AOE Part III: A Cultural Awakening for Electricity
On average, people spend just six minutes a year thinking about their electricity bills. And when they do, it’s probably not because they want to. For as the old adage goes, people call their electricity company for two reasons: paying their bill or complaining about an outage. Though the electricity grid is omnipresent, constantly churning in the background of daily life, the public rarely gives it much thought. But, in the Age of the Electron, this will change rapidly.
Building a grid with a large number of DER’s such as solar, storage, smart thermostats, and generators will create a new era of consumers who are vividly aware of the electricity grid around them. These new technologies, while changing how grid infrastructure is built, will in turn change how consumers interact with the grid, much in the way they are conscious of gas prices, where their favorite station is, and who the big oil companies are. This behavior change will lead to new archetypes being born on the order of magnitude of the “Marlboro Man” or “Oil Tycoon”.
It is important to lean into this potential, as creating new narratives and archetypes will help climate change fighting solutions like solar and electric vehicles “cross the chasm” from early adopters to the early majority. Many of early customers’ buying decision for these technologies came from their desire to support sustainable initiatives. But in order to usher in widespread adoption, a new wave of consumers must be targeted who will buy for reasons wholly outside of climate and sustainability. The marketing efforts of leaders in the space, from Tesla to SunRun, haven’t yet tapped into this potential.
Appealing to groups of people who care about climate as well as those who do not care about it with the same marketing should be the gold standard of clean energy marketing going forward. It doesn’t matter what an adopter believes, as long as they are adopting technologies that lower emissions. Thus, in order to quicken the pace of adoption, it’s of critical importance to create narratives for consumers that have nothing to do with climate. Counter-intuitively, building narratives around superior technology, resilience, and the American Spirit (to be defined) instead of around sustainability will only accelerate the adoption of clean energy technologies.
The End of the Early Adopter Phase
Sustainability-conscious consumers have been an important driver for the early success of technologies like electric vehicles, battery storage, and solar, but in order to spur the next adoption cycle, marketers need to find new beachheads. Consumers who were willing to buy what are essentially premium products provided the investment needed to prepare these products for mass market adoption. The easiest way to synthesize this point is Tesla’s own master plan, which used a luxury vehicle to kick start the EV industry and fund development of a mass market car. This has worked remarkably well, but won’t get us to 100% EV penetration because most Tesla owners are still rich people from blue states. Whether Tesla is able to shake this association will be a challenge for them moving forward, but more on that in a moment.
The prevailing driver in selling these products is that they help the planet. This idea is so engrained in our culture that we often forget something vital: even if the goal is to get consumers to adopt climate-friendly solutions and stop emitting, it isn’t important why people do in the end. Ultimately, consumers are being asked to change their behavior or adopt something new. And yet, marketing often focuses on the outcome of the behavior change (lower emissions), not why the behavior change or product consumers are adopting will make their lives better. There is no reason why marketing green products has to come with any mention of being good for the environment.
If anything, consumers are often automatically imagining that “sustainable” products will require some behavior change that affects their lives negatively. Ever since conservation became a theme in the 70’s, the idea of sustainability has been associated with the baggage of needing to sacrifice modern comforts for the environment, as infamously portrayed by Jimmy Carter asking Americans to “turn down the thermostat and put on a sweater”. It is important to acknowledge that every dollar spent on marketing green products comes with this underlying cultural implication. Thus, in order to get customers who don’t really care about climate to adopt, it may actually help to actively eliminate their association with conservation. Personally, I look forward to the day when a bunch of climate deniers are driving EV’s and have solar on their roofs, but they’ll only do that if sold something other than sustainability.
It is possible that clean or green marketing for products like solar has already plateaued. A good example of the marketing headwinds they face is that despite skyrocketing adoption rates over the last decade, solar cost of customer acquisition (CAC) rates have only gone up as a percent of total system installation cost. That is, we’ve gotten better and better at designing and installing solar systems, but no better at selling them. While it is hard to map sustainability one-to-one to CAC, creating more powerful narratives would be a good hypothesis to try. We need to get to a point where buyers, when viewing a potential new home, ask, “Where’s the solar? The battery? the EV charger?” much in the same way they would be curious why the kitchen lacks a stove. This would indicate a cultural inflection point where solar is bought instead of sold.
Yet, many of our attempts at creating non-sustainability driven narratives are still weak. While it is directionally correct, we can look at the latest GM Super Bowl ad to see what I mean. The premise of the commercial is to tap into the American competitive spirit to beat Norway at adopting EV’s, but there are a couple of problems. First, Norway is not the best country to choose for Americans to care to compete with. Second, the viewer is not told what the competition is about: the subtext is that it’s about climate change, but is the viewer supposed to just know that? And what should they feel about it? The burden is on GM to inspire them to care. Third, we know nothing about the product that we’re supposed to be adopting to win this amorphous competition with an adversary we can’t point to on a map. The commercial says nothing, which is sort of the point, given GM isn’t selling any of these cars today.
