People matter: Renewables industry needs a slogan and a story to go with it

A wealth of research suggests that the utility scale renewable energy industry would be better served by putting more emphasis on the people side of things rather than the financial policy.

I think it was the RE Alliance that first made this clear to me personally. Before that I just took it as self evident that the need to decarbonise and the benefits to regional Australia massively outweighed what I continue to see as minor costs. But what I see is not what regional Australians see.

Consider the “what happens when the wind don’t blow and sun don’t shine” question. In my view the broader community doesn’t trust a system relying on renewable energy.

The fact that it will work hasn’t been internalised by the broader community. Even people that own large energy intensive industrial facilities need a lot of convincing.

So far the best analogy I have heard is water. It only rains sometimes and unpredictably but we get water when we turn on the tap and on demand. The population doesn’t even think about that, it’s fully internalised. We need to get to the same place in electricity.

However successful the ISP (Integrated System Plan) is as a policy document, AEMO appears to have zero expertise at marketing it. Similarly, governments show that they “get it” but they do little on the bringing the people with them.

Australians and their Governments showed the Covid crisis how they could work together to achieve a policy goal. Essentially, most of the population ended up being vaccinated. The Governments’ united front on isolation and vaccination was accepted by a broad majority of Australians.

Something similar may be needed for renewable energy. The ISP messages need to be distilled into a slogan, there needs to be a trusted source of information at the national level.

When we get down to renewable energy zones we know we need to do better. Money isn’t to be ignored but it’s the social identity and aeons-old regional resistance to change that need to be thought about.

Change, it seems to me, is generally better accepted when it comes from within. This probably means identifying agents of change in communities and organisations and then getting them to internalise what it means for their community.

Not being a psychologist, anthropologist or sociologist I don’t know how to do this, but I can see that there is still nowhere enough focus on people, community and population skills compared to the investment in technical and economic issues.

Industry puts financial policy before people policy

Over the past year or two the renewables energy industry has gone strong on one idea after another. These include:

• Extension to the RET (renewable energy target);
• Household battery support;
• A US-style IRA (Inflation Reduction Act) with Australian characteristics.

Each of these schemes has its merits and demerits, and I do advocate investment tax support and household battery support.

However. based on lots of discussion I think all of these schemes miss out on the human element. Economics itself, well particularly the classical theory of finance starts from “rational economic man”.

Leaving aside the “man” the assumption was that people made choices based on the highest utility. An excellent and very informed and also easy to read history of the development of this theory of human behaviour as applied to economics is found at economic man to behavioural economics.

Personally, knowing how irrational many of my own economic choices were, it came as an epiphany when on a plane flight following a tour of concrete and fibre cement facilities in the US in the 1990s I asked the fund manager I was seated next to what he was reading and thereby started to learn about behavioural economics.

But of course the debate didn’t end there. As the epigram in my favourite finance text states:

“The questions don’t change but the answers sometimes do”

The current state of the art is shown below:

The message is that people matter

So for this discussion its not what process people use in making decisions, but simply that people and psychology underly economics and finance.

At least to some extent. In the end I personally think that the classical theory of finance and markets where people sacrifice present consumption to enable future consumption in a roughly rational way makes a great starting point.

Other topics that psychologists, anthropologists and sociologists are likely to know about.

1. How do people form beliefs?
2. What is group think?
3. How do communities or organisations make decisions?

I am not a pyschologist, anthropologist or sociologist, but I think that if we want to decarbonise Australia and bring Australians along on that journey then many such people will be required.

When was the last time you heard a psychologist, anthropologist or sociologist speak at a conference?

We as an industry know how important the job we are doing is. What we want is for local individuals and local communities not only to be welcoming the transition but leading the charge.

How nice it would be if landowners invited transmission builders onto their property? How nice it would be, and I think this probably does happen, that land owners would invite wind and solar developers to lease their land? How great would it be if regional councils were leaders of the transition?

How nice it would be if planning depts took the lead in getting things done even if much of the time it seems like their function is to stop things getting done?

Overcome negatives is better than selling positives

My personal favourite podcast interview last year was with John Pickering from Evidn. In that podcast he talked about Kurt Lewin’s force field theory.

A very non academic description of force field theory is forcefield explained. Pickering noted that Lewin concluded that reducing the negative forces was the way to go. So selling benefits of wind and solar is maybe less effective in regional communities than reducing the perceived disadvantages.

You can read how those concepts were interpreted in the successful “cane changers program ” here

Pickering wrote that for the cane farming community signing up was resisted because it threatened their “social identity” and because it required record keeping.

In the cane changer example one strategy was “to construct a strong positive social identity”. This was primarily achieved by something as simple as a slogan “Setting the Record Straight” which tapped into farmers’ desire to be seen in a positive light.

Personally I admire the power of slogans. “It’s Time”, “It’s the economy stupid “,”ute tax”,”think global act local”.

In the field of newspapers, in my opinion, it’s the subeditors who write the article headlines that most influence the tone and power of a publication. In my own case a headline Bad for the budget, good for the state had consequences well beyond what I could have imagined in the 30 seconds it took to write.

Anger folk more open to change tend to move away once they leave school. Those that stay are perhaps by nature more inclined to be change resistant. Regional communities are proud of their way of life, and its often a conscious choice.

And change tends to be far more obvious in a region than in a large metropolis and the community tends to form a community view. Once something is up and going things settle down. But these are just my personal observations.

Nevertheless its clear the fact that communities need to engage from the start and to participate in process as genunine stakeholders and as hard as it is there is a need to break down the us and them barrier.

In short we need a national slogan and a story to go with it.