Pine River Wind Park. Credit Mark Houston, DTE Energy.

One of the highlights of our WINDPOWER trade show experience was getting to talk with industry leaders working to secure support in communities with proposed wind farms. As part of our “Not Just for NIMBYs” interview series, we spoke with our first IOU leader, DTE Manager of Renewable Energy Development Matt Wagner. His company has gone from one of the most coal-intensive utilities to one that’s leading the way to a clean energy future. DTE has developed, owns and operates over one gigawatt of wind energy, and it recently committed to an 80% reduction in its corporate carbon footprint.

Community Acceptance with Will Eberle of E.ON North America

Will Eberle is the Director of Government Relations and External Affairs for E.ON North America. Will was one of our original participants in this analysis, and we're delighted to have him join us to discuss the state of community acceptance for the industry. He shared his surprise about the final results of the analysis that showed few companies in the industry were using social media for community acceptance but that nearly every opposition group was using them.

“It was almost like companies were embarrassed to admit that they had any opponents. Those days are gone. Everybody has opponents.”

“Companies have not been investing enough in this very important area, because they haven’t been taking the risk as seriously as is appropriate.”

The annual WINDPOWER trade show and conference starts today. We’re kicking the week off with the second in our series of interviews with wind industry leaders who drive their company’s engagement of communities that host wind farms. We started the series with an interesting discussion with Avangrid’s Paul Copleman. This week, we’re featuring our recent conversation with Apex Clean Energy’s Vice President for Public Affairs, Dahvi Wilson. 

Today, we’re continuing our discussion series on the use of digital tools to build community acceptance by wind energy independent power producers (IPPs). We’re pleased to do that with our friend, Paul Copleman, Director of Communications with Avangrid Renewables. Paul’s company is one of the leading renewable energy IPPs with large asset bases both in the U.S. and across the globe.

We recently conducted the first-ever review of the use of digital tools by Independent Power Producers’ (IPPs) to build community acceptance for wind farms in host communities.

Far from slowing down in any way, the scaling of clean energy has been accelerating - with no end in sight. A few recent articles and reports highlight what we mean.

A recent study by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) has some generally good news for all of us who want to see greatly increased penetration of solar and wind power on the U.S. power grid. However, there are also a few challenges identified by LBNL, mostly related to grid management practices. See below for two graphics from the report, and also see the LBNL presentation, both of which highlight key impacts of higher "VRE" ("variable renewable energy") penetration through 2030. For intsance:

Want some good news on the clean energy front? See below for the winning streak that leading clean energy proponent Tom Steyer has been on recently when it comes to pushing states towards more aggressive renewable energy goals.

We often hear from our clients and friends in cleantech that one of their biggest challenges is reaching and educating a wide and varied range of audiences. Whether it’s utility executives, corporate customers, policymakers or homeowners, an effective cleantech communicator can usually get to a win, given the opportunity to sit across the table and have a personal interaction. But your team can’t be everywhere at once, and it can be difficult to reach these audiences at scale and educate them on your company’s value proposition. 

Cleantech executive teams are almost universally concerned with the impact of commoditization of their companies’ long-term growth. But if your product isn’t differentiated, then competing is just about winning on price – otherwise known as commoditization.