It’s encouraging that a major car company is heading in this direction and seeing an EV Super Bowl ad provides further evidence that we are reaching a cultural inflection point. However, what dismayed me the most upon release was the universal praise being thrown at the ad and at GM for their heroic efforts, which indicated to me how major our narrative issue truly is. Sustainability as the primary driver of adoption has been incredibly successful up until this point in time, and we should be grateful for that. But if clean energy technologies are to truly cross the chasm, we need to find a wider audience using new methods.
Finding the Early Majority
In order to spur the next adoption cycle, clean tech messaging needs to rely on a variety of strong narratives and aesthetics that aren’t being leveraged yet — some commercial and others political in nature. The narratives that I propose below rely on using traditional American archetypes that can be adapted to the modern day, but of course there will be others. From traditional archetypes like the “frontiersman” to the “oil tycoon” to the “astronaut”, the desire for freedom, self-reliance, and a better future has been at the core of the American Spirit. Fundamentally, the American Spirit is a function of the Apollonian Will, and marketers can use this to their advantage. I’ll introduce a few possibilities here that have nothing to do with climate change, share this common thread, and will have even climate deniers adopting clean energy solutions.
Resilience and Self-Reliance
The American Frontiersman has always been the must enduring archetype in the American psyche. Frontiersman, cowboys, western gunslingers, oil wildcatters, astronauts, entrepreneurs, and generally trailblazers on the front lines of any field are functionally the same on an ideological level, despite the fact that their form has changed as the times change. The ability for an individual to be self-sufficient, and to think for his or her self to create new ways forward has always been a core feature of the American Spirit. Thus, leveraging these enduring archetypes into new forms consistent with the Age of the Electron should be the work of clean energy marketers moving forward.
I’ve stated previously that resilience is DER’s killer app because ultimately, more than anything, people care about their lights staying on no matter what. But the underlying reason for that is in its ideological power and ability to call forth something fundamental in the American Spirit: rugged individualism and self-reliance. For example, Apple’s famous 1984 ad sold an ideological breaking of chains of whatever overlord it is that ruled you. It didn’t need to sell the product because it sold the idea: their computers providing access to knowledge maps to freedom.
Resilience in electricity gives us a similar opportunity and should come to the forefront of sustainable marketing regardless of locale. In California, storage has been booming due to the public safety power shutoffs, indicating that customers are finally adopting for resiliency reasons, not sustainability or cost savings. We even saw a boom in search traffic for backup batteries after the recent events in Texas, of all places. This is also true in the tree-dense North East, which experiences power outages frequently due to wind storms knocking them down and into power lines. But there’s no reason that this idea of self-reliance shouldn’t apply universally.
On the electricity grid, onsite resilience with DERs is about breaking the chains of the regulated monopoly utility and inept politicians that govern the most essential cornerstone of our modern life, not about keeping our lights on. It’s about not depending on foreign oil that we have to fight endless wars to secure, which taps into collective American pride and sovereignty. Those who install DERs will never have to worry about losing power or a war over oil in the middle east again, because those who adopt DERs are free!
What’s important to understand is that only DERs can provide this superior feature, and they just so happen to also be good for the environment.
Aesthetics of The Future
Have you ever walked around Manhattan with buses that sound like jumbo jets driving around and belching toxic exhaust in your face? In a clean energy future, there’s no more noise or smell pollution. Walking in the city will feel like the countryside, with technology and nature living in perfect harmony. Clean energy technologies are flat out better than their fossil fuel predecessors in multiple dimensions, but more importantly give us an avenue to create a new vision of the future. Some companies are already trending in the direction of this narrative, but none have gotten all the way there.
If the industry is to continue to use sustainability-driven narratives, it needs to make them stronger not only ideologically, but aesthetically; a strong, optimistic vision of The Future is a cornerstone of the American Spirit. There is a very real difference between marketing lower emissions, sustainability, or saving the planet and creating an aesthetic vision of the future that consumers actually want to live in — it’s a future that just so happens to be unlocked by the clean energy technologies being sold. Lowering emissions is important for this future, but is not the defining characteristic, nor is it sufficient as a refrain to create a new aesthetic.
We still haven’t seen that “1984 ad moment” for a clean energy technology, which successfully leveraged a strong aesthetic. A great example of the industry’s current failure to do this comes directly from its leader, Tesla (and despite their popularity and the fact they lead the EV movement, Tesla maintains a tiny market share of cars sold compared to incumbents). Ironically Tesla, during its Cybertruck launch, was trying to use the exact aesthetic that Apple used in its landmark ad. The Cybertruck was supposed to appeal to a non-rich blue state demographic, but cared more for the retro-futuristic aesthetics of Apple’s 1984 ad than it did for any of the ideological undercurrents. Apple was selling an ideological movement, breaking the chains of those who rule you, and invented an aesthetic to serve that narrative. Tesla was selling only the same tired Blade Runner aesthetic we’ve seen for decades, a shadow of the power of Apple’s marketing. If Tesla wants to sell the future, it should create its own.
