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View details about the Green Energy Village project on the project page.
Dr. Paul Draus of U-M Dearborn talks in his own words about his ongoing project: A Green Energy Village in Detroit Eastern Market. This piece is an excerpt from a conversation Draus had with the Graham Sustainability Institute’s Jared Hocking.
Draus spent much of his early career researching health behaviors, with a particular emphasis on substance abuse. In recent years, he has expanded his focus to include urban green space.
How does your work in sociology and public health intersect with sustainability?
When you talk about social determinants of health, you’re tallying up the list of everything that went wrong and all the ways we got here.
Earlier in my career, I spent a lot of time interviewing people who had substance abuse issues. As I became more involved in the city of Detroit and with people in the city, I got to a certain point where I decided that we didn't need to just catalog the problems anymore. I started thinking that it’s the environment where a lot of these factors are coming together—whether you talk about race or economics or education.
I’ve been doing research in and around Detroit since around 2005, when I started at U-M Dearborn. As an urban sociologist, one thing that interested me was the different local community environments. Though people tend to paint Detroit with a broad brush, I saw that there were a lot of local variations in what was happening—even in terms of the local ecologies and clusters of activity and people in different neighborhoods.
After the Great Recession (2008), you started to see a real change in the narrative around Detroit. People began to think of Detroit as a comeback city. There was investment activity and people coming back to the city. But you also saw a stark difference between the few neighborhoods where those types of activities were happening and almost all other neighborhoods.
As a sociologist, I have experience diagnosing problems while placing them in a larger context. In Detroit, for example, I have researched the east side, but also neighborhoods on the southwest side of Detroit, which have high concentrations of industrial pollution—both legacy pollution and continuing pollution. And, of course, you see poor communities, communities of color, are often overburdened with this legacy pollution. What you tend to find is that all of these issues are tangled together, from structural racism, deindustrialization, environmental racism, and so on.
How did the Green Energy Village project get started?
Juliette Roddy and I became interested in an area on the east side of Detroit just outside of the Eastern Market called the Chene Street corridor because there was a lot of talk about urban agriculture and urban farming in this area. We were involved with one project there called the Recovery Park Project.
We started going around, just meeting people in that neighborhood by walking block to block, meeting people on the street, things like that. And we met Carlos Nielbock, who owns a workshop. His business is called CAN Art Handworks, which is on East Wilkins Street right outside of Eastern Market. This was around 2010, 2011.
Even back then, Carlos was working on these windmills, which you could see from the street. You could see them sort of spinning and catching sunlight. They’re quite visually striking.
Carlos had a sign on his business with his name and phone number on it, so we contacted him. We started talking to him about his projects and his history and the neighborhood.
Over the years, we learned that his vision was more than doing metalwork projects. He had built this business from the ground up using traditional metalworking skills that he learned in Germany as a young man. But he had a much bigger vision for how his work and his skills could fit into the redevelopment of Detroit, and could also meet the needs of the communities he knew so well. These communities, especially on the east side, had lost a lot of population and a lot of investment over the years.
Carlos believes we can provide a platform to build sustainable infrastructure products in Detroit. We can educate and train people who are residents of the city so that they can earn a good living and have something to pass on to their children. And at the same time, we can use the GEV project as a means to improve the physical infrastructure of the city. The Detroit windmills, which Carlos created, are really what brought this project together.
Why pursue a catalyst grant from the Graham Sustainability Institute for this work?
The Green Energy Village has at least three different dimensions, which all relate to the issue of sustainability. One of them is to generate energy from wind power—either off-grid or to feed back into the grid—which is, of course, very old technology at this point. The second is the skilled-trades workforce development piece.
The third piece is the materials themselves. Carlos builds these windmills (or low altitude wind turbine devices). The central poles for the wind turbines are made from old discarded light poles, for example, that are good steel light poles. Over the last couple of decades, thousands of these have been thrown out and are just sitting in scrap yards.
The catalyst project was never intended to develop the Green Energy Village itself. The goal was to establish a platform for scalability and integrated assessment.
The big idea or vision for the Green Energy Village is to scale up this windmill design that Carlos invented in his shop and install these windmills across the landscape to a point where you could generate a significant amount of energy that people could utilize locally. At the same time, it would also provide an employment base. If we produce these windmills locally out of discarded materials, that would create a source of localized green energy, and also a source of training and workforce development and employment.
I think about applied, community-based research in this way: You have to take your ideas and your questions, but you have to adapt them to work in that space. And that means working with the people who are there, within the environment and the circumstances, and interacting with them. We met with different church leaders and different community groups. We brought them into the project. And Dan Carmody at the Eastern Market Corporation, too.
We recently got a small amount of funding from U-M Dearborn to work with Chris Pannier, who is a mechanical engineer. Chris will work with Carlos on the electrical component to finish off some of the windmills that are there on his campus. His workshop will serve as a demonstration site for the GEV.
Eventually, we want to pitch a larger funder to do an installation for not just one or two wind turbines, but one hundred wind turbines. But to get there we still need to show a proof of concept of the energy production capability, of the stability of this platform as a microgrid.
The team is still actively working on the GEV vision. In the recently published Designing Sustainable Cities, Draus authored a chapter that provides additional insights into the project. The team is also planning fall event at CAN Art Handworks to celebrate the book’s release.For this project, supported by a catalyst grant from the Graham Sustainability Institute, Draus forged a community-based research partnership around the concept of a green energy village (GEV). The team installed a demonstration in Eastern Market of upcycled windmills that generate a portion of the market’s electricity and worked with residents to incorporate their ideas into the vision.
If you are interested in supporting the project or getting involved, contact Paul Draus ([email protected]) or visit the CAN Art Handworks website (canarts.portfoliobox.io).