Taking back narrative control

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Hi there,

Hope you have good plans for the long weekend here in the U.S.

Before you jet off, I’m excited to share today’s piece with you. This newsletter is a sponsored takeover in which I describe the work the good folks at Climatize are doing to scale solar and battery energy storage installations, including in places that may surprise you.

DEEP DIVE

In case you haven’t been tapped into energy and sustainability headlines lately, well, I wouldn’t blame you. Secondly, I’d note that the predominance of those in the media tasked with breaking news and writing opinion pieces have focused on headwinds facing everyone from countries and communities to everyday citizens, especially in the U.S., where the Trump administration has taken numerous measures to make it harder for climate solutions ranging from renewable energy to EVs to sustain the rate of deployment they did under the Biden adminnistration. On top of that, however, I’d also discuss very ‘fact-of-the-matter’ challenges that are cropping up, too, and not just those that pertain to a warming planet with increasingly dysregulated climate systems.

For example, as shown above, electricity bills in the U.S. have been rising for some time, driven both by increasing electricity demand in general and insufficient investment in and deployment of electricity transmission and distribution infrastructure. And since Trump took office, bills have increased anywhere between 5% and ~10%, a staggering rise in just over six months, any way you slice it. While there’s a lot of back and forth about just how bad inflation is in the U.S. and whether interest rates are or aren’t too high, rising electricity and utility bills, if left unchecked, will, beyond any shadow of a doubt, hurt consumers nationwide, and, in turn and in time, the economy at large. Trump’s Energy Secretary, Chris Wright, isn’t even trying to obfuscate this point; while Wright and the Trump administration argue that the proximate causes of increases are a holdover from Biden-era policies, Wright readily admits they’ll probably get blamed for it.

As much as pain from higher prices hurts in the short term, and increased greenhouse gas emissions resulting from slower deployment will hurt in the medium and long term, there are strong arguments for more sustainable solutions themselves that stand out when cast in relief against the challenges and narrative muddiness of this moment. Where emissions mitigation alone clearly wasn’t and isn’t a sufficient story to form broad political coalitions and individual citizen-level consensus around the value of solutions like distributed energy, EVs, and more, there’s never been a better time to bring the messaging back to affordability, alongside other benefits these technologies offer, such as resilience and independence (which is quintessentially American, after all).

Today’s newsletter is about Climatize’s work in this lane, with emphasis on how they’re nailing the narrative for solar and storage deployment by demonstrating its broad appeal.

What do people actually care about?

The short answer to the above is “I don’t know,” because I haven’t asked that many modal Americans, or people globally, for that matter. If I had to guess, say, if you asked me to go out and sell solar and storage and installations to farmers in rural America, I would…:

• …not assume anything about people’s worldview, even in states like Iowa, where renewable energy provides the vast majority of the state’s electricity. 

• Omit discussion of climate change and greenhouse gas emissions, as it’s not entirely necessary and risks wading into overly politicized waters.

• Emphasize other attributes that make these solutions sustainable in the fullest sense of the word. I would discuss affordability and resilience, focusing, for instance, on the ability to power farming operations even if the grid is down. Then I’d tie those back to the increased independence that those attributes foster, and connect that to the quintessentially American “frontier” spirit.

Of course, it’s one thing for me to conceptually suggest that focusing on stories surrounding affordability, resilience, and independence may be more aligned with what the median American actually cares about and that it’s a better way to scale sustainability solutions nationwide. It’s another thing entirely to actually walk the walk, deploy solutions, see how everyday people across the country respond, and listen to what they have to say. 

Fortunately, that’s precisely what Climatize has been exploring through a recent listening tour its team has gone on. Climatize is a SEC-regulated investment platform that enables anyone to invest directly in vetted renewable energy projects—whether solar, battery storage, or EV charging—across the U.S. But they’re turning on their narrative control hats of late, too. Where the team could have adhered to the standard climate tech messaging playbook—i.e., discussing emissions reductions, invoking urgency surrounding the climate crisis, and appealing to environmental and conservation values—they decided to take a new approach that’s more responsive to the moment we’re in.

