In this episode, Aaron talks with Ayelet Hines, the Community Acceptance Strategist at Tigercomm.

With 30 years of experience running issue campaigns and the last several focused on clean energy, Ayelet brings a political organizer’s mindset to one of solar’s biggest bottlenecks: local opposition and permitting.

She argues that what many solar developers treat as a technical or PR problem is actually a political problem with known solutions, if the industry is willing to change how it communicates.

Listen to this episode on:

* YouTube

* Apple Podcasts

* Spotify

Connect with Ayelet on LinkedIn here.

Expect to learn:

* How oil and gas successfully branded themselves as rugged, rural, and patriotic, while painting renewables as coastal, elitist, and out of touch.

* Why developers lose the “race to define” their projects, and how that creates a vacuum opponents happily fill with fear-based narratives.

* What rural voters actually care about, based on research in The Rural Voter.

Quotes from the episode:

“You need facts to win, but facts are not why you win. You win because a trusted person in the local official’s sphere of influence vouches for you.” - Ayelet Hines

“Community engagement is not a side show. It is the fulcrum on which this industry lives or dies.” - Ayelet Hines

Transcript:

Aaron Nichols:Hello, everyone, and welcome back to this week in solar. As always, I’m your host, Aaron Nichols, the Research and Policy Specialist here in Newtown, Pennsylvania.And today’s guest is Ayelet Hines from Tigercom. And Ayelet, would you mind introducing yourself, introducing Tigercom, and talking a bit more about your background in the solar industry?

Ayelet Hines:Sure thing. Ayelet Hines, VP of Community Engagement at Tigercom, which is a clean tech communications PR firm based on the Washington DC area.And I have spent the last 30 years leading issue campaigns to change policies at all levels of government, and for the past four or so years, I’ve been really focused on helping developers apply political campaign thinking to their efforts to win a permit.

Aaron Nichols:Okay. So where do you think developers miss the mark when communicating with communities that they’re trying to develop in clean energy projects in?

Ayelet Hines:In 2023, I interviewed 26 developers at 18 different companies to try to really understand what was happening with this problem because it’s clear to me as a political person, this is a political problem with a solution that this can be solved with money and there’s nothing so unique about this political problem that we don’t know how to solve it.So I interviewed all these developers and I asked them, what are you seeing, what are opponents doing to you. Why are they doing it? What are you doing?

And one of the first things I noticed is that developers leave a communications vacuum. There’s something that we call the race to define. Like so much about winning in politics is being the first. You got to be the first in to local officials, reporters, anyone who you want to really hear your message.You got to be in the room and and inculcate them with your message before the opposition does that. If you don’t do that, you’re leaving a communications vacuum that your opponents will then fill with their fear-base emotionally connected message.

And so what I found is that developers were losing the race to define themselves, the project, their land owners, and responding to opposition too late and with fact sheets, so human, like the research is clear on this. Humans are emotional creatures. First, rational creatures are very distant second. We can be no other way.

So like this industry is comprised of a lot of really smart people who have a lot of technical expertise, but we can’t lead with that. We have to lead with trusted messengers. We know today, especially, the messenger matters more than the message and developers usually are not culturally credible trusted people when they enter a community.

Aaron Nichols:Okay, so people need to hear from people like them and often developers aren’t like them or don’t know how to speak to them is what you’re saying.

Ayelet Hines:Correct. So one of the things that the Oral and Gas industry has been very successful at is positioning themselves as rugged, part of rural and the real America, hard, manly man work, patriotic.And the renewable energy sector has been positioned by them as for like liberal coastal, prehistidriving beta males.

I mean, you see that on shows like Tulsa King, Land Man, like there’s an episode of Tulsa King in which Sylvester Stallone who plays his character called Dwight, he ends up in a holding cell in Tulsa with this little man who had just been beaten up by the cell bully and they get in this conversation about what are you in for? And the little man says, a green energy scam.

This whole conversation about how renewables are a government creation, they’re fraud. And we let that happen to us, right? Hollywood writers are for sale. And that is one of a hundred ways we are not positioning ourselves as part of rural America, right?

So where is our space to build utility scale projects that we need to transition away from fossil fuels? It is in rural counties and these counties vote for Trump by a lot. That wouldn’t have been a problem 15 years ago, right? Like renewables used to be about private property right which is why Texas is number one and Iowa number two in solar.

But renewables got pulled into the culture wars on the eve of Obama’s re-election campaign, right. Have you ever heard of the word Salindra?

Aaron Nichols:I am vaguely familiar but I’d be happy to have you lay it out.

Ayelet Hines:Sure. So Obama’s opponents were looking for something to tarnish him with and so they turned to his Department of Energy which had a guaranteed federal loan program. They were making loans to clean tech companies.These were investments that most investors would probably find too risky to put their money in. But one of the companies that got a loan from this very successful loan program is called Selendra.

