Nico Johnson  00:00

If you wanted to go talk to the legislator of that county, what's more interesting? Walking in and saying, "Are you aware that this project, which is X size, created this many jobs and this much tax revenue? And that could take like 30 seconds, or simply five seconds, and said, "Can I tell you how to bring $33 million to Salisbury next month? The next thing they're going to say is, I'm listening. Hey, welcome back to SunCast. Earlier this month, I was in Charlottesville, Virginia, for the Chesa Energize Summit, put on by the Chesapeake Solar and Storage Association. Thanks once again to Robin Detta and the amazing team at Chesa for the invitation. I was privileged to sit on a panel with some folks that I really appreciate and admire. The panel is called "Beyond the Docket: Communicating the Affordability Case for Solar and Storage. Here's why I wanted you to hear it: Electricity bills are going up, and for the first time, a lot of people are paying attention to where the power comes from. Our industry has the data to show that solar and storage are part of the answer, not the problem. But we're not always great at telling that story to anyone outside our own bubble. Need to talk to legislators and regulators, and even our neighbors, who've just opened that $350 power bill and are gasping. Everyone needs relief. This conversation is all about how we communicate better, and Molly Knoll from Align Energy Advisors brings the numbers on what's actually driving these rates up, up, and up. Then, my friend Jamie Nolan from Nolan Strategic and Energy Empire joins me to talk about how we turn those numbers into a story that people actually want to listen to, or will pay attention to at all. Jamie is one of my favorite communicators, and she has a huge depth of experience. So I'm honored to have been featured alongside her as a peer and fellow communicator. Our moderator in this session is Robin Dutta, the executive director of Chesa, and I'm going to let Robin take it from here.

Robin Dutta  02:04

So this session, we want to talk about what are the ways and the different ways we can be telling the stories. How can we be talking about the answers to the questions when we once we've been able to answer the questions, and how can we be connecting with the various audiences that we need to be doing so? All of our panelists up here are great storytellers, and the thing about great storytellers is knowing your story and knowing your audience. When we are advocating for solar and storage, the venue and the audience matters, and they matter greatly for how we create our stories, how we build our industry narrative and brand, and how we advocate for specific policy outcomes. In general, solar and storage industries have excelled in the regulatory space. We bring in excellent regulatory attorneys and technical experts who tell us stories in that venue, and by and large, we have had successful outcomes. We've come this far, after all. So that's where I get to introduce our panel. Molly Knoll, a senior advisor at Align Energy Advisors, she's been a ratepayer advocate. She's worked as a senior commission advisor at the Maryland Public Service Commission, and I had the pleasure of working with Molly when she was the VP of Policy at the Coalition for Community Solar Access. Molly has led a lot of Align's research work for Chesa, and a lot of that research work really, you know, set the stage for what was an incredibly active Virginia General Assembly session. We actually held a legislator roundtable in October before the affordability narrative completely took off. And look at all the legislation that's come out of the General Assembly since. And a lot of the work has also been directly informing what Chess is doing around communications and outreach strategies, Jamie Nolan is the founder and CEO of Nolan Strategic Communications, as well as the co-host and producer of the Energy Empire podcast. She has worked across industry and government, including working at the U.S. Department of Energy's Loan Programs Office during the Biden administration. And Nico Johnson is back with me on stage. He is the founder and CEO of SunCast Media and the host of the SunCast podcast. His career includes serving in the Peace Corps and building a career in utility scale solar before pivoting to media, where he focuses on individual stories in clean energy. So, in this era of energy affordability, load growth, the evolution of our industry into solar plus storage and storage and virtual power plants and more. We are faced with more pressure to be great storytellers for our various audiences, while our industry realities are getting more complicated. So that's how we're going to get into things today. We're going to start with the storytelling venue our industry is most comfortable with the regulatory space. Molly is going to talk about that in just a moment. The moment we're in, based on the work she has done for Chesa and her own experiences over the last year, and then we'll bring in Jamie and Nico to have the whole panel discuss storytelling in this political and social climate in the affordability crisis. So, with that, over to Molly.

Molly Knoll  05:00

Thanks, Robin. Align did a number of pieces of research for Chesa last year for both Maryland and Virginia, really trying to get at what is driving the affordability crisis in the energy industry. There's a lot of data out there in our industry, and there are very few actionable insights from it. And so, I think what we're going to talk about a fair amount on this panel today is both how we take a bunch of that data, turn it into something that we can actually draw conclusions from, and then share outwards, and then how we share that, you know, to the broader audiences. We engage with these topics much more deeply than really just about anybody else, but that doesn't mean that everybody needs to engage at that level, and it doesn't mean that everybody, even at the level that we all engage with, are going to agree on what's going on. The first slide that would have been on here would have been an assessment of what's happening with electricity rates compared to economic indicators. So as percent changes from 2020. What you would see is that while the consumer price index has gone up and area median incomes have gone up, utility rates have far exceeded those increases. So essentially, if your income was going up but energy prices were going up significantly faster, you're driving an affordability problem. Just because you know that bills are going up doesn't mean you have any idea why. And so, understanding what makes up a customer's energy bill is the next step in the process. So, part of our bills come from inside the state with your distribution rates, and part of our bills come from outside of the state with things we're paying for like supply capacity PJM prices, and so legislators that say energy bills are too high need to understand what they can do within their jurisdiction and what they can't. And so, understanding how the bills are changing and what portions of the bill are driving those changes is incredibly important. For example, in Maryland, 12 years ago, when I started as a People's Council, 60% of the bill was distribution rates, and 40% of the bill was PJM costs. It's completely reversed today. You would see on the screen what portion of the bill comes from distribution versus supply for each of the Maryland utilities. So these are your various bill components for Baltimore Gas and Electric, Pepco, Delmarva, Potomac Edison, and Smeco, and you can see that even, for example, Potomac Edison, very small portion of the bill is coming from distribution. It's also the area of the state with the lowest rates, and so even within a state, once you understand those bills, you have to understand that there's different drivers within different service territories. In Virginia, you have the same bill structure on the left-hand side, where you've got distribution, generation, transmission. But then on the right, more than half of your bill are riders, and these are largely your public policy initiatives. That's a very different conversation than in Maryland, where almost all of your public policy drivers are hidden within the distribution rates, except for Empower, which, by the way, has a target on its back every legislative session. So, understanding not only what we're talking about with affordability, but then what's driving affordability, and then also what customers are seeing is kind of the starting point for any policy development, and understanding how you're going to be messaging that. The next thing that I want to just point out is what are people hearing about cost drivers. So these are the stated reasons for cost increases that utilities are putting out there into the regulatory space. 21 states you're seeing fuel and wholesale supply being blamed for cost increases, and you're seeing wildfire all the way down at the bottom because it's only as relevant in certain jurisdictions. And so, understanding what people are hearing also tells you where your audience is probably coming from, what preconceived notions they might have. The last thing I want to point out here is what is going on with increases and who's going to be blaming people for them.