Specifically, the Climatize team hit the road to interview customers, particularly farmers from Tennessee to Georgia whose solar and battery energy storage installations were funded through Climatize, to hear what they had to say. On the heels of several successful installations, they produced a video series, POWERED, featuring interviews with recipients of funding they accessed through Climatize, which was often combined with financing from Rural Energy for America Program (REAP) grants.†

The results so far are noteworthy. For example, take the testimony of one investment and grant funding recipient, Joshua Dowdy, who lives and works in Somerville, Tennessee, and partnered with Climatize to finance a solar plus battery energy storage installation on his farm:

Similarly, Debra Lockard, a third-generation farmer also located in Tennessee, described the benefits of her solar and storage systems as follows:

We may not all share the same level of insistence on independence as Joshua Dowdy. However, the benefits of resilience that solar and storage offer are readily appreciable. Resilience benefits aren’t just a question of comfort, though they help on that front, too. They translate into confidence and make economic sense (and cents). As Lockard outlined with a practical example, heightened resilience can be the difference between a harvest going bad, imperiling a business, or literally and figuratively weathering a storm.

Community solar → community buy-in

These takeaways regarding the affordability and resilience benefits of distributed energy systems may not be earth-shattering to those of us who are long-standing champions of said solutions in general. Still, it’s worth noting just how divorced our worldview can be from mainstream perceptions in other areas, especially in the types of communities where Climatize is increasingly operating. As Joshua Dowdy mentioned when interviewed:

There’s a tried-and-true adage that the strongest predictor of whether one house will have solar panels is whether a neighboring home does. The dynamic that stat crystallizes is also at work here in what Dowdy recounts about his community. And it’s especially salient in areas where people are otherwise reluctant to install solar and storage systems on their properties, whether due to high upfront capital expenditure costs, skepticism about government and climate-focused grant programs, or a lack of education on the benefits. In communities like these, getting even one community member to consider a solar and/or solar-plus-storage system can help establish a bedrock of support, conviction, and adoption organically. Then, once you have some early adopters in a community on board who are of the community—regardless of what messages and attributes of the solutions they’re excited about—those people are far more likely to become successful change agents in their community than outsiders can hope to be. 

In their interviews, Climatize also uncovered examples that point to the broader scale of impact these community advocates may apply themselves to, with multiple farmers noting that they’d advocate for programs like the REAP grants that helped fund their systems with whomever necessary. For her part, Deborah Lockard reflected: 

Similarly, Joshua Dowdy noted:

The combination of grants and catalytic capital from investors on Climatize’s platform—which flows dollars to farms in rural communities and then becomes a pillar of support for renewable and distributed energy—is one of the more compelling pathways to political change I’ve come across. We’ve already seen Republican politicians in states with significant shares of renewable energy in their electricity mixes stand out and make rare appeals to Trump to temper policies that would otherwise slow deployment of more renewables. That’s a thread that’s well worth continuing to pull on.

As I often discuss, opening our aperture to discuss the holistic benefits of sustainability solutions is a smart strategy for the path forward and to respond to the vicissitudes of the current political and economic moment in the U.S. Said differently, in discussing solutions like solar and storage, it’s not just about greenhouse gas emissions and global warming. It’s about air pollution, resilience, cost savings, peace of mind, personal autonomy, and, ultimately, reclaiming agency. It’s about power, and not just the electrical current kind.

With respect to the farmers we met through Climatize’s work and the POWERED interview series, we see that power and agency are evident in the way they discuss resilience and independence, which is a product of their new solar and storage systems.

With respect to your role, as the reader of this piece and a conscientious citizen interested in scaling sustainability solutions, you can support this work yourself on Climatize’s platform, where your dollars can support the upfront costs of similar solar and storage installations. To learn more about Climatize, explore more here:

† These grants are issued under a federal initiative that provides funding and loan guarantees to agricultural producers and rural small businesses for renewable energy systems.

Disclosure: I am not a financial advisor and this is not investment advice. Crowdfunding involves a level of risk that should be carefully assessed by the individual before investing.

Hope you enjoyed this one. Feel free to respond if you have thoughts and/or questions.

Best,

Nick