Aaron sits down with Dan Crawford, Senior Vice President at Echo Communications Advisors, a policy-first communications firm that works exclusively with climate and clean energy clients.

Dan spends his days helping clean energy companies and nonprofits shape public narratives, place op-eds, and talk to policymakers in ways that actually move votes.

He and Aaron dig into how energy prices became one of the hottest political issues in the country and how the solar industry can seize the moment.

Listen to this episode here, or on:

* YouTube

* Apple Podcasts

* Spotify

You can connect with Dan on LinkedIn here.

Expect to learn:

* How the clean energy sector got outmaneuvered in Washington during the One Big Beautiful Bill fight

* What clean energy companies can do right now to tell better stories, get local press, and bring elected officials into their projects.

* Why facts alone do not speak for themselves, and how emotion, human stories, and pocketbook concerns drive modern energy politics.

Quotes from the episode:

“Energy prices are not going away as an issue. Voters see the increases on their bills and they are looking for someone to blame and someone to fix it.”

- Dan Crawford

“Clean energy has flipped from being something people supported for climate reasons to something most voters support because they want cheaper electricity.”- Dan Crawford

Transcript

Aaron NicholsHello, everyone, and welcome back to this week in solar. As always, I’m your host, Aaron Nichols, the research and policy specialist here at Exact Solar in Newtown, Pennsylvania.And today we have someone that I’ve followed for a little while. Once we got started talking on LinkedIn, I realized that I’ve been subscribed to the Echo Communications Newsletter for, I think, over a year, and until I got really excited to make that connection.We have Dan Crawford here, the Senior Vice President at Echo Communications Advisors. Dan, would you introduce yourself and echo and talk about what a day in your working life might look like?

Dan CrawfordYeah, Aaron, it’s great to be on the pod. I started listening and we’ve been really enjoying the interview so far.Great to be chatting with you. So Echo Communications and advisors. We are a DC based policy first communications firm. We focus exclusively on climate and clean energy clients.So what I tell people is, you know, we help climate and clean energy companies, nonprofits, organizations have their voices heard in Washington and across the country.So if you’re looking to change policy, if you’re looking to fix a piece of legislation or get something past or input with lawmakers, you know, we help with communications tactics like media, op-eds, messaging to have your voice heard.

Aaron NicholsOkay, great. And just off the top of my head, I’m really interested in landing op-eds. How, what’s a off the top of your head tip for anyone who’s interested in getting more?

Dan CrawfordYou know, op ads are top. They’re easier said than done. Yeah. There’s a lot of people submitting a lot of op ads to not a lot outlets.I would say the first tip is know your audience. So, if you are trying to reach, you know, people in the specific area look for, you know, local or regional outlets, if you’re trying to reach people that are interested in a specific topic, you know, look at trade publications, look at kind of more niche websites, don’t assume that if you’re writing an op-ed, you have to pitch it to USA Today of New York Times, you know, they’re probably going to be outlets that are better read by your audiences.And if you kind of do your homework a little bit and find something that you think is a really good fit, you’re more likely to get it picked up.You know, having a clear message and a really unique point of view is really helpful. It can’t just be, you know, hey, here’s, you know, this thing that I think is cool, pay attention to me.You have to be making an argument, you have to be, you have to be saying something that it is unique to you that they’re not hearing from a bunch of other people.So make sure your argument is unique, make sure your audience, you have the right audience in mind, and make sure that your writing is solid and compelling.

Aaron NicholsYeah, okay, those are all great tips. I mean, I’ve never thought about this until I just asked you that, but the average editor who’s publishing op-eds probably has to sort through just the craziest stuff you can imagine coming into their newspapers.So make yours easy quick and related.

Dan CrawfordYeah, you have to imagine, you know, these folks are probably spending like two minutes for submission before they decide whether to accept it or reject it.So you have to make sure that you can grab their attention with something that’s very compelling. When they get go, that’s a unique argument that they haven’t heard before.And a point of view that is not represented in their newspaper or if they’re out there already.

