Cancun - When I started working on solar energy issues several years ago, I heard it repeatedly: "Everyone loves solar." Back then, many people in solar and other cleantech sectors saw long-term meritocracy in the energy business. Public demand, technological advances and an inevitable price on carbon were going to drive cleantech to dominance over time. "Renewable energy," it was often said, "will soon become just plain 'energy.'"
From the gridlocked global warming treaty negotiations here in Cancun, however, the picture seems starkly different. The congressional climate bill fight ended in disaster, the recession tightened credit markets, and the coal and oil industries bought themselves a new Congress last month. And that global carbon market many were counting on? The most optimistic note Thursday night from a top U.S. treaty negotiator, Jonathan Pershing, was "maybe next year."
Still, cleantech possesses a great combination of assets that many industries spend considerable time and money trying to generate. These include:
Policy momentum: California's anti-cleantech Proposition 23 lost by a huge margin last month; and the offshore wind industry has been greenlighted by the Obama administration.
Business success: Solar is now the fastest growing energy sector, creating jobs in all 50 states.
Wide and deep public support: More than 90 percent of Americans support solar energy, while 87 percent believe we should build more wind farms, and all over the country, people from different walks of life actually volunteer their time to move the nation from fossil fuels to clean energy.
However, that asset combination has also moved solar, wind, battery storage, and energy efficiency technologies from being cute niceties to potentially serious market disruptors for traditional, dirty energy players.
The dirty energy guys know that, and they are acting accordingly. Cleantech investors, executives and leaders have a lot at stake, and they should pay attention to dirty energy's increasingly aggressive attacks:
But if you invest or work in cleantech, should you really care? After all, customers and project financers make rational decisions, immune from a technology's market position... don't they?
Not according to a panel of cleantech communicators we convened during the recent Solar Power International (SPI) trade show. There, RenewableEnergyWorld.com founder and publisher Oliver Strube; pollster Jeff Levine of Gotham Research Group; Kimberly Kupiecki of Edelman; and Greentech Media Editor-in-Chief Michael Kanellos joined us to discuss two new polls and steps cleantech should take in the face of dirty energy attacks on cleantech.
These experts agreed:
1. Clean energy needs to capture peoples' imaginations, not just their intellects
While clean energy has the facts on its side, it hasn't been using its very strong connection with Americans who might invest in it, purchase it, or support it just on the grounds of national economic interests. Instead, there's far too much engineer-speak, facts, figures, watts, and jargon dominating cleantech communications. That's a mistake, according to Renewable Energy World's Oliver Strube, who said, "As an industry it really is important to us to change that language."
Emory University psychologist Dr. Drew Westen conducted groundbreaking research in 2004, finding that people make decisions first and foremost at the emotional level, and only then do they begin rational consideration. In fact, Westen found, humans are incapable of doing otherwise. The cleantech community should assume there's a reason why deep-pocketed Chevron and the coal front group, America's Power Army, have spent huge sums on advertising and marketing materials with a certain feel to them.
2. Individual companies should advocate for the cleantech industry -- it's in their individual interests
Cleantech companies have strong individual interests in collective brand defense. Michael Kanellos of Greentech Media made the point best: "...the onslaught of information that's coming to people has allowed them to solidify an opinion." And that opinion forms the landscape on which cleantech is trying to sell products, draw investors and scale.
If cleantech companies don't help with their own advocacy, who will? No cleantech sector is old enough to have a trade association or echo chamber it can rely on to do all its public communicating. Their trade associations need individual companies to tell their customers' success stories and celebrate milestones in a much more public and constant way.
A great recent example of a cleantech executive doing his company a service through collective brand defense was SPG Solar CEO Tom Rooney's piece making the case why political conservatives should support clean energy. Mr. Rooney is busy running a company, but he took time to do a thoughtful, spot-on piece that generated a lot of traffic, comments and conversation. It also raised SPG Solar's visibility and thought leadership, at very low cost.
We need more of that type of effort across the board. A lot more, in fact. At our panel, Edelman's Kimberly Kupecki said, "One of the biggest challenges is helping solar companies talk about the context - why they matter and how they're affecting their industry in the broader picture. It's another way we can simply and cheaply be our own advocates."
3. Welcome a conversation about cost
Cleantech voices need to frame the cost argument properly by relentlessly pointing out that fossil fuels' supposed cheapness is underwritten by massive taxpayers subsidies.
The dirty energy lobby has proven highly sensitive to this counterargument. On October 12, 2010, Solar Energy Industry Association CEO and President Rhone Resch called for cutting the "grotesque" subsidies to fossil industries. "Every year, the toxic fossil industries receive $550 billion in subsidies worldwide," he said.
Just two weeks later, ExxonMobil ran a remarkably defensive ad in the form of an obfuscating quiz on subsidies (see below) at the bottom of the front page of the New York Times.
