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It's Time to Change the Narrative About Clean Energy
- snowwindwaves 8y agoThe article discusses re-branding the clean energy industry so it is as American as the interstate highway system and the jobs that it provides are as valuable as those in the automotive or coal mining sectors but didn't go so far as to suggest what that branding could be. A television ad campaign showing lots of blue and white collar workers at solar farms, wind farms, and hydro plants performing various maintenance, construction, and engineering activities might help more than the shots of wilderness and nature that seem to be designed to appeal to environmentalists more than the average joe. need a slogan and an audio signature (a la intel bong or netflix drum) and clean green power could become the engine powering America's future!
- Brakenshire 8y agoVery good point, the political power of coal seems to be as much about cultural concepts of masculinity as anything else. It already employs many fewer people than alternative technogies: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-16/solar-beats-coal-on-u-s-jobs https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-16/solar-bea... I also wonder whether the talk of coal being dirty and dangerous actually boosts its appeal to some voters. At the least solar and wind need to be seen as rugged. Maybe they should also play up scale, the latest offshore wind turbines, for instance, are absolutely massive.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- cpeterso 8y ago> I also wonder whether the talk of coal being dirty and dangerous actually boosts its appeal to some voters. For example, see the attitudes around "Rollin' Coal". Practitioners cite "American freedom" and a stand against "rampant environmentalism" as reasons for coal rolling (aka "Prius repellent"). I'm not sure what argument one could make to change a coal roller's mind. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_coal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_coal
- yellowapple 8y agoAppeal to masculinity. "Real men" maximize horsepower, and coal rolling reduces horsepower.
- mikepurvis 8y agoSomeone who's gone to the trouble of modifying their vehicle in that manner may be beyond the point of reasonable discussion. On the other hand, that's likely to be a pretty small proportion of people, overall.
- 51lver 8y agoYou could certainly appeal to their appreciation for reliability. Consider this, does an electric vehicle have ANY emissions reducing equipment at all that one must maintain? The unreliability of the emissions gear is usually what comes up when I talk to diesel folks. Rolling coal is a fun extra for them. Just musing now, but the diesel guys today seem to say a lot of the same things the gas guys said in the 80s with their EGRs and cats and vacuum lines galore under the hood destroying their reliability. Gas got variable timing and direct injection, and is no longer so fragile. Maybe there's some room left for innovation there, maybe not.
- mitchty 8y ago> Consider this, does an electric vehicle have ANY emissions reducing equipment at all that one must maintain? Yes, you need to keep it clean, drag affects all things equally, and dirty anything means more drag.
- village-idiot 8y agoJail.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- cpeterso 8y agoFor example, the phrase "Don't Mess with Texas" originated from a 1985 anti-littering marketing campaign: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_Mess_with_Texas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_Mess_with_Texas > In 1985 the Texas Department of Transportation asked Mike Blair and Tim McClure of GSD&M to create a slogan for an anti-littering campaign. McClure said that "bubbas in pickup trucks" who regularly littered beer cans and other items out of vehicle windows and ordinary Texans who believed that littering was a "God-given right" were targets of the advertising campaign. ... McClure recalled that "The crowd was sprinkled with 'Keep America Beautiful' and 'Keep Texas Beautiful' folks, and our audience is 18-to-24 young males." McClure added that "The 'Keep Texas Beautiful' lady said, 'Can we at least say please?' I said, 'No ma'am, you cannot use the line if you put please in front of it.'
- floatrock 8y agoSo first, the author Jigar Shah is a heavy-hitter in the energy industry and knows what he's talking about. He founded SunEdison in the early 2000's and popularized solar-as-a-service PPA's (SunEdison pays the upfront capital costs to install solar on your roof and you pay it back by paying them for the electricity you consume at lower prices than the utility but still high enough to pay back with margins). Today he runs a big cleantech investment firm. But this article is also two years old. When it was written, coal-vs-cleantech was a big campaign issue for example. A different rebranding angle that people are talking about now is just pure cost. Most of the new energy generation capacity added in 2018 has been renewable: https://www.forbes.com/sites/rrapier/2018/05/06/renewable-sources-account-for-most-new-u-s-power-capacity/#6d92a86e5971 https://www.forbes.com/sites/rrapier/2018/05/06/renewable-so... This isn't because of "clean jobs" or a nationwide coordinated renewable push (there isn't one, and Trump has done his best to cut whatever marginal subsidies exist). It's because renewable is now the cheapest form of new energy. The beancounters love it. Conservative Texas is the largest windfarm state in the country. This shouldn't be surprising -- renewables are largely manufacturing-based industries where the more we build, the better we get at building it and the cheaper it becomes. Compare that to fracking where the half-life of a fracking well is 2-4 years -- after 2-4 years, the well contains half as much oil as it did, and what's left becomes harder and more expensive to extract (compare that to a saudi oil well that has half-life measured in decades and that should tell you something about the "fracking revolution" vs "fracking boom", but I digress...) Point is, we're now at the turning point where the economics of renewable just make sense. The rebranding as An American Thing was a good talking point two years ago (and still room for it, tbh), but costs are now the more interesting story.