They got their loan, a couple of years later, they filed for bankruptcy. There was no wrongdoing in the Selendra case at all. No one spent a minute before a judge because there was no this fake non-scandal about Selendra and they spent $800 million on attack ads, most of which aired on Fox News.

And it was at that moment that we watched support for renewables among white Republican men crater from 94% support to 47% support. So the Selendra fake scandal was very successful in positioning renewables as outsiders.

That is a barrier that, in a perfect world, you would have tried to overcome 15 years ago. So now our problem is more complicated and a lot more expensive, but we still have to do that. We have to position ourselves as compatible with a rural and agricultural way of life, which we can do.

We know how this is done. Just look at Ford Truck ads. We need to make everything we do and say look and sound like a Ford Truck ad.

Aaron Nichols:Right. I would actually agree and I think we’re very, very bad at that kind of messaging. And I think just as someone who’s relatively new here, we seem to be very hesitant to use emotional messaging.

I think sometimes we hide behind facts and we hide behind graphs, but I was very lucky earlier this year to give a talk for Switch Colorado, and I called it “Why no one wants to see a graph when they’re worried about a fire,” the story being, you know, that someone had said on a call that we sent all of our researchers to this community that was worried about battery fires with charts and graphs and they got shouted down.

And my first thought was, of course, they got shouted down. If I was worried about a fire and someone said, here’s a graph, I’d be like, get out of my house.

And I think we seem to be hesitant. It’s almost like, you can tell, correct me if I’m wrong here, but we seem to be hesitant to play by the same rules. It’s like fossil fuel has decided to play very, very dirty and we are really wanting to take the high road, but we just keep losing and losing and losing.

Ayelet Hines:Yeah. And just to be clear here, I’m not taking on oil and gas, because they are rational actors. There are lots of industries that do what they do, right? Look at McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, right? Like these brands, these industries have really wrapped themselves around every aspect of life. And that’s what we just have not done.

So the hesitancy for us to do that, well, I think renewables, like people who work in the sector think that the truth will set them free all while facts are on our side. That is just not how humans operate.

Aaron Nichols:Right. I like to say no one is sitting around waiting for a graph that proves them wrong.

Ayelet Hines:I love that. I love that.

You know, there’s an 80-20 rule in campaigns and it is like I see organizations, companies spend 80% of their resources trying to convince people to agree with them through charts and maps and graphs and videos and all the stuff. And only 20% of their resources applying pressure or creating the political cover that local officials need to feel in order to support projects.

And by political cover and pressure, I mean one-on-one meetings, letters, phone calls, right? Things that let local officials know that people whose voices they care about are paying attention.

And we need to flip that around. We should spend 80% of our resources applying pressure, giving political cover, and only 20% trying to convince people to agree with us. And I’ll tell you, I don’t care if a local official likes what I’m up to. I only care how he votes.

Aaron Nichols:Right. So where do you think that, why do you think that ratio is so skewed for people that work in renewable energy. Where do you think that that mistake in thinking comes from?

Ayelet Hines:Being really smart and thinking that just really believing in your data.

Aaron Nichols:Right. Okay. Well, knowing that people are emotional first, logical second, that people only look for facts if they already believe emotionally charged stories, what have you learned about working hand-in-hand with rural communities to deploy clean energy while also making sure they feel heard.

Ayelet Hines:Right. So feeling heard, people need to feel heard way upstream from where most developers start having conversations in communities. I know a lot of developers are afraid to poke the bear.

The bear is already poked. 25% of counties have passed bans on renewables. That number doubles every three years. At this rate we can expect that by 2030 about 40% of counties are going to be off limits to renewables, like markets are literally closing.

So you need facts to win but facts are not why you win. You win because you get some trustworthy person in the sphere of influence of the local official to vouch for you. So let’s say you have awesome tax revenue numbers. Like we’re going to bring all this tax revenue, create all these jobs, we’re going to then generate all this economic activity.

Don’t go straight to local officials with that information. Your first stop should be with the local economic development person, the local tax authority, someone who brings authenticity. Go get their blessing first.

Show them your numbers. Say, do these numbers look good? Yes, they do. Then you can shop those numbers around, say, local tax guy, local economic development guy signed off on our numbers. He says that they look good.

So you’re borrowing that person’s credibility for your own project, you cannot depend on your data alone.

Aaron Nichols:Absolutely. And so when you say that we also need to talk to people further downstream, does that mean that sometimes people are just, you know, moving the project along as far as they can and then coming to the community and saying, hey, how do you feel about this? But they haven’t consulted the community to begin with.

Ayelet Hines:Well, the number one complaint that rural Americans have against developers, they say developers are going into communities cutting back room deals with politicians and letting everyone else know about a project after the fact.

We need to remove the possibility of that accusation by going into these places much earlier. What about engineering an invitation to come in? How revolutionary would that be? What if you asked people, what do you want for the future of your community? And would hosting a project help you achieve that?

Yes, it would. Or only if it met these conditions. Great. