WED AM News: Study finds tribes will miss out on clean energy benefits if disparities persist; UW researcher bringing together health data from various real-world sources

September 11, 2024

— A new UW-Madison study predicts Native American communities will miss out on billions of dollars of economic impact from the clean energy transition if existing disparities persist.

Profs. Dominic Parker and Sarah Johnston led a team of researchers in analyzing the potential income that renewable energy projects could provide to tribal groups, recently publishing their findings in the journal Nature Energy.

Parker, a professor of agricultural and applied economics, says this report is the first “comprehensive analysis” of such potential benefits, along with the regulatory barriers standing in the way.

They found that Native American reservation lands are 46% less likely to host wind farms and 110% less likely to host solar farms than “otherwise similar” adjacent lands, according to the university. This disparity exists even as wind and solar resources “are especially abundant” in the poorest 25% of reservations, researchers found.

Using energy demand modeling through 2050 and other data, the researchers found tribes would lose out on more than $19 billion in lease and tax earnings between now and then under a scenario of “high electrification and future reliance on renewables” to meet energy demands. Under a low-electrification future, that future would still be $11.6 billion.

By comparison, the equivalent estimate for tribal casino earnings through 2050 is $67 billion, the release notes.

Researchers found the “complexity and uncertainty” of the permitting process for clean energy projects and transmission lines is a major barrier to developing them. Parker notes 49 regulatory steps were required to develop oil projects on reservations, compared to just four steps for projects elsewhere, according to an earlier study.

“This regulatory jumble makes energy projects almost as uncommon as where they are forbidden, such as in public parks, forests and wildlife refuges,” Parker said.

At the same time, reservation land is often divided up into more ownership parcels than non-reservation land due to historical land allotment policies, the release shows, adding complexity to the process for obtaining land leasing agreements for projects.

Because reservation land has an average of 14 owners for a 160-acre parcel, a 5,000-acre wind farm built on 32 parcels would need to get the agreement of 448 owners to secure a land lease. This makes it “very difficult” for Native Americans living on reservations to pursue renewable energy developments, Parker says.

Study authors say allowing tribes to “implement their own goals” without regulatory steps required by federal and state law would make it easier for tribes to pursue renewable energy developments.

“Rolling back the red tape will be critical so that tribes interested in development can realize the economic potential of their own resources,” Parker said. “The key is to avoid green colonialism by not pressuring uninterested tribes while at the same time making it feasible for those wanting the income.”

See the release.

— A researcher with the UW-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health is developing methods for incorporating health information from various sources to improve clinical trials, identify treatment gaps and more.

Jomol Mathew, an associate professor in the Department of Population Health Sciences, spoke Monday during a seminar focused on “changing the paradigm” around health data research.

Along with traditional scientific data collected through clinical trials, her work centers on bringing together clinical information from electronic health records, claims data, cancer registry data and census findings, among other sources.

“Obviously the data comes from real-world patient provider settings, for the most part when we are talking about clinical data,” she said. “The advantage of that is, that helps us to study large study populations, much more than what you would typically encounter in a standard clinical trial.”

That creates opportunities for better understanding certain drug applications, she said, along with giving scientists a greater span of time from which to draw their conclusions.

“Typically in a clinical trial setting, it takes years before this happens,” Mathew said. “This will help us overcome that time barrier, and assess some of the long-term and rare side effects of treatments, and doing post-market surveillance, and cost and time savings.”

Still, she noted drawing on data from “real-world” sources isn’t without its problems, as these alternate data sources aren’t collected with the same scientific rigor as clinical trial results. They can be missing data, or what’s collected may not be relevant, or technical changes to EHR systems can introduce new variables, complicating the picture.

Another issue is the “lack of standardization and harmonization” between hospitals or clinics, for example, as each may have different protocols for how health information is handled, Mathew said. Plus, researchers are faced with the additional challenge of ensuring data privacy for people whose information may be used for research purposes.

“This is not data that’s collected with explicit, informed consent,” she said. “So privacy and security concerns are paramount, and you have to really make sure that the data is handled appropriately.”

Watch the video.

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— August home sales in the greater Milwaukee region were down 3% over the year, marking the lowest total sales figure for the month since 2012.

That’s from the latest Greater Milwaukee Association of Realtors update, which shows 1,646 homes were sold in Milwaukee, Waukesha, Ozaukee and Washington counties last month. That’s compared to 1,697 in August 2023, and slightly above the 1,619 sales seen in August 2012, according to the report.

But GMAR notes August was only the second month in 2024 with a decline in sales.

“We can’t rule out the increase in interest rates as partly to blame for the decrease in sales, however, lackluster listings are more likely to be the cause,” report authors wrote. Listings for the four-county region in August fell 2.3% over the year to 2,120, compared to 2,170 in August 2023.

Still, the report shows sales for 2024 so far are up 4.3% over the same period of 2023 — 11,200 versus 10,737, respectively. The group says the market will likely see another 5,700 units sold through the rest of this year, which would bring the annual total up to around 16,900 units.

That number would be “anemic” compared to recent years, the report shows, as the market had more than 20,000 sales per year between 2016 and 2022.

Meanwhile, demand for homes continues to exceed supply in the region, driving up home prices. The average sale price was 9% higher over the year in August, going from $389,772 to $424,731.

“The market simply does not have enough homes to meet demand, resulting in prices being pushed up as buyers bid up prices,” report authors wrote, calling the trend “frustrating and unsustainable.”

See the report.

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