Is Personal Energy Independence A Better Selling Point? – CleanTechnica

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When it comes to selling clean technology, each kind of technology goes through several phases. At first, it’s too expensive because it hasn’t reached mass production. Then, as more copies are made, prices start to fall. Then, as adoption goes mainstream and then into a majority, prices become so low that people look back on the older technology and wonder why they ever put up with it.

The economics and pricing at every step is such that you have to find different ways to sell it.

For the early adopters who have to pay a premium, pricing certainly isn’t a selling point. To sell the first solar panels, the idea was to look cool and to promote clean energy. One of the earliest solar panels installed on a building was atop the White House in 1978. They weren’t photovoltaic panels, instead being used to heat water for the president’s residence. But, even so, they cost $28,000 (a LOT the year after Star Wars was released).

Another notable solar setup I can think of once sat atop a local environmental organization’s offices in New Mexico. The cost was astronomical, and the solar panels weren’t economical at all. In 2009, conservatives laughed at it. Now, solar panels are popping up on roofs all over the area, regardless of what the politics are of the people living under them. In those days, the environment was the selling point. Today, it’s being able to run air conditioning in the summer without needing to sell a kidney.

The same thing happened and continues to happen with EVs. The first modern-ish EVs in the late 1990s and early 2000s were sold under a California mandate. The government literally had to force automakers to sell a tiny amount of electric vehicles, and it was largely wealthy people buying cars like the GM EV1. The original Tesla Roadster was the same way. With extreme costs compared to most cars, only people who had the cash and cared about the environment bought them. Today, the guy in charge of Tesla is Trump’s “first buddy” and many left-leaning environmentalists are moving to other brands of EVs to avoid feeling like they’re associated with Musk.

Another great example of this step from environmentalism and altruism to other selling points is e-bikes. When people try to sell e-bikes as a replacement for cars in dense urban areas, people willing to ride on two wheels do so because it either gets them through traffic faster or because they want to lower their transportation emissions. Now, I regularly see ads for e-bikes that are tailored to hunters and survivalists, who probably aren’t buying the bikes to lower their carbon footprints.

Solar Generators Show Us A Possible Path Forward

One thing I didn’t see happening a few years ago was the rise of power stations and solar generators. After all, it was only 5-10 years ago that you’d get laughed at in an RV park if you told people you weren’t using any fossil fuels to power a campsite. Propane has long been the norm for everything from not only cooking food, but providing light in the camp and keeping things warm. Gas-powered generators were the norm for anyone camping away from electric hookups who wanted to run air conditioning, TVs, and even lights for more than a few hours.

Today, it’s hard to find a camper that doesn’t have solar panels on it somewhere. For many people, having a couple of panels and a lithium battery means being able to keep the lights on, charge phones, and maybe run the fan for the furnace. It’s more common now to see people with large solar arrays, big battery banks, and enough power to run everything from an efficient air conditioner to cooking appliances.

But, you don’t need a big bus-sized vehicle or a travel trailer to carry a bunch of panels and batteries along for the ride. Today, it’s all built into nice portable kits. The battery pack, the power inverter, the wiring, the solar charge controller, and everything else is built into a simple box that does it all. The solar panels come in neat folding form factors that you can put up and start generating with in just a few minutes. Everyone from the vendor at an outdoor farmer’s market to people running air conditioning in Shiftpods at Burning Man seems to have a solar generator today.

Now that solar generators are not only mainstream, but dropping insanely in price, people aren’t buying them to avoid the emissions associated with burning gasoline and propane. People are going solar outdoors because it gives a quiet and cheap way to get electrical power without needing to run a loud generator that requires fuel and maintenance. Being able to go off grid, whether in the park near home or way out in the woods, is the benefit.

Personal Energy Independence Is The Selling Point Now

One of the big anti-cleantech arguments still floating around today is that clean technology is coming to rob good, patriotic Americans of their freedom. Electric cars are there to put Americans on a tether, with the government able to shut EVs off on a whim, perhaps because they shared an unapproved opinion online or something. Windmills and solar don’t work “when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine,” so obviously the greenies are trying to take America down. Batteries, when combined with these clean energy sources, are made with slave labor, cost too much, and are going to rob Americans of great-paying oil jobs.

If you know crap from apple butter, none of the above is true. It’s common sense that power outages shut down gas pumps as much as EV charging stations. Solar panels on your roof and batteries under it mean off-grid power is available, and we know from both California’s and Texas’ woes that people with solar+storage had power when almost nobody else did. And the oil industry? It’s a mean cycle of boom and bust that ruins workers’ lives every few years.

But, being able to refute these idiot arguments and having the general public know that clean technology means more freedom and not less are two very separate things. Selling Americans on the freedom that comes from relying on the sun instead of relying on government and major corporations is the goal now, and we need to be focusing on that at least as much as we focus on the environmental benefits.

Featured image by Jennifer Sensiba.