The first novel I ever finished—which shall indefinitely remain unpublished—followed the journey of a handful of students across bombed-out Canada in a near-future apocalypse in the ongoing wake of an environmental and viral crisis fueled by government neglect.

I’d re-drafted the bulk of it in the summer of 2020, a time which exacerbated my worst tendencies to catastrophize, and which brought to front of mind, again, the notion of “prepping” which had lodged in my brain since the earliest days of boy Scouts. 

“Prepping,” the Scouts’ motto of “Be Prepared” taken to its logical extreme, is the practice of stocking up on essential supplies, divesting oneself from “The Grid,” and becoming individually self-sufficient in anticipation of an inevitable worst-case societal scenario. 

It is a bleak, pessimistic view of the future, one categorically rejected by How to Power a City.

The 2022 film, which profiles renewable energy infrastructure efforts in six key locations across the United States and its protectorates, a number of current and ongoing projects to shift municipal reliance away from fossil fuels, and future-proof cities for the ongoing and ever-shifting effects of climate change.

Director Melanie La Rosa privileges the community voice, eschewing narration to instead collage together vignettes from across the country, creating a jigsaw puzzle impression of the efforts being made to combat energy instability, and to invest in the future of communities on the community, municipal, and state levels.

From a once-affluent neighborhood in Detroit forced to take energy initiatives into their own hands after the city repossessed their street lights, to the community of Puerto Rico coming together in the aftermath of hurricane Maria to replace the fallible energy grid with a robust solar infrastructure, How to Power a City reveals the intricate and fascinating dimensions of sustainable energy production in the United States.

Most viewers probably won’t know that Las Vegas, Nevada, powers 100% of their publicly-owned and operated municipal infrastructure from renewable sources—a far cry from the Fallout imaginings of the city. Many will further be surprised to see the efforts undertaken by New York city councillors to ban fossil fuel production within the city’s limits, and to mandate the closure and environmental redevelopment of Rikers Island.

The scope of these various projects runs the gamut from a handful of people getting together to attempt to better their community, to large scale attempts to restructure the infrastructure of entire states like Vermont—where a green social enterprise provides power to 80% of Vermonters—to entire island communities like Costa Rica.

In a cultural climate where questions of fossil fuel divestment and transitional energy projects remain pressing not only in Peterborough, but especially to Trent University, How to Power a City provides an unprecedented glimpse into the material steps being taken to improve the energy economy for those curious about green investment and renewable energy redevelopment.

With a refined, minimalist approach that places importance on personal and community testimony rather than overwrought, glitzy visuals and dazzling production, the documentary is a succinct—though no less articulate for it—glimpse into the world behind energy production to which most people devote little thought in their day to day.

While most of us flick on a switch without a thought to where that power comes from, How to Power a City shows that the way we produce our energy can have radical and potentially lifesaving impacts on our communities, and for our future on this planet.