Jessica Fox noticed who wasn’t represented when she attended the 2019 North American Pollinator Protection Campaign (NAPPC) conference in Washington, DC. NAPPC’s mission is to promote the health of pollinators—like bees, birds, butterflies, bats, and insects—which are now known to be directly linked to essential nutrients needed by humans through the fruits and vegetables they pollinate.
The conference featured an awards ceremony recognizing people and organizations that had taken meaningful and lasting action to conserve pollinator habitat—winners included ranchers and farmers, roadside management organizations, and policy and educational advocates. Fox didn’t see any electric utilities. And she knew from her nearly two decades of work across EPRI’s environmental research that electric power companies were supporting pollinators.
“In 2019, we were just over a year into building our Power-in-Pollinator Initiative. I could see what the companies were doing, and some were doing a lot or ramping up programs,” said Fox, an EPRI principal technical executive. “But there was no recognition of those efforts, and frankly, the companies were not telling their conservation stories.” The electric power industry was not engaged in NAPPC or National Pollinator Week.
Fox approached the NAPPC board of directors and proposed the Pollinator Electric Power Award, which was later launched by NAPPC and EPRI in 2020. “If we were going to do the award, it had to be based on science and rigor,” Fox said. “We spent a lot of time developing the scoring rubric to make sure it was unbiased, comprehensive, and scientifically based. NAPPC also forms an anonymous expert review committee every year, which has helped improve the process. It has only gotten more rigorous and competitive in the five years since it started.” Since 2020, nearly 30 outstanding projects have been nominated, and five winners have been selected.
More than an Award
While the award is an opportunity to celebrate energy projects that have started and maintained effective programs to support pollinators, the goal has always been much bigger. The award is a tool to build internal and external support for pollinator conservation. The application process is an opportunity to evaluate the performance of pollinator initiatives and make changes to both improve the chance of a future winning project and, more importantly, increase the beneficial impact on pollinators.
In other words, the existence of the award has ripple effects that extend well beyond the winning projects. “You see the winners, but what you don’t see are all the applications and other people who are inspired to apply! The winning projects are examples that others can point to and say, ‘Look at what these other companies are doing,’ Fox said. “We now have this award category backed by consistent criteria, and all these stories and photos create inspiration and show how this connects to corporate strategy and risk management.”
Five years of awards has also created a coterie of past winners who have experiences and lessons to share about what goes into developing an effective pollinator project.
Many Lessons Learned
These projects provide myriad lessons about conceiving, launching, implementing, and maintaining pollinator-benefiting habitat. EPRI Journal spoke with several award winners, who shared their takeaways about everything from building project support to working with partners to embracing ambitious goals. Here is some of their advice:
Forge strong relationships and trust. Long before Himalayan blackberry and Scotch broom were removed to make way for native wildflowers and grasses in Portland’s Forest Park, BPA had to do a different kind of cultivation to lay the groundwork for a successful project. BPA’s past management of transmission rights of way through the park created mistrust with the city before the project began. “There was a lack of communication, hurt feelings, and anger among folks from the city managing Forest Park and previous BPA natural resource specialists,” said Nancy Wittpenn, an environmental protection specialist at BPA.
The job of repairing those relationships fell to Chris Morse, a supervisory natural resource specialist at BPA. That outreach was especially important to the success of the Forest Park project because three different institutions—BPA, the city of Portland, and Metro, a regional governmental agency—each had distinct roles in preparing, planting, and sustaining the pollinator habitat.
Robust, consistent, and trust-filled communication about project responsibilities and goals was a necessity. Metro provided funding and expert input from botanists. BPA handled prep work before the plantings by incorporating it into regular vegetation maintenance, and the city helped develop and implement a long-term vegetation management plan and spearheaded pollinator education with trailside signage. “One of the biggest successes of the project was collaboration,” Wittpenn said.
A key driver of strong communication and collaboration is positioning pollinator habitat to complement other utility goals. TVA had that in mind when the utility began developing an enterprise-wide biodiversity policy in 2021. “The idea was to garner internal support and recognition and acknowledgment of the value of biodiversity beyond compliance and listed species regulatory drivers,” said Holly Hoyle, manager in biological compliance at TVA. “There are opportunities where biodiversity and pollinator protection are complementary to operational and institutional goals.”
For example, environmental stewardship is one of the three key pillars outlined in the Tennessee Valley Authority Act of 1933 that established the utility (energy production and economic development are the others). Ensuring public access to the nearly 300,000 acres of land and 11,000 miles of shoreline, TVA manages is one way to pursue the mission. At the Douglas Dam, removing vegetation that obstructed the public’s view and replacing it with pollinator habitat helps improve the public’s enjoyment of the land while enhancing natural resource conservation. “Local, site-specific actions to establish pollinator habitat add up to significant change,” said Heather Hart, senior specialist in natural resource management at TVA.