Aaron NicholsYeah, well, to take it in a different direction, one thing that I wanted to talk to you about and that we are very excited about at Exact Solar because we install Solar in New Jersey is Mikey Cheryl, winning the governorship of New Jersey. And we also had Abigail Spanberger win the governorship of Virginia and both talked a lot about using clean energy to bring down energy prices when they were on campaign trail.We also saw two new elected officials to the Georgia Public Service Commission who ran on very similar terms, which for that to make national news is crazy.A lot of people probably hadn’t even heard of public service commissions before the last couple of years. So do you think this will be a winning strategy for other candidates a year from now as we go through the midterms?

Dan CrawfordYeah, I absolutely do, you know, 2025 elections were a big issue with energy prices across the board, and I don’t see any sign of that changing in the next year.Or if you look at New Jersey and electricity prices were up 20% year over year this summer and polls showed that a vast majority of voters considered it to be an important issue in the election.And Cheryl was really able to seize on that. She came out and announced that she was going to freeze rates, be executive order, and that she was going to fight to reform PJM, the grid operator in New Jersey.And, you know, she really kind of defined the debate over energy prices, and I think, you know, it was very smart and she ended up winning on the issue.You know, we were joking before we started recording. When was the last time a grid operator would say a household name, you know, in an election?So it’s clear that voters are paying attention. People have noticed that their electricity prices are going up, you know, in Virginia, data centers are a huge issue.There’s more data centers in Virginia than I think anywhere in the world, definitely anywhere in the country. And, you know, people see them as you’re driving by, you see these huge data centers, and you know that they’re just gobbling up tons of power.And there’s a big fight over whether there should be more of them and how they should pay for their power.And Spamberger was really able to see them on that as well. And then, of course, in Georgia, you had two Democrats winning in the public service commission, which is the first time that Democrats have won statewide non-federal election in Virginia or in Georgia in like 20 years or something like that.And, you know, these, these public service commissioners, gigs, like, usually if you’re, if you’re in an incumbent, you’re not really worried about a reelection challenge, people tend to just kind of like vote the same people in over and over again.So the fact that voters were fired up enough to even go to the polls for this election, let alone vote for a challenger shows that energy prices are going to be, you know, a huge issue.And I think what we’ve seen is really a flipping of the script with clean energy where, you know, clean energy, especially solar is oftentimes the cheapest form of energy that we put on the grid.It’s by far the fastest, and when you talk about supply constraints as data centers are demanding more power, you know, the fact that you can put solar panels up, the fact that you can get solar panels up and connect them to the grid in a couple of years compared to five, six, seven, eight years for a gas plan means that solar is by far the best option and so clean energy has kind of switched from being something that people backed because they cared about climate change, they backed because they care about the environment, to something that the majority of voters support because they want to see cheaper electricity.And I think that flipping of the script has been really interesting. And it I think is a great sign for the solar industry and for the clean energy industry in general going forward.

Aaron NicholsYeah there’s so many places to go here and so many things that I’m curious about since you are in this every day and you know so much more than I do.But I am I’m particularly interested in the story that’s being told right now because I know that that Mikey Cheryl and Abigail Spanberger won, and there was this public service commission election as well.And the media has really seized on that, saying, like, energy is going to be a hot-button issue. But four people does seem like a small sample size to me.And so I’m interested in what you’ve seen in the broader picture as well.

Dan CrawfordYeah, I mean, you know, 2025 is an off-year election and, you know, it’s not even a proper mid-term, so you really only have Virginia and New Jersey and then a couple of smaller state elections.So it’s a small sample size, but I don’t think this issue is going away. You’re already seeing Democrats talk about it, you know, who are sort of thinking about running for President in 2028.Governor Pritzker in Illinois just signed legislation to really kind of beef up energy production in the state. So you’re seeing, you’re seeing national names talk about it more and more.And you know, electricity prices are not going to go down anytime soon. So I think it’s going to continue to be a key issue going forward, especially with the president out there really attacking clean energy and doing its best to cancel wind projects and solar projects with Republicans and Congress rolling back incentives to put solar panels on your rooftop.Energy prices had become this very sort of politicized thing. And you know, I think there’s an opportunity there for the clean energy industry to kind of harness this political power.Now all of a sudden people really care about where is their energy coming from and how much does it cost.And you know, the solar and you know, wind and battery industries, you know, they really have an opportunity to say like, hey, we are the energy sources of the future.We are going to make the grid more reliable. We are going to make your energy cheaper and we want politicians who support our industry.

