While we were at #CLEANPOWER22 last week, American Clean Power Association (ACP) released their 2021 Market Report. This one is interactive, with some interesting graphics – I encourage you to check it out. 
 
My major takeaway from this report is the imperative role renewable projects play in raising community revenue. "Land lease payments serve as a drought-proof cash crop that provides a stable income for American farmers, ranchers and private landowners. The tax revenue that clean energy projects bring to communities means new income to repair roads, invest in schools and fund essential services."  
 
As we saw in our survey with Embold Research, the benefits of these renewables plants are vastly under communicated to the rural, often conservative counties that host them.  
  
A few other interesting takeaways: 

Cleantechers, some of you might remember that last December, we released interesting numbers from bellwether Huron County, MI.

Groundbreaking polling methods were used to assess community attitudes toward renewables - and what it took to move them in a positive direction.

Since then, Tyler Duvelius, Robin Pressman and I have conducted an iterative road show to socialize the findings.

But when we talked with Tim Montague, we expanded the perspectives presented to include solar developer Jon Carson.

The results were some useful insights for renewable power developers. All of them face tougher community acceptance landscapes, one of the few ways that the costs of renewables are going up.

So far on our podcast, we’ve interviewed cleantech leaders that are in a later stage of their careers. We figured that wisdom comes from a combination of gray hair and track record.  

We’re honored to be named among The Manifest’s most recommended B2B leaders in D.C. For 17 years, we’ve served some of the top clean economy companies who are scaling a more sustainable U.S. economy.  

Here’s to 17 more years.

We're up with our third episode of Scaling Clean, where I spoke with former CEO of Hemlock Semiconductor, Mark Bassett. During his impressive tenure, Mark saw sales surge even in the face of the COVID recession. He’s worked most of his career in heavy, mature industries, including 11 years rising through the ranks of Dow Chemical.

The traditional, conventional wisdom in business marketing is to ignore competitors. “Don’t give them oxygen.” But that’s wrong, according to Duke University marketing professor Dr. Keisha Cutright. Dr. Cutright’s research, first covered by NPR’s Planet Money, shows that companies who compliment competitors actually improve customer perception of their brands. In other words, the complimenter gets the credit from customers. 

B2B Purchase Decisions In Cleantech And The Digital-Social Criticality Scale

Across clean economy sectors, the sales and marketing teams we talk to share a growing frustration: it’s gotten harder to get renewable energy customer prospects to engage during the marketing process. They’re all too familiar with sending that seventh “touch base” email to a prospect they’ve connected with at the trade show and hearing nothing back. This experience has three main sources: what we’re calling the “VAR Phenomenon” (Volume, Attention, Relevance), and it's increasingly becoming a challenge in the smartphone age.

Episode 4 of our quarterly podcast roundtable is on the books — Nico Johnson and I had a great conversation with Marie Burgquist, Gil Jenkins, Tim Montague and Joshua Porter. I’ll be sharing my big three takeaways from this session soon. In the meantime, you can watch the whole episode here.

We’re up with episode 2 of Scaling Clean, the podcast for clean economy CEOs, investors and the people who advise them. Our goal is to convert company leaders’ experience into useful insights for you in your work.  
 
This episode features our conversation with Robert E. Fishman, a veteran CEO of three energy companies with experience in renewables, fossil fuels and nuclear energy. Bob’s a thoughtful, humble and accomplished leader and mentor. He’s got a wealth of experience in several areas, but I suspect you’ll find most useful his insights into assembling and maintaining the right executive team.  
 
If you don’t have the 30 minutes to listen to the whole episode, here are skimmable highlights below:  
 
5:20 – How to manage leadership teams you inherit, the signs to look for in determining who to keep and who to change out and the mandate you should secure from your board
 
14:17 – The challenges for clean economy companies are customer acceptance of a new product and having a balance sheet strong enough to match the promise of the product  
 
15:20 – How the software experience of impatient VCs doesn’t equip them to understand the capital intensity of clean economy companies 
 
16:50 – The role of the effective clean economy CEO  
 
18:27 – Best backgrounds for cleantech CEOs 
 
20:20 – Tips on hiring, including doing off-list reference checks and accepting that the best you get is a 2/3rds success rate in hiring — plus his favorite interview question 
 
24:50 – How his most important mentor’s “servant leadership” ethic impressed him 
 
We’re looking for feedback (lots of it!) on the usefulness of this format to you as people working at clean economy companies. Do these interviews convert to useable practices, tips and perspectives in your work? Please let us know.