Vox - David Roberts
The industry is groping for ways to talk the public down.
 |
| American as apple pie. Shutterstock |
Renewable energy is hot. It has incredible momentum, not
only in terms of deployment and costs but in terms of public opinion and
cultural cachet. To put it simply: Everyone loves renewable energy.
It’s cleaner, it’s high-tech, it’s new jobs, it’s the future.
And so more and more big energy customers are demanding the full meal deal: 100 percent renewable energy.
The Sierra Club notes that so far in the US, more than 80
cities, five counties, and two states have committed to 100 percent
renewables. Six cities have already hit the target.
The group RE100 tracks
144 private companies across the globe
that have committed to 100 percent renewables, including Google, Ikea,
Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Coca-Cola, Nike, GM, and, uh, Lego.
The timing of all these targets (and thus their
stringency) varies, everywhere from 2020 to 2050, but cumulatively, they
are beginning to add up. Even if policymakers never force power
utilities to produce renewable energy through mandates, if all the
biggest customers demand it, utilities will be mandated to produce it in
all but name.
The rapid spread and evident popularity of the 100
percent target has created an alarming situation for power utilities.
Suffice to say, while there are some visionary utilities in the country,
as an industry, they tend to be extremely small-c conservative.
They do not like the idea of being forced to transition
entirely to renewable energy, certainly not in the next 10 to 15 years.
For one thing, most of them don’t believe the technology exists to make
100 percent work reliably; they believe that even with lots of storage,
variable renewables will need to be balanced out by “dispatchable” power
plants like natural gas. For another thing, getting to 100 percent
quickly would mean lots of “stranded assets,” i.e., shutting down
profitable fossil fuel power plants.
 |
| LightRocket via Getty Images
|
In short, their customers are stampeding in a direction that terrifies them.
The
industry’s dilemma is brought home by a recent bit of market research
and polling done on behalf of the Edison Electric Institute, a trade
group for utilities. It was distributed at a
recent meeting of EEI board members and executives and shared with me.
The work was done by the market research firm
Maslansky & Partners,
which analyzed existing utility messaging, interviewed utility execs
and environmentalists, ran a national opinion survey, and did a couple
of three-hour sit-downs with “media informed customers” in Minneapolis
and Phoenix.
The results are striking. They do a great job of laying
out the public opinion landscape on renewables, showing where different
groups have advantages and disadvantages.
The takeaway: Renewables are a public opinion juggernaut.
Being against them is no longer an option. The industry’s best and only
hope is to slow down the stampede a bit (and that’s what they plan to
try).
100 percent renewables is a wildly popular goal
The core of the industry’s dilemma is captured in this slide (on the left is the industry perspective):
Utilities don’t think it is wise or feasible to go 100 percent renewables. But the public loves it.
And I mean
loves it. Check out these numbers from the opinion survey:
In our polarized age, here is something we almost all agree on: Renewable energy is awesome.
Here’s the most striking slide in the presentation:
In case you don’t feel like squinting, let me draw your
attention to the fact that a majority of those surveyed (51 percent)
believe that 100 percent renewables is a good idea even if it raises
their energy bills by
30 percent.
That is wild. As anyone who’s been in politics a while
knows, Americans don’t generally like people raising their bills, much
less by a third. A majority that still favors it? That is political
dynamite.
Insofar as utilities were in a public relations war over renewables, they’ve lost. They face a tidal wave. So what can they do?
Explaining why 100% renewables is impossible backfires
What they
can’t do is tell customers why they can’t do it. Customers do not want to hear excuses.
They tested the following message (this is an excerpt,
with emphasis added): “Today, we can choose between a balanced energy
mix, which provides reliable energy whenever we need it, and 100%
renewable energy. But we cannot have both. We also need to consider the costs. ... The logistics, resources, and costs would be immense.”
Nope. Customers didn’t want to hear it.
“You could tell what side he was leaning toward,” said
one Phoenix focus-group participant. “He offered no solutions. It was
just problem, problem, problem.”
“I want to hear about how the work would get done,” said a
Minneapolis participant. “I don’t want to hear him complain about how
much work it will take.”
Other can’t-do arguments drew similar reactions:
Can’t-do arguments get a company branded as anti-renewables, and that means Bad Guy. After that, customers aren’t listening.
If they want people to keep listening, utilities must
begin by convincing them that they are on board with renewables. Thus,
the very first piece of advice on “framing the conversation” reads,
“Positive, pro-renewable message first ... every time.”
An anti-renewables message, even a message that
implies anti-renewables, is simply untenable.