“We tried to pick an area that is highly visible to the public. And the dam observation area at Douglas was a great place to do that because people go up to the top of that ridge anyway just to look at the lake and the dam,” Hoyle said. “Then right below it, you’ve got this huge expanse of areas where we’ve enhanced the habitat with the native and warm season grasses and the pollinator-friendly flowers.”
Be prepared to make a business case. Fostering strong internal relationships and trust is every bit as important as tending to external partners. Tim Lohner learned throughout his career in natural resources at AEP to keep an eye on the bottom line.
Lohner understood that getting the attention and support of people responsible for transmission system vegetation management budgets meant focusing on the financial benefits of pollinator-friendly habitat. “We made the business case,” Lohner said. “Native vegetation is more drought tolerant; it’s more flood tolerant; there’s less erosion. And if you do it right, there will be fewer trees to manage.” A compelling business case often requires education, including how the pollinator habitat is complementary to cost-saving and risk management.
Good preparation has long-term benefits. A common challenge all winning projects faced was vegetation removal before pollinator-friendly seeds could be planted. For TVA, that began with a well-developed integrated vegetation management plan. “Preparation is a big thing. You need to make sure you get as much of those unwanted plants or undesired vegetation under good control before you start moving forward with planting,” Hart said. “One of the biggest lessons learned is that if you don’t have the site preparation down pat, you’re going to be fighting weeds and other undesirable vegetation that make it harder for the pollinator plants to get established.”
Rigorous prep work adds initial costs to adding pollinator habitat. But it also lays a foundation for longer-term maintenance savings. “You don’t have to mow as often, and you aren’t going to have to use herbicide as much,” said Suzanne Fisher, senior program manager in environment and sustainability at TVA.
Take full advantage of the excitement for the project. Pollinator projects are unique. They are visually beautiful. The stories behind their inception, development, and, most importantly, beneficial impacts are compelling. All these ingredients build enthusiasm for pollinator projects both within the utility and among customers. Take advantage of that enthusiasm to build support and momentum for pollinator-supporting initiatives.
Tim Lohner, AEP
Tim Lohner remembers the enthusiasm of corporate communications partners who were eager to tell the story and employees who were already doing their small part to support pollinators. “I think companies will find there are lots of people who raise honeybees, want to protect the monarch, or plant natives on their own,” Lohner said. “One of our transmission vice presidents raised honeybees.”
One reason TVA applied for the Pollinator Electric Power Award was because it provided opportunities—through webcasts, internal communications, and informal conversations—to talk about the value of pollinator protection. “It provides us an opportunity to speak to people internally and externally,” Holly said. “We wanted to apply for the award to create materials and some recognition to be able to go out and talk about it. I think this will be helpful with us moving forward and engaging with our internal business units and project managers on the operational front.”
The internal and external recognition award-winning projects receive can be used to increase pollinator protection ambition. At BPA, Wittpenn says the Forest Park project established a model to follow for future projects. “Now we work with Metro on replicating the project in other areas on rights of way,” Wittpenn said. For example, BPA is working with Metro to create a pollinator-friendly habitat on a transmission right of way along the Willamette River.
If anything, Morse wonders if they should have been more ambitious with the Forest Park project. There was natural trepidation going into the project, Morse recalls. “If I knew how successful it was going to be, it makes me wonder if we should have gone bigger and done more,” Morse said. “But the fact that we created this model and these relationships will help accomplish more in the future.”
New energy projects can equal more pollinator protection. Fuel source transitions and load growth have focused energy companies on the need to build new transmission lines and energy generation sites. This is an opportunity to catalyze more pollinator habitat creation, argues AEP’s Lohner.
In fact, pointing to past successes protecting pollinators can help get projects permitted. “As we build new infrastructure in different communities, municipalities are going to want us, as an industry, to do things for wildlife,” Lohner said. “And if you have an example where you’ve done it before, you can use that to say, we can do this for you, too.”
The Pollinator Electric Power Award is beneficial to projects that don’t win and to projects that may apply in the future. Projects can measure themselves against the award’s rigorous evaluation criteria—a process that illuminates strengths and areas of improvement. “People who haven’t even applied yet can look at the scoring rubric and use it to inform how they set up their projects now to apply for the award years from now. The existence of this award is inspiring companies and people to think bigger about their land management programs,” Fox said.