- DoctorOetker 8y agolook no longer, when can I start? off-shore triple-damage elbow-grease tidal wave sooperpower merciless monkey wrenched czochralsi silicon titty solar panels full frontal 24/7 double penetration doctor x' geothermal energy strike-breaking conflict mineralized all-american circumcized powerwalls Mach-4 Modern Times side winder electrical wind mills National Park flooding blue-collar nine-to-five hydroelectric damnation brutal triangle trade carbon credit master race cards storm trooper deployed stars and stripes space shades high-maintenance super cool transmission lines soundtrack: https://youtu.be/qvhSaIh02dA https://youtu.be/qvhSaIh02dA
- amluto 8y agoI would also like to see the environmental groups and the left in general stop branding coal as somehow immoral. How about instead trying to make coal compete on level ground: tax its carbon emissions, tax its particulate emissions, require real management for whatever waste it produces, and see if any investors or inventors want to keep it alive. If the CO2 emissions could be adequately captured, the particulates scrubbed, and the fly ash turned into concrete [0], there may very well be a place for coal for hundreds of years. [0] Fly ash appears to be a pretty good replacement for a large amount of Portland cement, and the latter also comes with quite a bit of CO2 emissions.
- francisofascii 8y agoThe environmental impact is one thing, but I would argue consuming coal unnecessarily is immoral because coal is not easily replaceable. If you cut down a bunch of trees, at least you can replace them in few decades. How long does it take coal to form? Thousands? Millions of years? My point is, one you burn coal, you can't get is back.
- 24gttghh 8y agoCoal can apparently form after "only" many thousands of years, but most of today's mined coal seems to come from the Carboniferous (290-360 Million years ago) and the Cretaceous period (69-144 Million years ago).[0] [0]https://energyeducation.ca/encyclopedia/Coal_formation https://energyeducation.ca/encyclopedia/Coal_formation
- mobilefriendly 8y agoUnfortunately in the real world, with the best available technology, mining coal is dirty, the particulates can't be fully scrubbed, and coal ash is toxic.
- jamesrcole 8y agoThe comment was talking about the hypothetical future ("If the CO2 emissions could be adequately captured, ...") not the present.
- tynpeddler 8y agoThis guy is right on, it's time to stop calling clean energy "clean energy". That term makes it sound like the differentiating aspects of wind and solar as compared to coal, gas and oil, is that the new stuff has lower carbon output. That's true, but it's not the point anymore. Wind and solar are so efficient, and so cheap that there's no need to market them on their environmental impact, so dump clean energy. Here are some ideas I'm just throwing out there for new terms: New Energy Tech Energy Cheap Energy Durable Energy Efficient Energy
- sxates 8y ago"Renewable Energy" maybe?
- ekun 8y ago"Renewable energy" is a perfect term, but I think that it has the same negative connotation for the people who have an aversion to the term "clean energy".
- naasking 8y agoOr even "free energy" if you want to go really eye-catching. Or "independent/freedom energy" to highlight that building up renewables pushes independence from resources provided by foreign nations. Along those lines, how about "secure energy" since energy independence is a national security issue as well.
- consumer451 8y ago> Or "independent/freedom energy" to highlight that building up renewables pushes independence from resources provided by foreign nations. This should be large part of the narrative. I vote "Energy Freedom."