Molly Knoll  09:02

So if you look at PJM, which is the third column from the left, in 21 22,001 to 2010, only 50 ish percent of rate increases were granted, and that number is now up to 65% of rate increases being approved. That puts a big target on your public service commissions back. So you can blame fuel cost increases, but then you also are going to see a significantly higher portion of spending is being approved today than was approved 20 years ago. And so again, any one of these pieces of information is just interesting. But as you start to pull them together into a whole picture of both what is happening and what people are hearing, you start to think about the story you're going to be able to tell across them. This is the story that everybody is focused on. This is what's driving 98 of the policy conversations that are happening, which is that. Prior to 2024, you can see that PJM's projections are all clustered. 2018 to 2023 are largely in the same space, and since then, 2024, 2025, 2026, the projections of the electricity we're going to need have gone through the roof. The canary in the coal mine for that, in particular, is the capacity market happens to have coincided with a moment where PGM was fiddling with their capacity market and not running auctions, and so the first auction after that pause was very eye opening for everyone. What I want to put into context here, though, is PGM's capacity prices are now in line with ISO New England. It was a massive change in the capacity prices, but it's not putting us significantly outside the realm of what other areas are paying for resource adequacy. So when folks say that historical or that fuel costs are a big driver, this is a list of basically monthly prices in PJM, and I want you to take a look at 2021 through 2023. That spike right there was the Ukraine invasion, and that was when gas prices went through the roof. I could pop up a copy of Henry Hub's prices, and you would see that same spike. The other really interesting spike on here is 2013 to 2015. You see that huge spike up to $200. That was one week of a polar vortex, that one week of a polar vortex, though, is not a long-standing impact. Whereas what happened in Ukraine was fairly long-standing. You're seeing the same thing happening again now. These increases today are unlikely to be temporary the way they were in the past. Again, another very important element to the story you're going to be telling. So, the two things that we're driving at here are that there was a capacity price increase of 400% and there was a fuel price or energy price increase of 80% But the numbers that are not as big as they should be, and the comms folks can talk about that, are that capacity added 1421 per megawatt hour, but the energy increase added 4289. So it's more of a you know boiling slowly in water as opposed to the sudden change. But I would be surprised if anybody in this room has heard more about increasing energy prices than they've heard about the capacity market. It's where everybody wants to talk because it was such a shocking change. It's not driving as much of the increase as people think it is, so this breaks down what happened in the capacity market for per state impacts, and you can see DC it was 3.2 cents per kilowatt hour, but in Ohio it was point eight cents per kilowatt hour. So even with something like the capacity market, you're seeing differing impacts across jurisdictions, and when you look at something like that first chart with Potomac Edison, you're going to see differing impacts even within service territories in certain jurisdictions. And I say that because Baltimore Gas and Electric, for example, was a transmission-constrained area. The price cap that's in place on the capacity auction is actually lower than what BGN was BG&E was paying for capacity prior to that cap, so that price cap, which was a 400% increase for everybody else, was actually a reduction for almost half of Maryland's ratepayers. So moving into a little bit of information about how you present solar and storage, this is probably everybody's wheelhouse, right?

Molly Knoll  13:16

Your lowest cost of levelized cost of energy over the lifetime of the asset, solar compares quite favorably to the other types of generation that you might be considering to solve for capacity needs. You can also always look at the determined value stacks. The value stack in Virginia far exceeds the existing kilowatt hour rates. These are things that you can present to legislators. They're they're fairly well accepted that these are the numbers that are out there. Some of them probably need some adjustments, as we talked about the political climate earlier, where you're not necessarily going to have social cost of carbon in these anymore. But again, these are talking points that everybody in this room should be pretty familiar with. Last one here is kind of how you pair solar plus storage to be meeting peak needs, you can see you're charging during an off-peak period. You're using the PV to serve load in the blue period. You're having your storage discharge to kind of offset those afternoon peaks and essentially evening out that curve over the course of the day. Again, this is for someone who may not understand exactly how you pair these resources to get something much closer to firm generation. Another interesting talking point that we pulled together in the research that might be useful, depending on your audience, is the importance of distributed resources in resiliency. So this visual shows the way billion-dollar weather and climate disasters are increasing over time. Again, that ties nicely into a self-sufficiency message or a message around local grid impacts. Particularly if you've got an area that's had a blackout recently, this can be an incredibly valuable piece of information to to share with your audience. I want to present all of this information as kind of the the raw material. From which you're going to be building narratives and stories, and building policies, because you can't produce a good policy or a good narrative or a good comms campaign if you don't understand the problem you're trying to solve for, and then the solutions and tool sets that you have available to you. So I presented this as kind of raw information, raw data for folks to be working from, and from here I will add to the comms conversation, but hand over to the experts.