Aaron NicholsYeah, I’m really excited to watch that play out. And I know that if we’re talking about a public service commission election, like you said, for someone to defeat incumbents in something that most people have probably just checked a box on every election and never really thought about is huge.And I know Georgia got hit really hard with price increases. I think they’ve had, I read in that New York Times article about canceling solar for all, but I think they’ve had four or five in the last four years, and it’s gone off some huge amount.So obviously, there’s public frustration that candidates are tapping into here. But how do you think that clean energy companies who historically have not been amazing at public perception PR media?How can they tap into that same frustration and use it to our advantage?

Dan CrawfordYeah. Yeah. The first thing I’d say is, you know, make sure that you’re telling your story.So, you know, if you’re a company that’s breaking ground on a new project, you know, have a press conference, invite your local officials and invite your representative.Talk about the jobs that you’re creating. Talk about the impact your project is going to have on energy prices. Don’t be afraid to, you know, to talk about what your projects mean for the economy, what they mean for homeowners, ratepayers.You know, find out who your representatives are, make sure you’re in touch with them. You know, if you, if you can go to their offices and sit down and chat, visit DC and really start to advocate for the industry, you know,And I think a little bit of it is just that kind of flipping of the script of remember solar and all this clean tap is going to make energy prices cheaper. And so we don’t have to appeal to people sort of sense of altruism or their concerns over climate, which have always asked someone who cares a lot about climate.You know, it’s tough to admit, but they’ve always been secondary to pocketbook concerns. And so now the energy, the clean energy industry has, I think, a very firm ground to stand on to say like, we are making electricity bills cheaper.We are making it easier for you to get power. We are making it easier for you to, you know, get through blackouts and brownouts and survive and unreliable grid.All of these things that just sort of like make people’s lives easier, you know, we can now kind of talk about our role in that.

Aaron NicholsAnd I think I want to emphasize something you talked about at the beginning, just from my own narrow band of personal experience that’s about telling your story and inviting local officials.I think we’ve been very successful in that. When we were trying to have more of a national impact in the run up to the one big beautiful bill, we were too small for reps to listen to us in Washington.But our local impact and zooming in on one story, specifically the fact that we built an off-grid system that powered a greenhouse that grows organic produce and a food desert in inner city Philadelphia, and then inviting reps and non-profits, that got us all sorts of media attention.We probably couldn’t have afforded just in terms of eyeballs on us, and also landed us in NPR. And so I think one thing that in my own, once again, narrow band of experience, the clean energy industry doesn’t seem to do a good job of, is zooming in on emotional one stories and trying to tell the story of the whole thing at once saying you know if we if we’re saying we’re going to lose 100,000 jobs that’s much more difficult for a human mind to conceive of than saying Jim’s going to lose his job Jim just got an electrician’s license Jim has a family.

Dan CrawfordYeah I mean telling those individual stories can be so powerful and showing that kind of depth. I tell people, when you’re trying to get a story picked up by the media, you want to think about kind of breadth or depth.Does it have a very broad impact? Does it affect everybody? Or does it have a really profound impact on a few people?Because media like to tell those stories. They like to be able to find specific people that they can interview and say, like, yes, this is making my life better or, you know, this will make my life worse.And having those individual stories can be just super powerful.Yeah. The other thing I’ll say is, you know, I think this whole industry has some great trade groups that are, you know, really doing a good job making the case in Washington.So, you know, if you’re interested in, you know, getting involved with your trade associations band together and make sure that, you know, your collective voice has be heard.

Aaron NicholsAnd I think there’s there’s an order of operations there as well. Like we realized, okay, so this project involves education, politicians love education, specifically they love to stand in front of education and talk about how great it is.And the media loves to photograph politicians while they stand in front of education and talk about how great it is.And so if you can make sure that everyone gets what they want.Yeah, you can create a really special moment.

