How fossil fuel companies keep your energy costs high | Jon Powers

Elise Hu (0:03)

You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. Solar energy and storage are among the fastest, cheapest ways to add electricity to the grid, and they account for most of the new power capacity being built in the US.

Yet a growing number of towns are pausing or even banning new projects, often driven by misinformation spreading at the local level. Clean energy entrepreneur, Jon Powers, has spent more than a decade building these kinds of projects, and he set out to understand why this is happening and what it will take to turn it around.

Jon Powers (0:39)

If we're going to get building again, we need to get in the fight. We need to get coordinated, and we need to get hyper local.

Elise Hu (0:47)

In his talk, Jon argues that his industry needs to get much better at answering the questions communities have, and that a pause, in his view, is often just a town asking for answers.

Jon Powers (0:58)

When a town passes a moratorium, they're not saying they're anti-renewal. They're just pressing a pause button. They're trying to understand this new technology. They're trying to understand how to get it right.

Usually, about 180 days, there are limited window where we as the industry need to lean in. So we need a coordinated, rapid response to get them the support they need to answer their questions.

Elise Hu (1:20)

Jon calls for a quick moving coalition that spots problems early, links local groups, and sends trusted figures like firefighters and farmers to answer questions. In one town, that meant a local farmer telling his neighbors how solar is helping him keep his farm in the family, with pumpkins growing right under the panels. That's coming up right after a short break.

And now, our TED Talk of the day.

Jon Powers (1:48)

When I started in the clean energy industry, the public loved us. Over 10 years ago, I co-founded a company. We build solar and storage projects across the country. And when we began, clean energy was very popular. But today, it's harder to build than ever before. Why? Because the fossil fuel industry has launched an all-out attack of disinformation, and they've taken that fight hyperlocal into communities. That hyperlocal campaign is changing the hearts and minds of everyday Americans who no longer believe in the benefits of clean energy. Energy security, lower utility bills, more economic opportunity. So now, when we go to build a project, we're being stopped by tactics like law and science. So if we're going to get building again, we need to get in the fight. We need to get coordinated, and we need to get hyperlocal.

To do that, we need a war room, because this is combat, and I've been in combat before. I spent 15 months in Iraq as a captain in the US Army, the most hostile sector of Baghdad. I later on went to serve as the first special advisor on energy to the Army, and then as President Obama's Federal Chief Sustainability Officer. If I learn anything from my time in the military, is if we're going to win this battle, we need to fight smarter. We recently met with a town supervisor in upstate New York, where we're building a solar planet, or trying to build a solar project. He said, we don't build these here because it drives up our utility bills. Another town supervisor said, these will poison our water and kill our wildlife. We know none of this is true.

And these town supervisors, they're not the enemy. They're just trying to protect their community, and their community is being bombarded with disinformation online by anti-clean energy influencers, pictures of battery storage systems on fire. You can literally go online and order an anti-solar lawn sign and have it delivered to your house, mostly funded by the fossil fuel industry. So why are they doing this?

Because they understand the risk to their bottom line, and they're using every tactic they can to stop us.

Clean energy employs three times as many Americans as the fossil fuel industry. So why don't we have a stronger voice in Washington or in the home towns where we live and work? Because fossil fuel is outspending us 27 to 1 politically, and that's just the money that's being tracked publicly. And when they're spending it hyperlocally, they're literally creating the boots in the ground to stop us from building projects, and it's working.

One in four counties in the US now have some restrictions on solar or wind construction.

And that hyperlocal activity is spreading in Georgia and Illinois and many other states. And the next frontier is battery storage. So in my home state of New York, the 120 towns have passed moratoriums or bands on energy storage. And we take you into a recent town hall where a mother stood up, a mother of three, and she talked about the fact that she was concerned terrorists would attack the energy storage system. That's the level of disinformation that we're facing. And this is a time when data centers are driving up electricity costs and driving up demand. This is a time when we need to be building every type of supply of electricity as we can.