Robin Dutta  15:27

Thanks, Molly. So now we do go to the comms extraordinaires, to Jamie and to Nico. So let's start with what are your initial thoughts on how you know the facts and insights about the industry can be presented to the average person, and using the slides and the information as a as a jumping off point. And I think as part of it, I just maybe frame it as if you had a minute to be talking to, we'll say, a quote unquote average person, somebody who's not in the weeds on this, you know, what are the ones or two core points that Molly's gone through that you would want to focus on and and really lead with.

Jamie Nolan  16:04

Sure, I wrote this down because I wanted to get it just right, and I think the word choice is so important. And I would say from this presentation for a non technical audience, I would say solar and batteries are practical tools that can be deployed locally to address affordability, reliability, and rising electricity demand. Like most audience, for most audiences, non-technical audiences, it would be hard for them to get a lot out of presentation a presentation like that because the evidence is essential to the story, but the evidence alone isn't the story. So, to this is an important tool to put into a story that would also include values-based messaging, anecdotes, polling data. Like you want to pull information from multiple different sources when you're when you're trying to encourage someone to act right because that's the point. You're trying to either influence their point of view on something, or you're trying to get them to take action.

Nico Johnson  17:05

I look at the data as a-I mean, I was an engineering undergrad, and I have an MBA, and I still get lost in the charts and graphs. And I know for sure that my father or my grandfather would get lost in it, and the question is ultimately who's the audience that we're trying to communicate to, and we're going to talk a lot about that today. Because if it's a regulator, it's different than if it's a legislator, and if it's a legislator, it's different than if it's your president of the HOA in your community or the county board supervisor. I think that at the community level, talking to the the humans in your neighborhood who are trying to deal with the thing that we all are waking up this month, going, "What the heck just happened to my electricity bill? Electricity affordability is bigger than the price of an electron. Like when we talk about what this data shows, it is effectively customers are paying for the whole system required to deliver reliable power. And most homeowners, there's some ridiculous stat. It's like seven minutes a year that you think about your utility bill, right? Who knows if that number is true? The point is that most homeowners, us included, even in energy, don't really think about the electrical, the cost of the electricity. Well, that's not true for this room, actually, but but most most people don't think about the cost of their electricity, but they and and therefore they have no idea what goes into delivering that the light switch that turns power on whenever they want it, or the reliable refrigeration that keeps their cheese from molding more than than they want it to. And I think that the second is once you've established a conversation that I might have with my with my neighbor that there's more embodied in that electrical unit than than just the the cost of the wire to bring it to your home, then you can start talking about how there's data that shows that solar and storage can address some of those costs with resources that can be deployed locally on your roof, maybe in your neighborhood as a microgrid, and help reduce the expensive peak and the future system needs, but you have to back into it. And oftentimes, we try to, you know, even like at a at a party, say, "Well, the recent capacity market was a shit show, and that's why your electric bill is too high. And and nobody can make that connection, but we learn it that way. We might learn that like PJM capacity markets lead lead to auction mechanics and then peak demand and then eventually down to like the customer price and then solar and that's sort of the way we might learn it in energy speak, but the customer learns it in holy shit my electric bill is 350 bucks what happened and they have to work backwards and so we have to in story we. To think in reverse,

Robin Dutta  20:02

so that kind of gets to you know I'm gonna I'm gonna combine a couple things and how we have it, and that's we've kind of already touched on then how the how you know the uninitiated tend to be coming from energy, but how can can you guys touch on not just the difference, but the the the the level of the delta between how one would be engaging not just a you know the non technical you know general public to a legislator to a regulator and and you know because that's really it's community to governance to really then regulatory technical and just try to you know between the three of you kind of start to break down the differences between those different audiences.

Jamie Nolan  20:45

Sure. I mean, obviously, you bring in someone like Molly Noll because she's an incredible expert, and you want her to be in the meeting when you're talking to the regulator. Like that's she's great for that, and she walks through these slides, and the the person on the other side of the table, understands what she's talking about and is persuaded by that. You know, I think it's you identify your audience, and then you have to think who will influence this audience, and you have to remember that sometimes it's not you. That's one thing that a mistake that I see a lot of companies make is or organizations like who is the best messenger at this moment, and it might not be you. Do you need to bring faith leaders into the conversation, other community leaders, other other business leaders, you know, members of like the the citizens group in the in the neighborhood? Like, who is going to influence the person who needs to take the action that you need to be taken? That opens up like a world of possibilities, and so that may mean that you need to equip that person with the tools that they need to help tell that story to influence that audience.

Molly Knoll  21:54

I think the other thing that I would add to that, obviously, who is the the person that needs to take action? Who do they need to hear from what and how much do they actually need to know? I work with the Utilize Coalition, and I take calls with everybody from governors' offices to state energy offices to regulators to distribution system engineers, and those are all deep regulatory conversations. And then I took a call with somebody who's like shopping policy papers to potential governors. They didn't need to know much about the policy. They needed the top five talking points, and they were like, "Fantastic! I can deliver those. I was like, "Great, this was easy. There was no convincing necessary. They were already there. They just needed the tools. And so, in addition to who and who do you bring to them, don't over deliver if you don't have to.

