Overview of Social Change:

The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly impacted the job markets and workforce dynamics worldwide, including the renewable energy sector. I interviewed Karlis Povisils, Senior Vice President of Development for APEX Clean Energy, to discuss the pandemic’s effects on renewable energy development, particularly in remote work and virtual interactions. Karlis discussed the importance of negotiations and face-to-face interactions in securing land leases and government approvals, which predominantly occurred in person before the pandemic. However, virtual negotiations have limitations, and school closures have compounded logistical challenges for employees with school-aged children. Despite the challenges, technological innovations such as Zoom have been essential tools for remote collaboration. However, they cannot replace the interpersonal dynamics of face-to-face interactions, which Karlis emphasizes as necessary for fostering long-term relationships with stakeholders. Experts have explored the evolving dynamics of remote and hybrid work models in the Harvard Business Review and Cornell SC Johnson’s BusinessFeed. The pandemic has also impacted the global renewable energy sector, with disruptions in supply chains, project delays, and decreased investments. Despite this, the sector has shown remarkable resilience and adaptability. In conclusion, my interview with Karlis Povisils highlights the intersection of COVID-19, remote work, and renewable energy development. Even as we navigate a post-pandemic world, the renewable energy sector continues to thrive, instilling a sense of hope and optimism for the future.

Biography:

Soren Povisils 0:03
All right. Hello, everyone. Today we’ll be learning and hearing about how COVID affected jobs in renewable energies [wind turbines that create energy] that sometimes need face to face interactions, we will check out how COVID has now shaped the market for renewables, or if it just went back to normal. And we will learn how the pandemic affected my father from a developer standpoint, and just what that meant for the company during those isolation times. And how those projects were carried out during those difficult times. We can start off with a quick introduction, before we get into the questions, can you just give us a quick elevator pitch on who you are and what being a developer means to you, and how that affects the company.

Karlis Povisils 0:42
Sure, Karlis Povisils, the senior vice president of development for APEX clean energy. So Apex clean energy is a is an independent power producer. What that means is we develop, build, own and operate utility scale, renewable energy power plants. So like a solar farm with, you know, with the minimum of 500 acres under panels and potentially up to 1500 acres, no wind turbines that are over 600 feet tall, and there’s, you know, at least 50 to 75 of them in a single facility. That’s the kind of size that we’re talking about. And a lot of it is in the kind of the center part of the country from Texas up into the Great Lakes. And solar can be a little bit further spread out than that development. Renewable energy consists of everything from finding out where you want to cite a project, to getting all the various permissions you need environmental permissions, land use to think of like zoning permit type things. There’s all kinds of environmental studies, interconnection studies for how it affects the grid, everything up to the point in the project design everything up to the point where the project goes, that construction is considered development. And I believe that group for APEX clean energy, has a team of about of about 60 developers, we also have land agents, environmental folks and all the various subject matter experts. So that’s what that is.

Soren Povisils 2:19
Perfect. We’ll get into the questions now, first being how did remote work during COVID-19 affect your job as a renewable energy developer, and especially since they relied on sometimes face to face interactions?

Karlis Povisils 2:34
Yep. So, a lot of a lot of development involves negotiations. So, negotiations of contracts for the land, is we’re not buying the land, and we’re not a government agency, we don’t have eminent domain powers or anything like that. So that when a project is developed and built, it’s because we’ve been able to win the willing cooperation of landowners to lease their property, sometimes it’s a purchase option, if it’s a smaller solar project. There’s also a fair amount of negotiation that has to occur with either state permitting agencies or local permit agency, sometimes federal, and, as a general matter in negotiations, it’s valuable to do this face to face. Because you… you can only gain so much information by reading an email or, you know, doing it by mail, even on the phone, you want to be able to see body language, you want to be able to… you can learn a lot by being face to face with somebody. So that’s always preferred. And before COVID, just about everything in development was done face to face. It was… it was not considered acceptable to have a Zoom meeting. If you suggested a conference call that was almost always a step backward. So, what COVID changed my job, the job of mine developers in many ways, and I’ll just kind of tick through them. One, it’s the most obvious what we’re talking about here is face to face meetings become more difficult. But there’s others. There’re government processes, you know, if you need a county approval. So, you’re talking with the county beforehand, and they’re deciding what you’re going to do you know, whether the project complies with the local ordinance, but then the county has to be able to function or state agencies if they’ve got a public… if they’ve got public meetings to approve things. Well, now they’ve got to figure out how to do that. Also, a lot of our developers, some developers live close to where they work, and can drive to projects but a lot of us are flying to projects. And that also became incredibly challenging and uncertain. And then finally, the other major way it affected us is kids were home. The schools were shut down, and that’s, you know, that is you know, some folks if they don’t have school aged kids or their kids are older, you are not a big deal for parents to carry on as normal. But for anybody with school aged kids being able to get away to take a trip to a site became challenging. So those are those are the four main ways that it affected the business. Those are the those are the challenges to be overcome.

