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

0:02You'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 U.S. 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 John 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'll take to turn it around.

0:39If 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. In his talk, John 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. 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 or a limited window where we as the industry need to lean in.

1:14So we need a coordinated, rapid response to get them the support they need to answer their questions. John 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.

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3:50And now, our TED Talk of the day. 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 have taken that fight hyper-local into communities. That hyper-local 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.

4:33So now when we go to build a project, we're being stopped by tactics like lawn signs. 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 U.S. Army in 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.

5:12We 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 communities 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.

5:53So 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 hometowns where we live and work? Because fossil fuel is outspending us 27 to one 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 on the ground to stop us from building projects. And it's working. One in four counties in the U.S.

6:30now 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 bans on energy storage. Let me 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.

7:09This is a time when we need to be building every type of supply of electricity as we can. And the fastest, cheapest, cleanest way for us to do that is solar and storage. The economics are simple. More supply is going to bring down costs. And we have a great story to tell. Look at the growth of the solar industry over the last 10 years. And last year alone, 70 % of new electrons that came on the grid were from solar and storage. So here's the opportunity. 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.

7:50They're trying to understand how to get it right. Usually about 180 days or a 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. To do that, we need a war room. Brings together folks like developers, clean energy advocates, pro-development environmental groups. In this war room, we detect, coordinate, and deploy to get the right people into the fight. So I want to take you into Baghdad. We lived in Uday Hussein's bombed-out palace on the Targus River. Our war room was a dining room table.

8:28We had combat commanders, intel officers, logistics experts. We took incoming information or active activities. We then would coordinate a rapid response and a plan, and then we would deploy our soldiers into the fight. One morning, we received intel that someone from the infamous deck of cards was living in our community. So in the war room, we planned a strategy to cordon off his neighborhood, raid the house we thought he was in, and capture him. Funny enough, also in the war room, we learned his name later that afternoon, and it turns out he was coming over for lunch at the base that next day.

9:04So in the war room, we changed the plan, and we were able to capture him without a shot being fired. I know this sounds like an extreme example, but it mirrors the current situation because we have a playbook for success if we can execute on that playbook. And we're doing this right now in New York. We've launched something called the Energy Resilience Coalition, which is a war room funded by developers and philanthropy. And before the war room, if a developer who's on the front line meeting with a town supervisor learns that a moratorium might be coming, they wouldn't know what to do with that information.

9:37Now they can bring it to the war room. So one town we learned was very worried about fires and battery storage. So they usually, in this situation, turn to the town supervisor or the volunteer fire chief. We then need to get the right information to those folks to answer their questions. So we coordinated amongst the local organizations in New York. Many of them have tools to help address the situation, but none of them have them all. And then we deploy the right folks into those conversations, the right messengers, the right tactics. One organization has trained a fireman to go in and meet with a volunteer fire chief in this department, train them on this new technology, and then help them put together a fire response plan.

10:21This has worked so well, we're trying to raise funds right now to get several more trained firemen out there. Another organization has deep technical skills, and they help the town permitting team understand best practices that permit battery storage and get more built. But we also need to change the narrative. We need to create the political space for town leaders to make the right decisions. And we have to do that by empowering our champions and giving them the tools that they need to fight back. So this is a message I received from my mother-in-law. It's a Facebook post from the rural town that she lives in where they're trying to build a solar project.

10:56This echoes the anti-clean energy influencers that says solar is anti-American, anti-human, anti-environment. We know none of that is true. but that's the conversation that's happening locally. So in the war room, we're developing messages to empower champions like her to fight back because we have an incredible story to tell. Over the last few years, America's gone from 14th in the world to third in terms of solar manufacturing for modules. Solar is made in America. Over 50 million homes are powered by solar energy. And we now have the right way to permit and build battery systems to make them safe.

11:36And not only is solar great to address climate change, it can be a really critical enhancement to an ecosystem when done correctly. So I want to sum it up with an example of a recent situation in upstate New York. We found out there was a rural community having a music festival. And this is a community that had a lot of anti-solar signs. So we found a farmer who had solar on his property, and I literally interviewed him on stage at this music festival. He talked about how solar is allowing him to keep his farm in the family for the next generation. Solar is literally powering 25 percent of the residents in his town.

12:14And they're growing crops under the panels that they're selling locally, including things like pumpkins. People came up to us afterwards because he was the right messenger and they trusted him and they asked questions. And this fight we're seeing is happening all across the country. We're being asked to consider bringing the warmen to places like Illinois and Massachusetts. Every state's different, different partners, different tactics, but the war room model remains the same. We can coordinate to bring the right voices into the fight. We are an incredibly decisive moment that will determine if the future involves clean, affordable energy.

12:53This fight will happen one town at a time. It's up to all of us to get in the fight, So I look forward to working with you to win back some hearts and minds. Thank you.

13:09That was John Powers at TED Countdown, The Next 10 in Berkeley, California in 2026. If you are curious about TED's curation, please visit ted.com slash curation guidelines. And that's it for today. TED Talks Daily is a podcast from TED. This episode was fact-checked by the TED Research Team and produced and edited by our team. Aspen Fitzgerald Dorsey, Oliver Friedman, Lucy Little, Xu Han Hu, Debbie Rolfe, Emma Taubner, Connor Titsworth, Tanzika Sungmar Nivong, Isaac Waiten, and Hannah Yu. Additional support from Isabella Aslarona, Daniela Ballarezzo, Valentina Bohanini, Ban Ban Chang, Christopher Fazey Bogan, Cinnamon Horn, Lainey Lott, Matthew Polis, and Yadi Vasquez.

13:57Learn more at podcasts.ted.com. I am Elise Hu. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed. Thanks for listening.

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