can physically interact with and, thus, inviting them to participate rather than spectate.
The workbook also attempts to ascertain the level of participation amongst landowners and farmers on the designated site for the community energy co-operative solar farm, as seen in exercise 1. The level of participation amongst this particular group ultimately dictates the size and placement of the proposed solar farm, and in turn, the amount of energy the community has access to. Reflecting on this, it became evident that varying degrees of participation needed to be communicated back into the community, thus, revisiting the design and construction project of semester 2 and bringing the research full circle.
Design, information, and visualisation:
equipping the community through elective design.
It had been established at this point in the research, from critical reviews with an architectural audience and from engaging with community members, that the community needed to be equipped with elective information in addition to the design of the solar farm and participatory methods established. However, the primary custodians of this solar landscape are ultimately going to be landowners and farmers, without their participation the community energy co-operative solar farm has lost its most vital resource – the Land. This is one of the primary challenges the community will face in the implementation of the solar farm, thus, highlighting this and visualising it back into the community is paramount to their understanding of the challenges inherent to community-based energy.
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To equip the community with this information, four examples of participation were visualised in plan and section, along with infographics conveying the number of solar panels, landowner participation, battery cabins, community fund, energy production, the embodied carbon of each scheme:
The biggest challenge facing Mulranny in implementing this community-based energy system is connecting to the grid, with concerns regarding existing infrastructure not being sufficient to undertake this connection and export excess energy to generate revenue for the community: “There is significant grid challenges and if we discover that the grid infrastructure is the disabling factor then it is important that we highlight that.” (Sean Carolan, 2022) In addition to this, Farmers and landowners are facing challenges in terms of policy relating to solar energy generation and grant aid. The Targeted Agricultural Modernisation Scheme 3 provides up to 60% in grant aid for qualified farmers on solar infrastructure investment, however, when investigated further, grant-aided solar panels may only be used to produce energy for the farm on which it is installed.
If policy were to allow for renewable energy to be harvested and exported by farmers to a co-operative community setting, communities such as Mulranny have the potential to curb grid connection challenges whilst utilising and adding value to agricultural resources. The farmers become the primary facilitators of such a collaboration – providing the necessary resources, being qualified to apply for grant aid and potentially being the custodians of this solar landscape by constructing, maintaining, and advancing the infrastructure along with other agricultural enterprises such as sheep grazing.
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To show the effect of the solar panel infrastructure on the ground in relation to the custodian, the constructional logic of this is drawn in section – showing possible methods of construction by the custodians, allowing for them to elect which construction method to undertake on their parcel of land. This licenses a return to semester 2, looking back and reflecting on this part of the project as a method of construction. This also allows for an exploration of less carbon-intensive models of construction when compared to the semester 2 design project – a method of construction heavily reliant on concrete and steel due to large spans and the existing use of such materials and structures in Irish agricultural settings.