- philipkglass 8y agoThe rapid growth of jobs in renewable energy is a temporary excursion, mostly an artifact of current rapid expansion. At steady-state it will take fewer people to supply electricity from a renewable-heavy electricity system than a coal-heavy system. That's one reason that I am bullish on the long term price-competitiveness of renewable electricity but skeptical that there will be enough steady "green jobs" to offset jobs shed from legacy energy technologies. For example, the old coal plant in Nucla, Colorado is going to close by the end of 2022. http://www.cortezjournal.com/article/20161001/News05/161009993/0/FRONTPAGE/Coal-fired-plant%E2%80%99s-closing-sends-shockwaves-in-Nucla http://www.cortezjournal.com/article/20161001/News05/1610099... ... the local job options could be pretty limited in far-western Montrose County once two of its major employers close their doors, eliminating what are currently 55 jobs at the plant and 28 at the mine. ... According to the EIA, the Nucla plant generated 416,150 MWh in 2015 for an average annual power of 47.5 megawatts: http://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/browser/#/plant/527 http://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/browser/#/plant/527 That's an abysmal productivity per employee (or a fabulous job source, depending on your perspective): 0.86 real annualized megawatts per employee at the plant ; 0.57 megawatts per employee if you include the mining jobs. (Since this article was published, the mine shut down. The coal plant still operates for a few more years. The MWh generated at the Nucla plant also declined sharply in 2016 and 2017.) A well-sited utility scale solar farm like Desert Sunlight can produce an average annualized power of 147 megawatts with just 15 full time employees, for a ratio of 9.8 megawatts per plant employee. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert_Sunlight_Solar_Farm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert_Sunlight_Solar_Farm https://www.doi.gov/sites/doi.gov/files/migrated/news/pressreleases/upload/Desert-Sunlight-fact-sheet.pdf https://www.doi.gov/sites/doi.gov/files/migrated/news/pressr... ("Expected to create up to... 15 permanent jobs") If you amortize the labor for construction over the lifetime of a solar farm, it takes up the lion's share of labor-years associated with a given facility. It's still lower per MWh than for legacy coal plants. It's also concentrated up-front. It looks like solar produces a lot of jobs if you measure while new American solar projects are booming and new American coal projects are nowhere to be seen. I don't intend any of these observations as a defense of coal or an attack on renewable energy. I am thrilled whenever low-emissions sources displace dirty fossils. But I keep writing comments like this on energy-and-jobs stories because few writers have thought much about the composition of the numbers. The gleeful articles about how many jobs we can create with renewable energy are at least missing some important caveats. The occasional conservative attack on how labor-inefficient renewables are, like https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2016/06/01/jobs-are-a-cost-not-a-benefit-yes-even-for-renewables https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2016/06/01/jobs-are..., likewise misunderstand the long term labor implications of more renewables than fossils.
- roenxi 8y agoEnvironmentalists are the only power bloc in politics that isn't in favour of cheap energy (their priority is obviously 'clean'). The irony of this is that if it happens that clean energy is the most economic alternative, then the small number of fanatics who want to make it a moral or political issue are going to be the biggest roadblock. They'll probably still be ignored as they have been for the last couple of decades though. That being said, talking about the number of jobs might be politically savvy but isn't actually a big picture advantage - energy production is a bit special in my view and we don't want people working on that. We want people working on ways of taking energy and transforming it into something useful. The thinking here is a bit like observing the difference between being unemployed and starving vs. unemployed with a $10 million inheritance - there are good and bad ways to be unemployed. With cheap enough energy, anything is possible.
- mikeash 8y agoIt seems to me that environmentalists want cheap energy, they just (rightly) consider the environmental damage of traditional energy to be part of its cost, and it’s expensive enough that it’s not actually “cheap energy.”
- Eric_WVGG 8y agoI agree with a lot of what this guy says, but this bit rankled my nerves: > In short, it doesn’t feel American. […] American is can-do, right-now, yes ma’am… No dude, that is exactly the kind of polarizing attitude that you are accusing the folks on the other… "side of the fence" (or whatever you want to call that). "American" is lots of things to lots of different people.
- shmerl 8y agoI didn't get the point of anti-progress stance being perceived as American.
- scottlocklin 8y agoThis is a social class issue, as much as it is a 'branding' issue. The social class that likes Subarus and Volvos, recycling, organic foods, and coffee with foam in it (aka us, the hacker news types) has chosen 'clean energy' as a sort of social purity test. What he's saying does make sense; take it away from the bozos who brought us ... Facebook, 'Obamacare,' $4000 studio apartments next to a pile of human excrement in San Francisco, and the rest of the disgusting mess that is modern life, and it might be more popular with regular joes.
- 8bitsrule 8y ago"Clean energy could feel as all-American, cutting-edge, rugged, reliable, resilient, and tough as fracking." Feel, schmeel. Clean energy must be -thought of- as manifestly the only rational option ... one that is decades behind where it needs to be ... one that is an urgent priority. The future of all life on Earth is at stake. We waited too long, and now it's too late for PR, too late for 'gentle easing'.