Nico Johnson  22:43

Yeah, it's oftentimes we come with a full toolbox and open them all, and we're like, "All right, now let's talk about the poll. And there's all these strategies that can be deployed. And I have personally, you know, I have a fifth of the experience that you all do on on any of the Capitol Hills, or speaking with regulators, I spend all my time either speaking to industry, which is the easier part, or speaking to the consumer. I think that one of the things that really is important to remember is story is a it's a deal that we make with someone, it's a gateway into or a doorway into the their brain. It's a way to get into their house, and that doorway is different for each person. But you have to earn relevance first. And a lot of times, my friend Spencer calls it pitch slapping. We do this all the time. We'll have all this data, or have a PowerPoint, or we'll have like the pamphlet that we need to share, or maybe it's the four or five stories that we believe are relevant, but they're only relevant inside of this room, and they're not relevant at the Christmas party. And earning that relevance first is really important before you can explain your a position, or try to move someone one centimeter away from their own position, much less to get them to take action. Like there's relevance, and then comprehension, and then action. And I find that we try so often to start in the second place, comprehension. Like, why don't you understand? And the answer is because you're not relevant. When I say doorway, I'll give you an example. I've been in solar my whole career for 20 plus years. My father has known I've been in solar for 20 plus years. He lives in South Carolina, where his relative relevant relative cost of electricity is like nine cents a kilowatt hour. So it's also like he could be, he could care less for that reason, but he desperately wants a generator for his farm. And when I talk to him about solar, it's like there's a there's a shield, there's an invisible wall. He's he voted for an administration that has told him that it's a scam, and so he. Naturally defensive, even though for 20 years I have shown him the facts and the data, and so I said, "Dad, what if I could show you how? Like, there's actually this company that turned this Generac generator into like a battery backup system, and instantly he was interested because he understands the he understands that like the generator is the thing I want, and if if there's new technology that helps the generator do more, right? It's not replacing my generator; it's helping it do more. Now I've earned, I've opened the doorway because I made it extremely relevant to something he cares about, which is reliability through a mechanism or a medium that he trusts.

Jamie Nolan  25:46

I'm. I'm just going to add one more thing on on tactically. Like, as I'm doing my job, what would I do with a study like this? And when I, you know, I spent many years, like 10 combined years at the U.S. Department of Energy across three presidential administrations, I spent a lot of time working with PhDs from the national labs that were writing very, very technical reports related to solar power over the years. And what I would do is I would keep a like a master messaging document on a given topic. Like Odette is in the audience, and we worked together on one on low and moderate income solar. That was like a big topic of the day during the Obama administration. And when you get a new piece of research, I'm like, how does this make my story stronger? Where does this fit into the story? And so, in a master messaging document on like on a given topic that would be a combination of data that we have. Like obviously, it would have like a citation, so you could always find more if you needed it. But how would we talk about this? What are the top line talking points, as well as anecdotes, polling, every single piece that you have that can help to tell that story, and then like a member of our team might come to me because kind of like the communications team kind of acts like an internal kind of little mini PR firm that serves the different teams across the office. Come forward and say, "I'm going to this meeting that faces this audience, and I need materials for this. Then you, as the communicator, go back and think: How can I persuade this audience, given all of this information, all these tools and resources that I have? What makes the most compelling argument? What do they care about? And you put the the given like you know deliverable together from there, whatever it may be. Sometimes it's just like equip equipping someone with talking points that's going to a meeting, and you know no one's gonna read the leave behind. Don't do that. I just need the top five most persuasive messages for this group. So that's how I would apply that in real life. You have like a big a big resource that has everything on that topic, and then you just pull out the pieces that are relevant to that audience.

Robin Dutta  28:03

I mean, I think everything that you guys have been talking about circles back to relatability with your audience and the ability for there to be validation with your audience. And and I also just I want to rise up. I think it was I think all of you said it to some extent too. When you have the opportunity. You don't have to tell the full story if you have a 15-minute meeting with a legislator, or you're at a community meeting. I mean, I've had some nerdy Christmas parties that I've attended, so you know I can probably go probably have gone deep on PJM in at least one of them in my life. But when you're with a, even if you're with a regulator in all of them, because you have a half-hour meeting, you know it's it's like a verbal white space. You know, if you're putting a piece of collateral together, you're not going to fill it up with all the words. You know, you want it to be easy on the eyes, just like a conversation. You want it to be easy on your audience so they can feel comfortable. As a policy advocate in my career. That's definitely something that I have been improving on as the years have gone on. Hopefully, I'm you know good enough in that regard. But that's where we are. We have the time, and we want to throw every. I've seen this so many times, throwing everything at them, and then they're overwhelmed. But if we can be focusing more on relatability and on validation, then that can also increase effectiveness. So all of that then goes to my next question.

Nico Johnson  29:28

Can I add something really quick? Sure,

Robin Dutta  29:29

please.

Nico Johnson  29:30

What's really important is I I try to teach our clients when we are talking about messaging that the goal of telling someone anything about what's important to you is to get them to say more, which means you need to say less. You want them to lean in and ask you, "Tell me more, and that's like you need to create that kind of intrigue. And an example is we talked about the project that generated $33 million of. Of tax, like returned to the to the tax base for a county for a 70-something megawatt project in North Carolina, and if you wanted to go talk to the legislator of that county, what's more interesting? Walking in and saying, "Are you aware that this project, which is X size, created this many jobs and this many this much tax revenue, or and that could take like 30 seconds, or simply five seconds. It said, "Can I tell you how to bring $33 million to Salisbury next month? The next thing they're going to say is, "I'm listening, right? Like the getting that permission to say more is what we often jump over by trying to convince them that we that we deserve to be in the conversation.

