BOXERWOOD RISING:

Meet Robbie Gardner, wind farm developer

Throughout our 25th year, we’ll be sharing stories of young people whose Boxerwood experiences shaped their passions and vocations. Have a young friend to recommend? Contact Catherine Epstein, creator of this series: catherine@boxerwood.org

Click here to read the entire series.

Twenty years ago, Robbie Gardner, then age nine, attended one of Boxerwood’s summer camps. The days were filled with a range of nature activities, and the young campers even had a sleepover. But when his mom came to pick him up the next morning, “I just cried and cried," Robbie remembered. “I didn’t want to leave and go home,” he explained, “even though we lived like a 10-minute walk away.” Reflecting on what made him so sad to leave, he said, “I think it was just the fact that the whole day was spent in this beautiful place where there was learning going on the whole time…I really liked the other children I was there with, my peers, and I was sad to leave them as well.”

These two strong connections – with the outdoors and with other people – have propelled Robbie toward his current job as a Senior Development Manager at the AES Corporation in Boulder, Colorado. There, he develops wind turbine projects from conception to construction, or as Robbie explains, “from an idea to when shovels are going in the ground.” While his original interest in the field stemmed from a passion for renewable energy and being outside, he’s found unexpected gratification in the connections he’s cultivated with the individuals and families with whom he works. Sustainability remains his “macro goal,” he said, “but my passion these days, what really gets me out of bed in the morning, is the local benefit, economically.”

“Something I love about my job,” Robbie explained, “is it’s a lot of time spent in rural communities meeting with ranchers, local elected officials, local business owners, just basically forming relationships.” Through those relationships, he’s learned about the deep ties people feel to the land that they farm and ranch, and he’s gratified that wind energy can actually sustain families who otherwise might have to abandon their land or their way of life. “I’m very passionate about wind energy because I work with a lot of ranchers that still ranch their property up until the 0.1 acre of land that’s taken by a wind turbine,” Robbie said. “They can still use their land in whatever way they want to. They hunt, they can ranch, they can farm, and still have a very lucrative form of supplemental income in the form of the wind farm.” 

He gave the example of a project he worked on in Arizona, which was on “one of the largest, most historic cattle ranches in the state.” The family was struggling to figure out whether and how they could keep the ranch. “They’d been at it a long time, and ranching’s a tough business,” Robbie learned. Robbie’s work with AES generated a wind farm on their property that “fully allowed them to not worry about it for 30 years and beyond. They can keep [the land] and keep ranching.” Currently, that wind farm also happens to be the largest in the state of Arizona.

Like that ranch, most of the projects Robbie leads are in very rural areas, where he explained that “a lot of communities are really struggling. One that I’m working in has a coal plant that’s coming offline, and the local school is losing [about] 90% of its funding.” Robbie noted that the wind turbine project being developed in that community is “contributing tens of millions of dollars in property taxes…and hundreds of thousands of dollars annually in local partnerships and local jobs.” Robbie is careful to acknowledge that turbines cannot entirely replace coal – either the jobs it generated or the cultural significance it built over generations – but they significantly supplement the loss of changing energy sources, providing much-needed resources and support to communities who value their land.

This connection to immediate surroundings is nothing new to Robbie himself, who grew up in Lexington with a deep love of the outdoors. “I always wanted to spend as much time as I could outside,” he said. Boxerwood was always one of his favorite places for adventuring. “Boxerwood felt so big when I was a kid. There was so much to explore,” he remembered. “I just remember being so enthralled in a totally different universe and make-believe world, exploring and wandering.” 

Robbie thinks that part of what makes Boxerwood remarkable is the physical place itself. “What happens there is really special,” he said, “but the actual land is really unique. It just provides a playground for kids to learn and explore.” Through his work with AES, Robbie has had the opportunity to see environmental education and nature centers throughout the western United States, and he says Boxerwood remains singular among them. “Boxerwood is just such a unique place – to have both the environmental education aspect but also the play and the land to go and explore and learn…nowhere that I’ve found has come even close to Boxerwood in my mind.”

These days, Robbie is grateful to do work he finds meaningful, and he’s also aware of its challenges. First, wind farms are “really really challenging to develop and get built,” he explained. “It’s frankly rare to build a project…getting it across the finish line can be challenging.” He’s also encountered people who oppose the development of wind farms for a variety of reasons. Some of those people “may not understand what we’re doing, and some do understand it and just don’t like it, and that presents pretty serious headwinds,” he said. 

But he’s also found meaningful and effective ways of working with people who might harbor questions or doubts. “What I’ve found is that there’s a lot of people that don’t like what you do until you sit down in a room and talk to them,” Robbie explained. “I really appreciate my line of work because pretty much every concern that folks have, we have a really good answer for those. We do years and years and years of work to ensure the smallest impact.”

Reflecting on these discussions – which merge the passions for community and the environment that he discovered as a Boxerwood camper – Robbie said, “I love those conversations. I really enjoy those.” 

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