That is worth noting. It’s something I’m not sure US
climate hawks or political types have entirely internalized. There
aren’t many contested political issues on which public opinion is so
unequivocally on one side.
The public might be willing to let the experts work out the details
So utilities must convince customers that they support
renewable energy, first thing, off the bat. (The best way to do that, of
the options tested, was telling customers about investments —
highlighting the rising level of investment in renewables. Money talks.)
If
they can make that key connection, then they can swing the conversation
around. Once customers are convinced that utilities are sincere about
supporting renewables, they become more open to the message that getting
to 100 percent will take some time, that it needs to be done
deliberately, and that costs need to be taken into account.
“Given the cost and the complexities of it, it should be
done gradually,” one Phoenix respondent said. “Not the next five years,
but maybe by the end of our lifetimes,” said another.
The researchers tested the following message (excerpted):
“[A balanced energy mix] helps us maintain consistent service for our
customers and avoids over-reliance on a single fuel type or technology.
This means we’re able to bring our customers increasingly more renewable
energy without asking them to compromise on reliability or cost.”
That worked much better. “It seemed like we all have the
same goal that we’re working toward,” said a respondent in Minneapolis.
“In the meantime, they’ll use a balance to serve us. It’s sensible.”
In fact, in terms of reasons not to rely entirely on
renewables, by far the most potent argument was that it would slow the
transition to clean energy: “We can get to cleaner energy faster and
more effectively if we use a range of sources and technologies.”
The state-of-the-art message for utilities, then, is
this: Yes, we want to pursue renewables, but to protect consumers, we
want to do it in a way that is “balanced, gradual, affordable, [and]
reliable.” That means we should avoid, ahem, “short-term mandates.”
(How much this message will merely cover for efforts to block legislation and slow the transition depends on the utility.)
On renewables, “yes, but” is the only countermessage left
So where does this leave us in terms of the messaging landscape?
In the 100 percent renewables debate, there are roughly
three camps, at least among the researchers, energy executives, climate
advocates, and journalists who pay attention to these sorts of things.
The first, with most
activists and
advocates,
supports 100 percent renewables as a clear, intuitive, and inspiring
target, an effective way to rally public support and speed the
transition.
The
second camp believes that the cheaper, safer way to get to carbon-free
electricity is not to rely entirely on renewables but to supplement them
with “firm” zero-carbon alternatives like hydro, nuclear, geothermal,
biomass, or fossil fuels with carbon capture and sequestration. (See
this paper, from a group of MIT researchers, for the best articulation of that argument.) This camp supports the strategy
California has taken, which is to mandate 100 percent “zero carbon” rather than “renewable” resources, to leave flexibility.
The third camp, containing many utilities and
conservatives, flatly doesn’t believe 100 percent carbon-free
electricity is possible anytime soon, and would just as soon not close
working fossil fuel power plants before the end of their profitable
lives. They would like to continue balancing the rising share of
renewables with natural gas.
The first camp has won the public’s heart. Big time.
Everyone, even those gritting their teeth, has to signal support for
renewables if they want to be taken seriously.
There is some room for the third camp to convince the
public that the transition to renewables needs to proceed carefully and
“gradually.” That’s the ground advocates and utilities will be fighting
on in coming years: not whether to go, but how fast. (There’s a lot of
room within “not the next five years, but maybe by the end of our
lifetimes.”)
And there is some room for the second camp to convince the public that the transition to
clean energy is best achieved by relying on sources beyond
renewable
energy, or at least by not locking ourselves into renewables
prematurely. One of the survey’s findings is that under a range of
questions, the public does not have a strong preference between
increasing renewables and reducing carbon emissions. I doubt most people
differentiate the two at all — they are vaguely good, environmental-ish
things.
Similarly, I doubt the public at large will care much
about the distinction between “renewable” and “clean,” which serves as a
pretty good argument for the California approach. (The California
approach, or at least earlier variants of it, has helped keep existing
nuclear plants running in
Illinois and
New York.)
But these are implementation details. The decarbonization
ship has sailed. Renewable energy is in the vanguard and, at least for
now, it appears unstoppable. At this point, it is difficult to imagine
what could turn the public against it. (Perhaps a giant wind spill?) The
more relevant question is when lawmakers will catch on to renewable
energy’s full political potential.
The basic message from the public, if I could pull
together all the strands of the research, is this: We want clean, modern
energy, and we’ll pay for it. We’re willing to let experts work out the
details, but we don’t want to hear that it can’t be done. Just do it.
Utilities can’t make that sentiment go away, though they
can and will try to soften it. In the meantime, in the off-chance that
their messaging efforts fail, they’d better get serious about giving
customers the clean energy they want.
Links