Soren Povisils 5:18
And with those challenges, new tech came out, such as zoom, how did zoom kind of affect the whole way you conducted your work?

Karlis Povisils 5:30
You know, it’s, it’s interesting, I had never even heard of Zoom before COVID. And now it’s, it’s an everyday part of our lives as a team, we use Microsoft teams as well has similar functionality to it. It has become acceptable. Meetings that we would have never assumed you could do remotely, just because it’s not considered acceptable, COVID has changed what’s considered, you know, a normal course of business. It, it’s, it’s interesting, it’s not, it’s not simply a change in it, instead of going out and meet somebody face to face. Now you can do something through Zoom. It also, it caused us to revisit, we often would have internal conference calls, and things like that. And now, we tend to do those over zoom, and there is an expectation that you turn your camera on. And so, it has that that’s been an interesting change for the better, I think, that tech existed before, but now we use it a lot more than we used to.

Soren Povisils 6:39
you said back then that it wouldn’t be normal to do these over Zoom, did having Zoom during these times, since it made sense to do it over zoom, did the engagement and client relationship ever change, or did zoom kind of hold that same power that it would in face to face that we just couldn’t do anymore?

Karlis Povisils 7:01
It’s not a perfect substitute for face to face. I mean, it’s better than just being on the phone. And it’s better than just email. I mean, I personally like negotiating over email, because I feel like I’m stronger in writing, then it’s just easier to control what you’re saying on your side. But you need to have all the various channels of, of information open, I would say it evolve over time. So, in the beginning, if, I should step back for a second one of the one of the challenges, probably unique to renewables is that our projects are mostly located in rural areas. That’s where like, places that are really, really windy are not typically places a lot of people want to live. So, they’re away from urban areas, for the most part, and you need a lot of ground. So, you’re not you’re not like right up against the city or anything like that. It tends to be an older population. And it’s a population that really doesn’t necessarily, it’s not a given that they even have an email address. So having to make that switch go from just stopping by their farm when they’re available to being able to get them on email. Or sometimes they work with attorneys, attorneys used to only want to do face to face. But what we started to see over time, as they became clear that COVID was going to be around for a while. I think a lot of those attorneys started losing work. And they were suddenly a lot more willing to be proactive. They were willing to do conference calls, they were willing to do things over Zoom and over email. So, we did see a bounce back after about a month or so where they were. You saw the attorneys prompting their clients to move there. And then counties, they kind of got over it, they because they had to figure it wasn’t just about renewables, they had to figure out how to conduct their, their business, which has to be done in public. They’re required by law to do meetings and have public meetings. And so, they had to figure out how to do that. So, they had to do spacing, and they had to have overflow rooms and ways to accommodate the public that were that were in the beginning where we really didn’t know what COVID was. So, I would say within just about two months like county started figuring out, other state agencies started to figure it out. You know, the landowner attorneys were figuring things out, but also, at the same time we were as developers figuring out how to travel safely. I mean, my kids were a little older when this hit, so I didn’t have the burden of, you know, school aged kids at home. So, I first was traveling, just taking longer trips, but fewer of them so driving 10 hours to get to Illinois, for example, and then staying there for 11 days where normally I would Just fly in and be there for two or three days. And, and then when I was switching to flying, I was flying from one small airport to the next. You know why? Because I didn’t want the larger end in mind connecting through a large airport but didn’t want to start or end in a large airport. Because then like things like rental cars are off site, you got to be on a crowded bus to get to them. It just was a whole lot more and the airports were different, like Charlotte was a mess. But much Chicago has much wider corridors, it wasn’t quite as bad. So, we all we all kind of learned the ins and outs, like little tricks and tips. A lot of times in a rural area. large landowners that we work with tend to be involved in agriculture. And they have large facilities, they’ve got large, they’ve got tractors, harvesters, lots of big equipment, and it needs to be stored in a big open area. And its only certain times a year that all that stuff is inside. So that means that you had these big, wide-open areas, that even if the weather wasn’t good, we could be indoors, but not be super close to one another. And people did take it seriously. One thing we also noted is that different communities took COVID, more or less seriously than others. And, you know, we figured out ways to do things we also found were normally we might do things like dinner meetings or have landowner dinners where we have maybe a dozen or two dozen landowners together and like a banquet hall, are trying to figure out well, you know, the banquet halls were really suffering. So instead of like a smaller restaurant, we were able to rent some of these larger halls but have fewer people in them. And then that will also that was also allowing us to give some business to some of the local merchants that in the communities where we were. So, everybody was kind of figuring it out together. You know, kind of how to get past that. And it’s not, we didn’t have the luxury to just say we’re just not going to do any work for the next, you know, couple of years or even I think we did a complete stand down for about one month. And then it was a little over a month that I took my first trip out just to try to see what it would be like, and I would say we didn’t get fully back to normal like we weren’t doing. Sometimes we do really large landowner dinners with like 200 people, 250 people. We didn’t start we didn’t do that for almost a year, I think. Then we now are fully back into that. But I think it was it’s eight months to a year before we got back into that habit.