Dan CrawfordYeah, totally. And I’ve been talking a lot about prices. I think the prices are the key issue next year and for years to come.But the cleaning and energy industry has so much to offer the economy as a whole. When you think about AI, I mean, one, like we’re going to need so much energy to power AI and it can’t just come from oil and gas.It’s going to have to come from everywhere. You cannot build a new gas plant in less than eight years right now.You can build solar a solar plant in two.And, and be, you know, when you think about how the workforce is being transformed because of AI, you know, a lot of jobs that were high paying jobs that you would go to college for are gonna be harder to get and they’re gonna be harder to come by.And then meanwhile, I guess what jobs can’t be outsourced AI, electricians, like people that are actually on the ground using their hands installing solar panels, building windmills.And I think that those are in a way the jobs of the future because they’re the jobs that we’re going to need that are going to pay really well, and it can’t be outsourced or turned over to the robots.

Aaron NicholsYeah, and to get there, we obviously have to go through to Washington, and there’s going to have to be policy that’s favorable to that.But in the run-up to the OBBB being passed, I mean, we really got our butts kicked as an industry. And I went to Nico Johnson’s some at last month, and he had a former state rep come speak who told us that in their time in office they had to ask one person to be the clean energy industry’s filter for them, because there were so many competing companies talking to them about all these different things that they wanted, and no one seemed to have unified messaging or goals, whereas on the other side of the aisle, the fossil fuel industry knew exactly what they wanted and how to get it, and there’s just a lot more practice at that. So how do you think as an industry, as someone who works in Washington, how do you think as an industry, we can get on the same page, and what common messages do you think we have that we can rally behind? I know energy affordability is one that you mentioned.

Dan CrawfordYeah, you know, I think leading up to the OBBBA, BBBA. I think there was a feeling that the like the facts would speak for themselves.You know, you had all of these projects that were breaking ground. You had all these investments that were being announced.And a lot of them were in Republican states and Republican districts. And I think a lot of people, you know, sort of thought, well, there’s no way that they will vote, you know, against these tax credits that they’ll vote to roll these incentives back because you know we are making investments in their district and I think people were maybe a little naive and didn’t you know didn’t put enough stock in the strength of the ideology of some of the members of Congress that were pushing this legislation forward.You know it was no there were plenty of there were plenty of members who said oh yeah I support the tax credit that you wish you keep you know this tax credit or that tax credit, I think we should protect some of the IRA, but it was nobody’s top priority.Nobody was willing to put their neck out there to be the one to save this particular tax credit.And so, at the end of the day, they all voted yes anyways, even though they said, oh yeah, we should protect the IRA tax credits.I think that was definitely a lesson learned. I think having the affordability messaging, you’ve already seen advocacy organizations and trade organizations start to coalesce around affordability, which is huge.You know, the oil and gas industry has had a lot more time, right, like they’ve been around for longer. They’ve had time to kind of consolidate power, but they are very good at kind of speaking from you know, the same notebook, right?Like they are very practiced and very disciplined. And they’re very good about thinking about where does their money go, you know, where are their donations going.And so you have members of Congress who they know where their bread is buttered. And they, you know, support the oil and gas industry because they’re getting donations, They’re going to make support, they’ve got support for years, even at the expense of their own constituents.You know, you think about it, you know, so our employees close to 300,000 people in America, that’s like five or six times more people than coal employees.And it’s getting to be close to rivaling oil and gas, at least the sort of direct employment. And, you know, the coal industry and the oil and gas industry, they just have spent so much time kind of building political power that now they have this outside impact on politics.And, you know, I think it’s going to take some time, but I think that that should be the model for the clean energy industry is, you know, how do we build political power?How do we make sure that we are being heard in Washington and that our influence reflects our impact on the economy, our impact on prices, our impact on jobs.

Aaron NicholsYeah, my friend Spencer Meeks, I don’t know if you’ve been lucky enough to meet him at a conference or anything.He says facts don’t speak for themselves at all. which I have come to believe that’s true as well. And I think that emotion has a much larger role to play than we like to imagine it does.I think as people who tend to be a little more educated or have gone to a little more university, whether that makes us educated or not on one side of the aisle, I think that there’s this over-reliance on facts and an under-reliance on emotion, and I mean facts have really never mattered less to the political discourse these days.Yeah, which is interesting to see. I mean, I like to say that no one is sitting around waiting for a graph that proves them wrong.I think people only go. I think people only go looking for facts when they already believe in emotionally charged story.