Robin Dutta  30:41

Yeah, and so let me let me tee this up then for everyone here, and and I think this ties in well. So, what should all of you and all of us as communicators then understand about an audience as we're selecting that message evidence format and messenger? Let's just dive deeper into this because I think we've already started to touch on it, but I think across the different venues and audiences, you know, I think it's going to look different.

Jamie Nolan  31:06

Yeah, I mean, I like I love what Nico said because you're basically asking the person you're trying to influence, how can I influence you? Because before, as you're developing messaging, you want to know who can produce the outcome that you want, who influences that person? I cannot tell you enough that that this goes back to um very early in my career. I was the communications director of the Chesapeake Climate Action Network. How many of you have heard of them? They do a lot of great work in the DMV. Great, I love it. Um, and so this is like back many years ago when I was working with them. One of my very first lessons was that you have to figure out who you need to persuade, and then you essentially power map that person, like who influences them. So, like one of my clients right now is working on this because I know we're here in Virginia, but Governor Gavin Newsom is not historically very friendly to distributed energy resources, and so my client, like they've just they've multiple great pieces of DER legislation have passed through the California legislature, and they're like, who is he listening to on this topic? So we can go talk to them, so that they can help persuade him. And sometimes that's the person that you need to get to. Sometimes it's not the decision maker; it's the person who influences the decision maker. So you want to figure that out. What does that person already believe? If it's a legislator, what is happening on the grounds in their district? Never go in without knowing that. You don't want to be surprised by someone who's who's like, well, this is happening and it's been terrible. And like, you know, the farm bureaus come to me, and they're concerned about citing and taking away prime farmland. You already need to know that they care about that before you walk into that meeting. What evidence will they trust? Like, how are they going? How may they perceive like a very technical presentation versus you bringing in a customer who lives in their district and they have like 10 friends in common, and they're gonna really put a lot of stock in what that person says. And then always make sure you know what action you need them to take. Never go in without like our goal for this meeting is we want to directly ask this person to do this thing.

Nico Johnson  33:18

Our notes look very similar. It's like we've been doing this for a while. A story came to mind for me that I wanted to share. I didn't know the impact over 10 years. I've done almost 1000 podcast episodes, and I really didn't know the impact of the podcast or who listens. Like you're shouting into the void oftentimes. You don't get a lot of direct feedback. Jamie's learning this. Love

Jamie Nolan  33:40

direct feedback. Jenny's learning this now. I love when I get a listener email. I'm so excited. Email me if you're listening.

Nico Johnson  33:46

Indeed, and so we often don't know, and this is true for anything anyone of you are writing. You don't know who you are influencing on LinkedIn or through your other mediums. There are most of the powerful people on these platforms are silent, right? They aren't going to like your post. They're certainly not going to reshare it. They're not Elon Musk. They are most often they have aides if they're in legislature who are feeding them information. They have experts on their team whose job is to be the expert for them, so that they can be a pseudo expert across like 10 things that they need to go into legislature and defend. Right. The example that I want to give is I had no idea that Senator Feinstein in California's staff listened to SunCast. I don't even know who on her staff listen to SunCast, but I do know they listen, and I know that it has been worth many hundreds of 1000s of dollars for me because my sponsor SunGrow Power back in the day went to visit Senator Feinstein, and when they walked in, they said, "I am so and so from Sun." And the aide who addressed them said, "Oh, I know who you are. I've heard you on SunCast, right? Like a really subtle way to influence. And I tell you that because I didn't know as the creator that I had any influence on Feinstein's office, let alone that I could be targeting legislative aides to improve my chances of getting sponsors, and I have since then started actually paying for ads to target the people in the people groups that I'm trying to find. And when we learn like the core basics of marketing, we we we learn this thing called an avatar. Like who's your target audience? Who's the one person that you want your message to resonate with? And you want to know where they eat dinner. You want to know where their children are in daycare. I mean, you you want to be like as close to a stalker as possible, so that you can get inside of their head. And I'm saying this in like in reality, it's what magazine

Robin Dutta  36:01

gets that. What magazine just gonna go down? What magazines are

Nico Johnson  36:04

they are they reading? Like, what are they listening to NPR? Are they listening to other podcasts? Do they listen to like rock music? The closer you get to understanding the way they think and the and the channels through which they receive influence, to Jamie's point, the better off you will be at deciding how and when to deploy the tool that you want to deploy to reach and influence them, because this is ultimately about like developing story to influence a decision.

Molly Knoll  36:32

So, as a policy person, not a comms person, I I come at this from an entirely different perspective, and and I'm going to go way back. I did environmental education during my AmeriCorps days. I was a teacher. I was a substitute teacher during law school to make some pocket cash, and then I'm a ratepayer advocate. And I very much view advocacy as education. Somebody is kind enough to gift me with their attention, and hopefully, I know more about the topic than they do. Otherwise, I'm not sure why they're listening to me. But my goal is to give them the information they need to make an informed decision. And I was a trusted expert of the Maryland Commission for five years. If your policy was not something that I thought was a good idea, it wasn't happening. But essentially, where I come from, it is it's not my job to change someone's mind. It's my job to make sure that they don't make a bad decision because they didn't have the right information. It's not up to me. All I can do is make sure that whatever decision they come to, it's well informed, well considered, and that they have what they need to move forward. I'm not going to agree with everybody, and everyone's not going to agree with me or on the outcomes. And because of that, you know, I had commissioners who were Republicans, I had commissioners who were Democrats. All of them came to my office and said, "What do you think? And it was partially because they were interested in what I thought, and it was partially because that was my job as an advisor, and we very much would respectfully disagree. And then once they decided where they wanted to go, they would equally say to me, "Okay, Molly, how are you going to deliver? And I would deliver, even if I didn't agree with the particular outcome of the particular decision. I might help blunt the impacts a little bit, but it was very much about making sure that the decision maker had what they needed to make a decision, regardless of what that decision was. And to this day, I have those regulators and those relationships in all kinds of places where I have the ability to call them, and they know that I'm not pushing a particular agenda. I'm helping them come to their decision, regardless of whether it agrees with mine or not. And it's a very different style of advocacy. But I think there's a role for all of them.

Jamie Nolan  38:46

It is, and I'm smiling because I'm like I'm trying to influence their decision. I'm absolutely trying to change their mind. So it really is just a different. I I respect that so much, and that's we we need voices like yours, Molly. But we we do also need people who are just openly trying to influence decision makers. I

Robin Dutta  39:06

want to go to you, Molly, to talk about because you know regulators have mission statements, they have structures, they they have remits. Can you talk about like as we're talking about relatability and validation? How do you have to be, you know, typically framing arguments and theories and the stories for regulators in a way that matches, you know, their official statutory requirements?

Molly Knoll  39:31

Yeah. So obviously, as an you know, as a consultant now, I am trying to change the decisions. I frequently tell people to put a spoonful of sugar into comments or into whatever they're going to talk to their commissioners about, and I said that to somebody once, and they put in a whole half page on economic development, and I was like, "Not for this audience, right? And I went back in and I said, "What does this person care about, right? They don't care whether or not a data." Brings economic development to Maryland. They care whether or not what we're asking them to do improves utility forecasting in a way that's going to give them more control over capacity price impacts. It's a very different value proposition, but it's a value proposition that your audience cares about. Right? It's that same relevance that opens the door when when you want to put a spoonful of sugar on the table, you need to make sure that it's the spoonful that the other person that's a value to them, and and a regulator wants to know: Am I going to keep the lights on? Am I going to do it without creating a political firestorm? And am I going to do it without driving rates through the roof? Those and and utilities are going to go up. They're going to say safe, reliable, affordable power, almost always in that order. Although the South Carolina utilities this week said safe, resilient, reliable, and affordability was not on their agenda. But you have to make sure you're coming from the standpoint of there is no regulator anywhere in this country that will do anything that they think even has a slimmest chance of causing a blackout, reliability, not making things go boom, not making things go dark. Number one top priority. They will take no policy actions that even slightly increase the chances of that happening, and their one and only source of authority on that is the utility. They will defer to the utility top down, left right, all the way around. If the utility says that will make things go boom. Secondly, they want to make sure that they're serving their policy goals across the state, just and reasonable rates, affordability for customers. If they have a clean energy remit, if they have a DER remit, but those are always going to be secondary to the lights must stay on, and we must not make the system too expensive. So again, understanding what their remits are, and then what their priority is within those remits, and then twisting your policy around to how it delivers those. Right? We may be in here because we all want to make money just pulling solar and storage across the system. The commissioners want the storage in the system because it's going to drive down peaks, reduce exposure to the PGM markets, keep the lights on more often. They really couldn't care less if we get more solar into the system unless it's delivering those benefits that they're looking for.

Robin Dutta  42:19

So we're now in this affordability, you know, this era of affordability, and and I was I like to joke if Taylor Swift were in this industry, we'd be in our load growth era. Starting to get more jokes the more times I tell it, and it's not not too bad. But

Molly Knoll  42:35

I thought it was the Beyonce era, the bring your own new clean energy.

Robin Dutta  42:38

That's also really good. Yeah,

Nico Johnson  42:39

that's great.

Robin Dutta  42:40

We we need to start using that more often. Talk about relatability, but you know we've now been talking about different audiences and different venues, and you know we are in this affordability era, and we're trying to market solar and storage. We're trying to be convincing about solar and storage as a solution for all this. So, turn to the three of you. What tools should we be using around this storytelling, and when and to whom, and and you know you guys have pulled in some examples already, but you know I think this is where you know hopefully looking for for some more.

Jamie Nolan  43:17

I think we went over some of this, but you know across you know, I've listed several things like technical research, polling, personal stories and anecdotes, local examples, and current events that you can tie to a local event. So, like extreme weather events, for example, which Molly covered, and then I think you need to you need to just pull all of those together, figure out what is going to be most compelling for your audience, again, it all starts with your audience, and and and return there. I I would be remiss in our discussion of tools if we didn't talk about podcasts because because Nico and I are podcasters, and so I wanted to talk a little bit about that because we I think as an industry, you know, there we have a lot of podcasts, and we're really good at talking to each other, and all of and a lot of the podcasts face one another. And I think you know what we're trying to do at Energy Empire, and I also want to shout out our friends over at Watts the T that have started another new energy podcast. We're trying to do something different and make you know a media property that's more palatable for a general audience, and so you know we're having we just had the chief sustainability officer of United Airlines on to talk about sustainable aviation fuel. That one I think that drops this Thursday. That came out last last Thursday. Forgive me, I'm like behind on my recording schedule, and that's the one that I told my husband, who's a police officer, to listen to because I was sure he could understand 90% of it. But increasingly, I think we just need to create more content and more like fun content, in particular, that it doesn't just talk to ourselves. We're like we. Very insular, and you know the the media our media is very insular, hard for people to understand. And I know I'm getting it right because my co host on Energy Empire is Sugar Shaw, and he is like the original energy podcaster, and he has another podcast. And I've recently had people tell me that they have moved their listening time from that podcast over to ours because they don't have to take a full page of notes of acronyms and look it up afterwards. And so one thing that I've started to do is like is in our run of show, I'm literally like, no, what's the acronym? No, what's the acronym? Or I'll be like, what does that mean in plain language? I say it almost every episode. It's either to jigger or to our guests. Like what? And I, I'm there to try and pull people back down to earth and get out of the weeds. Now, listen. I don't know how much you listen to the show. I'm not always successful, but I'm doing the best that I can, and I'm trying to make this stuff more palatable for a general audience because in this era of load growth, where you know Nico spoke to this, but like you have to realize, non technical audiences have never really thought about where their power came from. They they plug in their toaster, and the electricity is going to be there, and that's as far as they've gotten until their bills start rising. And now you've got people who are like, "What is happening now? I'm paying attention to this, and I have to figure it out. So our challenge in the solar and storage industry is that first you have to explain to people a little bit about electricity and how it works. Then you have to make the case for why why solar plus batteries can help to bring down their bill. So it's it's a it's tough, right? Because you're you're the point of entry is something that people already don't understand. You have to give them something there so that they have a basis of understanding, and then further persuade them. And my solution is the solution that's going to help you.