Speaker 1 12:44
Yeah, and just going on to kind of the emotional side of this. I’m kind of just tapping into, like, if you were feeling stress with all these changes, and having to change practically your whole interface, from going from face to face to zoom to long car rides to worrying about the sickness. How did all that and also juggling, I mean, it wasn’t too bad for you for kids at home. But juggling all that. How did that kind of play into, were you stressed out? Were you kind of doubting the market or anything like that?

Karlis Povisils 13:24
I wasn’t, you know, it’s a pretty big change. And then it wasn’t very, once we started getting a handle on COVID, then we had things like, you know, inflation for the first time in my working life. I’ve never really dealt with inflation. So, there was a lot of uncertainty. And that’s always inherently nerve racking when you’re in a business where you want certainty. And then when you don’t have it, that’s, that’s inherently stressful. But in terms of the COVID itself, like we are just really it was tough to predict the effects. Energy is something that there’s always a demand for it. So, we really weren’t worried about energy demand falling. I was more worried about the people on my team that had school aged kids. And you know that they’ve got me kids ruined everything that’s pretty well known, but they so they’re they’ve got screaming kids at home, they’re kindergarteners, first graders, and these kids are I mean, I imagined it was very damaging for younger kids to, to be away from school for an extended period of time. And that had to be stressful for the parents realizing that their kids might be losing an entire year or two of education. I was worried about that. I was worried about the other folks on my team that really myself so much.

Soren Povisils 14:37
That makes sense. And during this time, were there any successful projects you worked on just solely in the pandemic? Or did you kind of start off a project and then it slowed down during the pandemic? I’m kind of just asking like, what Yeah, was it doable to carry out your job and have a successful project solely in the pandemic?