In fact, these clean-yet-superior products from the likes of Tesla, Nest, and Arcadia are perfectly positioned to capitalize on envisioning a new future that sheds the aforementioned notions of conservation and sustainability in favor of something more powerful: harmony. In fact, that’s exactly what the name Arcadia means, which is genius. Arcadia markets itself as being about solar, but the deal closer is their slick and intuitive interface and user experience. And have you ever driven a Tesla? The lack of noise and silent propulsion forward makes you feel like you’re in a spaceship. However, when you go to these websites, the futuristic products are featured more predominantly than the actual future they will bring. This lets the subtext of conservation around these companies continue to exist for the broader, non-IPCC report-reading market, so many of these products are still mostly adopted by those who care about lowering emissions.
We should not forget that The Future is an ideology, not a cheap aesthetic, and thus can look any way we want it to. And further, the American Spirit needs a new aesthetic to map itself onto. So let’s get back to our frontiersman roots while progressing ever forward, and make technology work in harmony with our surrounding environment. I’d love to see a clean energy company that can get us out of dystopia, and back to the land. We can do better than drone videos of solar farms.
America Back from the Brink: A New Space Race
On top of marketing individual products and companies better, we need to market the entire movement better. The best place to do that is from a political lens. Job creation, onshoring of manufacturing of clean energy technologies, and competition with foreign adversaries all can win bipartisan support and thus greatly accelerate clean energy adoption. Politically, we can use the concept of America’s standing and influence in the world to motivate Americans to unify across varied backgrounds — economic, racial, cultural, or otherwise. Economically, the energy transition can be used as a vehicle to fix the current imbalance between capital and labor and put Americans back into well-paying jobs, rebuilding our gutted middle class. This America first rhetoric will go farther than putting the environment first because ultimately, the problem with using the climate changing as an enemy is it’s too amorphous. Matters of national security, wages, and jobs are not.
China is absolutely dominating the US on the most important areas of the clean energy transition, but most of us just don’t know it yet. Despite China continuing to build coal and other dirty sources of energy, it has a near monopoly on clean energy supply chains. China not only has the largest installed capacity of solar and wind, but also manufactures 71% of solar panels, 65% of Li-Ion batteries, and 30% of wind turbines. Their grip on upstream raw materials may be even tighter. Dominance like this in an energy transition hasn’t been seen since Standard Oil owned 80% of global oil distribution, which in turn set up American hegemony for the succeeding century. If GM actually wanted to succeed in tapping into the American competitive spirit via competition with foreign countries in the aforementioned Super Bowl ad, they would have been better off positioning the competition with China.
China holds our emissions-free world in their hands, which is something we should reconsider. This isn’t to say we should dislike China, but rather understand that our ability to successfully transition the energy sector and our position in the world is influenced directly by China’s stranglehold in this arena. Our entire green transition hinges on a country where the risk of tensions — from trade or otherwise — is escalating. Recently, China banned rare earth metal exports to the US defense agencies. What if they made similar bans of rare earth metals needed to build EV’s, or the solar and batteries themselves to US companies next? Or used them as weapons in a trade war? Our domestic industry would collapse. Luckily, Biden’s top climate adviser seems to understand this well.
We don’t just need to sell America as a leader in the global fight, but we also need to turn inward and address domestic problems. Despite Trump’s failed attempts to market an economically populist agenda, we shouldn’t turn away from concepts like bringing manufacturing back and supporting jobs at home. In fact, the Biden administration is taking steps in that direction as well. Meanwhile, clean energy jobs is one of the fastest growing and well paying sectors in the US. Who doesn’t want good jobs and American made products?
We need to again tap into the American Spirit with political narratives that put America first. Bringing this to the forefront of the climate agenda will bring broad bipartisan support. We need to create competition with adversaries that are concretely defined and within competitive arenas we care about. We didn’t care about the space race because of Norway: we wanted to beat the Russians!
What holds all of these disparate threads is something fundamental within the American Spirit. The Future, self-reliance, and America’s standing on the global stage will converge to create new archetypes, aesthetics, and political narratives that are desperately needed to quicken the pace of clean energy adoption while putting America back on track. Whether it be through resilience or visions of the future, our industry will redefine culture along with it.
These archetypes already exist in the Age of Oil, but the monopoly they hold is weakening. How embedded in your psyche is the idea of dropping the top on a convertible, punching the gas, and feeling the power of an internal combustion engine skip and hum you along an open highway? We don’t even know it’s there, but it rules us. It’s been sold to us for decades, ever since Jack Kerouac’s subversive On the Road was absorbed into consumer marketing campaigns. Climate tech companies should take note, as it is this ideological underpinning, as it always has been in America, that will drive the awakening of the American consumer’s mind in the Age of the Electron. What will be our On the Road?
So the era of reporting the newest facts and numbers finally proving climate change is real is gone and the era of innovation and inspiring the American Spirt is here. We shouldn’t care about whether or not people accept the latest IPCC report, we should care about results. Because at the end of the day, we’re not asking customers to lower emissions, rather asking them to change their behavior to new technologies and habits that do reduce emissions. There is a more powerful way to motivate these new behaviors, and we can “Trojan Horse” consumers to reduce emissions with ideas and technologies that inspire them in a new way. To do that, we don’t need to reinvent the wheel; by looking to the archetypes of the past, we can find our way into The Future.