Nico Johnson  46:57

Yeah, I'll tag on to what you were saying earlier. I think that one of the things that Jamie brought into the discussion, Robin, to really package your question well, is this notion that every company, really, I think every person, I do this as a personal inventory, should create what's called a story bank, right? You you catalog the stories that you can tell, which also means you need to be paying attention and you need to harvest the stories that come up that get surfaced in dialog and conversations. I had a boss early in my career who said your only job at dinner is to write down everything that's said that makes people laugh, and we captured all the stories he told that made people laugh, and the stories that fell flat. I would come back to him.

Jamie Nolan  47:45

I love that so much. Yeah, that's a great idea.

Nico Johnson  47:47

And I said, and I would go back and I would say that story sucked. Don't tell it again. This one. And by the way, if you've traveled, like you know, if you've traveled with a CEO, you know that the good CEOs are the ones who tell the same story over and over and over, and they know when to deploy that arrow in that forest for that animal, right? Like very specifically, and they know that because of the pattern matching, the repetition. But you can synthesize that if you're just observing what's happening inside your office or inside the next dinner, take a notebook out and like just make notes. Nobody in a business meeting is going to think oddly of you for taking notes. Take notes of the word, the words that work, the stories that work. It really matters that you begin to think about the story bank as a a collection of tools because you're going to then be able to correlate them to when it matters, and really, a story is a thing that you use to convince someone of something. You want to make them care about something. If you want to show them that you can reach scale and achievability or reliability, well, now you need data, right? You can't just pull data into the story because it helps to make you feel good, like you are believable. But if you need credibility and scale, you need to pull in data. I don't have any experience with campaigning, but Jamie tells me that polling is very successful. I watch it all the time, move the market or sentiment, but it really helps to show what resonates across a broader audience, right? Understanding how each of these tools are useful in the story architecture is important, and it is not just the bastion of the marketers on the team to understand how these tools work. The amazing thing about what I'm just saying, like really good executives, is that they seem to have this innate understanding of how story works, and it gives them an unfair advantage because they can deploy these stories or these these jokes appropriately timed. They have that charisma. It can be synthesized, and I want to tag on to the other thing that you mentioned, Jamie, which is. Podcasts. I've done almost 1000 podcasts. I've encountered every excuse for why anybody believes that they're not smart enough, relevant enough, or have enough time, or what have you, to come on as a guest to the podcast. Every one of you has something that is relevant to a podcast, and there are hundreds out there that would have you as a guest to talk about the thing that you've figured out that helps to improve their neighborhood or their audience. So, what I try to help people focus on is how is the message that you carry relevant to someone outside of solar? Can we get you on a poker podcast because they're actually way more popular than solar podcasts? Can we like? Can we get you on a comedy podcast? You know, Jigger and one of our clients was on an extremely popular podcast, the Prof G podcast, because they had a timely message about data centers. Right,

Jamie Nolan  51:00

I pitched them for a year and a half. That's how Jagger Shaw got on that podcast.

Nico Johnson  51:06

True story, but that's how Jagger gets on anything. Really, is Jamie Jamie makes it happen. But they had a timely message, and it's going to take maybe not this one, maybe not that one, maybe not that story. But you have to once you understand the message you want to communicate, and it's like a plethora, maybe it's 345, different messages. I mean, we put together a one sheet that says these are the talking points that my person can talk to, and send them out outside of the industry, so that we can actually get more of our people in other podcast audiences. You, we won't reach the the broader world by just talking to ourselves inside of run podcasts.

Jamie Nolan  51:46

Yes, and I just want to pull one more thread from what he said, which is repetition is an important tool. Rep, repeat yourself, repeat yourself, repeat yourself. When we got to the loan programs office, and the reputation was terrible because of that company that starts with an S that I never will utter utter the name again. I gave Jigger Shaw two to three page document of talking points and said everywhere you go you need to say these things until you are blue in the face and then and then we said yes to every single interview opportunity like people were like, he's gonna be overexposed. I was like, that's what I'm going for. Like, I want to anyone who will listen to us. I want to reform the reputation of this office. This this office has an incredible success story, and we are not gonna shut up about it. And just repeat yourself, repeat yourself, repeat yourself. You want to be sick of your talking points. You want to know them backwards and forwards. You want to know what people laugh about, laugh at, and just that-that is how to win. That is how to win, and you'll get better every time.

Molly Knoll  52:50

So obviously, regulatory is very different, but a bunch of those points actually still hold. Right, a good story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. And as everybody in this room knows, there is no regulatory process that has an end, right? We're going to be here forever, but you want repetition. You want repetition across your dockets. You want consistency in messaging, and so so many of the dockets that folks in this room are in are siloed dockets, right? Nobody in this room is resourced to be in every planning docket in the states you're you're working in, every rate case in the states you're working in. You are maybe resourced to be in the you know technology specific dockets. You are hopefully resourced for your trade association to be in your relevant dockets, but the commissions need a consistent and cohesive and coherent narrative across their dockets, and so while you might be resourced for a solar specific docket or a storage specific docket, the commissioners still need to know how that links in at planning, and they still need to know how that links in at cost recovery. And so it's a much harder storytelling job when you don't get to tell it in one docket, start to finish, because there is no finish. But and you also need to tell it across three or four different dockets. I work with a number of clients who have kind of an overarching goal across a number of engagements with their commissions, and that's the most effective way to be kind of doing this kind of work. But if you're not resourced for that, I would strongly encourage you all figure your talking points, figure your value propositions, and then find your messengers who are in those dockets and make sure that the repetition is happening at every opportunity that this issue comes in front of the commission. If it's rooftop solar and there's a NEM docket, fantastic. If it's rooftop solar and there's a TOU docket, you need to be there or have somebody who is. If it's rooftop solar and it's planning, you need to make sure it's incorporated into the utility planning processes. If it's rooftop solar and it's cost recovery, you need to be in there on. Whatever they're doing on billing changes, making sure that they're not unfairly blaming your industry for the fact that they have very bad billing systems, which every utility does. So, making sure that that consistency, repetition, and and kind of coherent narrative is happening across places where even you can't be resourced is incredibly important.

Robin Dutta  55:19

So, I'm going to make a a quick statement to help shape the concluding remarks from from all of you guys as we're we're just about in time, and and that's kind of going back to you know trying to sum up. There's the relate relatability. There is validation. It's all about you're trying to connect to your audience, but the pieces too come down to, you don't have one bite at the apple. Sometimes you have very few bites at the apple, but to be successful in in messaging, it ends up being a conversation. And if you can if you can get to that hook, I'm saying this partly to also internalize for myself so that I can be doing better. But if you can then get that hook, then that can create. It's it's like you're playing a game and you get extra lives and power ups. You know you you've earned future conversations with your target audience. So you know when you can sustain that, that's when you know you're starting to be successful, as well as when they start to also understand and start to come to you with perhaps some of your own talking points. So that's that's kind of a lot of what I've kind of taken from here, and and I now turn back to the panel for concluding statements and to tell me, you know, if I was right or not in that.

Molly Knoll  56:33

I will tell you the number one thing I tell my clients when they're putting a filing in front of a commission is write the decision you want the commission to make at the conclusion, right? The commission should order that, and if you get an order back that's echoing your talking points, that's echoing exactly what you asked for, that is an absolute win. Middle of the road is if you get a commission process because you're still in the game. The only thing you don't want is for the commission to say we're not interested anymore. So you need to keep that conversation going in whatever way you can, either by getting the outcome or keeping the conversation going. But making sure that you're giving the commission that value proposition of spending the time and attention on this, because I guarantee you, they got a lot of other things to spend their time and attention on in this industry.

Jamie Nolan  57:20

I was listening to the opening session of the day, and you all were talking about messaging is the biggest advantage that this industry has. And and Nico gave an anecdote about showing up at this $33 million plant opening, and he was the only member of the media there. And I was like, and I wanted to raise my hand and say that's because nobody invested in communications and marketing. There needs to be an active and growing investment by this industry in communications and marketing in order for us to build and sustain political power. I talk. I get leads all the time and talk to companies, and they're like, "I want to hire you as a consultant, but I've never had a communications or marketing director here. I want you to do media training, but no, we don't have any talking points, and we don't know what our story is. And I'm like, I can't help you. I can I can help you hire someone, but you need to have a professional communicator who is sitting at with the C-suite, helping to make key decisions to establish a reputation and credibility for your company. And so, the reason nobody's there at your 33 million-dollar plant opening is because that wasn't anyone's job, and you need to invest in these skills in order to for this industry to build the political power that it needs to help get out of some of this policy whiplash that we keep facing.

Nico Johnson  58:49

Yeah, I just want to reiterate that we don't need to become less sophisticated about energy in the way we communicate, but we do need to become more sophisticated in communication so that we aren't asking the listener to do all the work, and yes, it makes me sad the number of times I come across really good companies with great stories who've invested next to nothing in telling them, and they bemoan the market, and they bemoan, but they've never taken out an ad anywhere. They've never. They've actually never expressed any interest in the fundamental blocking and tackling that just watching one season of Mad Men would teach them. Like this, like the world of marketing exists for a reason because historically people have been bad at telling their story, and there aren't people who can be your guide. So, my piece of advice to everyone is: I I don't care if it's an agency outside or if it's a hire inside. Every company needs someone helping them tell their story. Please join me in thanking our panel. All right. That was the Beyond the Docket panel from Chesa Energize Summit. I think that you, if you are on the East Coast at all or interested in the Mid-Atlantic market, would get a lot out of the next Chesa session. You should check it out when it will be back around next fall. Big thanks to Robin and the whole Chesa team for having myself, Molly, and Jamie for a great conversation. We got some kudos after the panel that it was several folks' favorite panel of the day. Thank you for those of you who came up and said hello to us. I hope that I get to see you again in real life, maybe at RE Plus or another event coming soon. You could find how to connect with Molly, Jamie, and Robin via LinkedIn and all the other links that we reference in the show notes. If you haven't yet, go check out Energy Empire with Jamie and Jagger Shaw. Remember, you are what you listen to. Thanks again for showing up, Solar Warrior. It's half the battle.

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