Karlis Povisils 14:59
Yeah, well, renewable projects take, they take years to develop and build. So, there was no project that started and finished. Within the pandemic, I would say, I mean, there are projects that were in critical phases, and then the pandemic hit. And that’s where, I mean, I was going to Illinois all the time to work on to work on a project in central Illinois, where it was in a critical phase, and if we didn’t get that county moving, and it was a county that was not figuring out how to do to conduct business, and so I had to be there, you know, practically every week to just kind of lean on them and get them help them get back up to speed. But, ya know, I mean, that we, we basically, we did figure it out within, it’s not just us, like, we have a lot of partners in our communities, landowners, their attorneys, county officials, state officials, I mean, people, people figured out how to do the work. And there were, there were successful projects it did, it slowed things down for a little while, but it, it bounced back fairly quickly, especially once we were able to start doing with larger gatherings again, in you know, eight to 12 months into the pandemic.

Soren Povisils 16:12
That makes sense. And I’m kind of just to finish this all wrap it all up. What do you think the future holds for the renewable energy development and market? Host pandemic? And how like you? How might face to face interaction change? Do you think that’s still going to be mostly interaction face to face? Or like you said? Or do you think Zoom is ever going to go away? Or is that kind of a staple for your company now?

Karlis Povisils 16:41
Alright, it’s hard to tell me, it seems like it’s, I don’t use Zoom a lot. If I’m talking to, for specifically for project work, it’s we use it all the time for coordination internally. And there are, I mean, I think one of the habits, and I’m glad to see change permanently, because of COVID is, there were there used to be, if you were talking about like two companies maybe wanting to work together, it would have been unthinkable to suggest that the first meeting be, you know, over zoom in, so I would sometimes take not all the time, but maybe two or three times a year, I would take a flight, just to have one meeting. And that now is become it’s become acceptable to suggest that that happened over zoom instead, or a conference call it so I think that’s good. That’s a, that’s a lot of that’s just a lot of fuss and expense for a single meeting. However, if it’s important enough, I mean, I recently had to do this, where it was an important enough meeting, it was one meeting, but it was so critical to the project that I felt like I got to get on a plane and have this one meeting, because it was, it just was it was pivotal to the to the, to the to the project. So, it’s, I think any negotiator will tell you that you need to have, you need to be able to get in front of people, you just have to, it’s so hard to really, you so often don’t have enough information, just doing it over doing it over just voice or just in writing. And so, you need to do that. Also, I mean, another big piece of this, I should have mentioned this earlier, a huge piece of why face to face is so necessary. It’s not just the nuts and bolts of negotiation. It’s also it’s not like we are selling vacuum cleaners or some kind of one-off thing where you make the sale, and you don’t have anything to do with each other anymore. These projects last for 30 plus years. Yeah, so the landowners and the communities that we work in, they need to decide a do we want to do this and do we want to do this with Apex clean energy. And so that’s about you’re building a relationship. And you can’t do that just by email or over the phone. You have to put in the time you have to be present. And you have to be present in the community if you if you’re looking to make an investment like this there, they want to know what kind of neighbor Are you going to be you know, what kind of partner are you going to be in the community they need to they need to see your face they need to see multiple people’s faces and they just need to see that you’re engaged and you’re for real it’s an it’s also just a shorthand way to figure out if something is real as if you see the people there over and over and over again. And you see them working hard trying to solve all the various things you need to all the permits you need to get all the studies you need to do so when they see you there week in week out they can they start to let their guard down and say okay, you guys are for real you’re you really intending to do this. Let’s figure out how to get the other pieces together. So, it’s necessary for a lot of reasons. So, zoom will never completely replace that. But I think like for the occasional one-off meeting, you can save a trip by being able to do it with Zoom and If you’re just doing internal meetings, where you’ve got a far-flung team, it is better to be on Zoom and see people’s faces than just be on a call, or being on zoom with your camera’s off like we are right now.

Soren Povisils 20:12
Yeah. All right. Well, thank you for the time. Thank you for your wisdom on how COVID affected not only you, but your job as a developer and your company and how you relate to other companies and conduct your business. Yeah, thank you.

Karlis Povisils 20:31
Always happy to talk about renewable energy.