Dan CrawfordYeah, I think that’s right. You know, I think the energy, the clean energy industry is at a bit of an inflection point now where for the longest time, you know, it was, it was an ideological choice to support clean energy because you were, you were doing it for political reasons.And it’s sometimes meant sacrificing something and meant spending more money because you wanted to get carbon free electricity. And I do think that there is a moment right now where we’ve kind of crossed this inflection point where now you don’t have to care about climate to support clean energy.You just have to care about, you know, electricity that’s cheap, that’s reliable, that’s fast to deploy. So, you know, I’m hopeful, as somebody who does care about climate, you know, very deeply, I’m hopeful that, you know, the economics will win out and that people will support energy, clean energy because of the economics.And I think that that’s the best path forward is to just keep investing, keep doing what you can to make this technology better and cheaper and faster, and let people vote with their wallets.

Aaron NicholsYeah, and I think the psychological emotional lever to pull in the short term is this system that we rely on for this thing that we now need is completely out of your control, and And it’s just going to continue costing more.There’s nothing you can do about that, except this one thing. And that, yeah.

Dan CrawfordWell, and people should, people can get involved at all levels of government. I would say, find out if your state has an elected public service commission or public utility commission, find out where your PUC stands on the issue.You know, find out where your representative stands on the issue, you know, like you’re going to see things like BJM in New Jersey and Pennsylvania becoming a really big issue, you know, and just like grid operators and interconnection cues and all this stuff that, you know, feels very technical and very wonky is going to become very important to the, you know, the simple question of, you know, can you get power to your house and how much is a cost?

Aaron NicholsYeah. Well, Dan, to bring it home since we’re running out of time, I ask everyone the same last question who gives me their time to guest on this show.And that it has to do with the fact that I was at my grandma’s 80th birthday party a couple months ago.And as I was sitting down to write a LinkedIn post about it afterwards, I realized that that means that she was born into a world where clean energy did not exist.She was born in 1945, so Missouri had just been electrified a couple of years before. The only way we knew how to generate energy was to dig things up and burn them.We had no other way of doing it. Solar PV was an invention until she was nine years old and then that took decades to become cost-effective.And then, you know, at the turn of the century, the price just cratered and became way more cost effective. All of that has happened within her lifetime.So if you are just going to spitball moonshot, what do you think clean energy looks like 80 years from now?

Dan CrawfordOh, that’s a great question. And I love just the historic perspective there. I was at an event where they were talking about electric cars and somebody brought up a a news article from like the 1830s that was about steamships, and now steamship technologies never going to beat the, you know, the wind and sailing ships there, too slow, they’re too high-byes.So we’ve been having these debates for ages, right, and you know, I just think that we need to, you know, we need to have that historic perspective of, like, yeah, hundred years ago, we didn’t have, we didn’t have natural gas, right?We had coal and that was it. You know, doesn’t mean we’re going to have to have coal forever and it doesn’t mean we’re going to have to have natural gas forever.I think that in 80 years, you know, the technology will be at a point where we can, where everybody in the world has abundant energy and, you know, energy is everything.Energy is at the heart of economic prosperity. It’s at the heart of economic growth. It’s how countries become superpowers. It’s how developing countries become developed countries.And, you know, if we can unlock cheap, abundant, clean energy for the world, I just think we’re just going to see this explosion of human wellness and flourishing.So that’s the future that I’m working for. It’s the future that you’re working for. I hope the future that our listeners are working for as well.

Aaron NicholsAmazing. Then, if you want to be found, where do you like to be found? I assume you mean on the internet.

Dan CrawfordI do mean on the internet, if you’re not a person.Well, I didn’t watch it in DC. If anybody wants to get coffee, if you’re here, I’m always always happy to chat.But echo coms.com. It’s e-c-o-c-o-m-m-s.com. We have a great newsletter that goes out once a week where we we talk about but you know, it can verify it as a copy of the day.Appreciate it. And we do some of these interviews as well. So Aaron, maybe we’ll have to have you on our newsletter, The Echo Chamber.And I’m on LinkedIn as well. Folks should find me. I wish I had to reconnect.Fantastic. For everyone listening, that’s been this week in solar and we will see you next week.Thanks so much, Dan.Thanks a lot, Aaron. This was great.

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