This ad was followed with a laughable blog post from Vice President Ken Cohen insisting that "open-ended subsidies for existing energy technologies simply shift the costs to taxpayers without making the technologies more competitive or sustainable."Â Mr. Cohen's multi-billion profit company is uncomfortably familiar with open-ended subsidies and their impact on consumers. So, he should know that if you're given $550 billion a year to be "inexpensive," you shouldn't run your mouth about the cost of clean energy technologies.
Our panelists were in full agreement that it's time for the solar industry to wade into the cost conversation. If we aggressively frame that conversation accurately, we'll win.
Bottom line: Cleantech managers and investors are busy trying to build successful companies, but their growing successes have drawn the opposition of status quo players who don't want them to succeed. That's why the dirty energy industries are now spending significant resources to harden the marketing and sales environment against cleantech's success. All the facts, figures and solid product offerings in the world won't overcome that problem if this emerging threat isn't faced.
Dirty energy is playing full contact. Are we ready to do the same?
Follow Mike Casey on Twitter: www.twitter.com/scalinggreen
I think you have it backwards. Everyone loves the idea of renewable energy. Its when people learn more about relative costs of power and the inverse correlation between the cost of power and economic growth that they start to have questions. You are solidly losing to the pr battle on that front. You say you want to have a conversation about costs, but then you bring up the total dollar subsidies of the fossil industry. $550 billion worldwide!!! BIG NUMBER!!! Yet you provide absolutely no context. For instance you fail to mention US subsidies for both fossils and renewables and more importantly you fail to mention the subsidy per unit of energy produced which for renewables is orders of magnitude ahead of fossils. That sort of argumentation will only create more skeptics and feed the perception rightly or wrongly that the renewable industry is dependent on high subsidies to exist.
It also dosen't help that you have the feds through the EPA obstructing the permitting processes for new fossil power plants across the country.
What the fossil pr people are consequently able to is piggy back on both the anti-government sentiment, and the deficit fears prevalent in the country today. You have everyone's imagination. You have to work on their intellect.
2) Operational issues. Can this power be used in a way that supplements what we've spend a century building and perfecting (the grid). Basically, the bigger and more interconected the grid, the better use we can make of renewables that are unscheduled (wind and solar).
Solve these two major issues, and we're there. Doing anything but solving these two issues does not move the ball forward.
If you subsidies proportional to output, you support the status quo: No change.
Solar wind and waste bio chars are already the cheapest energy subsidies not included, for million of americans and billion of people world wide. It's not your daddy's solar wind and bio char.
NGOs keep sending young people into coal states who do not understand the science and engineering and are torn to shreds in debate with fossil folk who actually know what they are speaking about. Rallies with a handful of folks in front of the most receptive politicians offices come are humurous, well meaning and ineffectual. We have NGOs with permanent staff theoretically hired to work on policy development related to climate science who are never heard from.....seemingly meant only to allow the sponsoring NGO to tell supporting foundations that they are active in every state. Cleantech has nice advocates fighting folk for whom dirt is comfortable...in all ways. It's a street fight with one side not comfortable raising their voice....while they bleed on the pavement.
Attack a politician's legacy and you attack the politician. A digital Climate Monument that is endowed for 100 years showing who was/sn't on board -- a marker to show the grandkids, when the effects of climate change are most felt...twenty, thirty, more years from now...where granddad stood...in shame or as a leader.
So, if clean tech would stop fighting democracy, jobs, property values and our open spaces, and instead focus on providing efficiency and solar PV and other point of use solutions (starting with a German style feed in tariff), they would have a bipartisan slam dunk. If they want to own everything, take everything, kill everything and run everything, then Chevron Solar and Chevron Oil are really all exactly the same.
The truth, which we all need to accept, is that clean power needs fossile fule plants to operate, and fossile fuel plants can run less often with clean power supplementing thier generation whenever the sun is shining and the wind is blowing. One without the other is stupid.
So, I know everyone was geared up for the big "fight", but the reality is we can never run on totally alternative energy, yet to not develop clean power would be the worst thing Amerca could do.
Let's advance clean power, and stop demonizing fossil fuels, since they are past generations clean technology. In 1960, environmentalists pleaded for a coal fired plant. Today environmentalists would cringe at that. Things change.
In huge power plants we are losing 80% of energy of fuel—heat energy in vain.
In small power plants we could use as electricity as heat. In this case wood could provide more useful energy, than coal or oil products.
Emission from coal are toxic, emission from wood –not.
We must change our energy production policy to build small power plant, surrounding by forest and use mix of wood, coal and natural gas in environmentally save proportion.
All gases from oven could be put in water to watering these forests. Together with ash it will be the best nutrition to grow trees.
Efficiency of engine in cars around 30%.
Efficiency of production of gasoline from oil is less than 45%
It means that real efficiency of moving mostly one person (weight 200Lb.) in car (weight 4000Lb.) is less than one percent.
It is the main reason for changing our transportation system from heavy cars, moving by gasoline, to small carts, moving by electricity directly from grid.
It could be close to zero emission of greenhouse gases in air.
It could bring independence from foreign sources of energy.
It could be 100% of employment!