Research:

The COVID-19 pandemic has profoundly impacted job markets, particularly those reliant on face-to-face interactions. As governments worldwide implemented lockdowns and social distancing measures, many industries had to adapt to remote work or temporary closures. Laura Amico’s analysis in the Harvard Business Review sheds light on the realities of remote work during this time, emphasizing the challenges businesses face in maintaining effective communication and productivity. Amico notes, “Remote work has changed communication for the better in some ways—emails, for instance, can make conversations more efficient—but there is still no substitute for being able to read someone’s facial expressions or body language during an interaction” (Amico). Technologies like Zoom became essential tools for virtual collaboration, yet they couldn’t fully replicate the interpersonal dynamics of face-to-face interactions. Amico highlights the limitations of virtual interactions, stating that “virtual interactions may work for transactions but not for transactions based on relationships” (Amico). The transition to remote work underscored the importance of adaptability and technological literacy in navigating unprecedented challenges while emphasizing the enduring value of personal engagement in fostering trust and collaboration. Overall, COVID-19’s impact on jobs underscores the multifaceted nature of remote work and its implications for workforce dynamics and organizational culture.

Janice Endresen’s article, “COVID-19’s Impact on Work, Workers, and the Workplace of the Future,” provides crucial insights into how the pandemic has reshaped the workforce and workplace dynamics. Published on Cornell SC Johnson’s BusinessFeed, Endresen discusses the rapid shift to remote work forced by the pandemic and its implications for employers and employees. She emphasizes the accelerated trends toward remote work, highlighting workers’ challenges in maintaining work-life balance and adapting to technological barriers. Endresen observes, “The pandemic has accelerated trends toward remote work” (Endresen), underscoring the significant changes in the work landscape. Additionally, she explores the potential for hybrid work models blending remote and in-person work, emphasizing the need for organizations to embrace flexibility and innovation in shaping the future of workplaces.

The NCBI article “Impact of COVID-19 Pandemic on the Global Renewable Energy Sector: A Review and Analysis” by Md. Rabiul Islam examines the pandemic’s effects on renewable energy, discussing supply chain disruptions, project delays, and decreased investment; according to the International Energy Agency (IEA), “Global renewable energy capacity additions in 2020 experienced a decline of 6%, representing the first decline in almost 20 years” (Islam), which is “5% less than the expected growth pre-pandemic” (Islam), and the article highlights a significant loss of over 500,000 jobs in the sector globally while also emphasizing the need for resilient policies and investments to support recovery and future growth in the post-pandemic era.

Bibliography:

Laura Amico. The Realities of Remote Work. Harvard Business Review, May 29, 2021. https://hbr.org/2021/10/the-realities-of-remote-work

Endresen, Janice. “COVID-19’S Impact on Work, Workers, and the Workplace of the Future | Dyson BusinessFeed.” Cornell SC Johnson, 25 Sept. 2020, business.cornell.edu/hub/2020/09/25/covid-19s-impact-work-workers-workplace-future/.

Islam, Rabiul. NCBI. “Impact of COVID-19 Pandemic on the Global Renewable Energy Sector: A Review and Analysis.” National Center for Biotechnology Information

Follow Up Commentary:

The interviewee, Karlis Povisils, approved the transcript on April 8th, 2024, and requested no changes.

Interview Technology and Process:

This interview was recorded over Zoom because Karlis Povisils lives in Charlottesville VA, and I live at JMU in Harrisonburg. We figured, instead of driving an hour to speak in person, that it would be easier over Zoom. We recorded the interview, I exported the Mp3 file, put it into Otter.ai, transcribed it, and then manually edited the transcription.

Transcription Process:

The transcription was carried out by a program called Otter.ai, an artificial intelligence program that writes what is said in an audio clip. It breaks down the time markings, name labels, and double spaces for new speaker inputs. After I put my audio into the program, it created my initial transcription. On my first edit around, I put in the correct speaker titles (Soren Povisils, Karlis Povisils). Then I would go in and correct any grammatical errors it made due to small mistakes from the program. Third I took out filler words that were negatively affecting the flow of the conversation such as “um”, “uh”, and “like”. Finally, I went back through and checked for any confusing points made in the interview, and added brackets as needed to help clarify, once this was done, I sent the transcription to Karlis Povisils, he approved of it with no requests of changing.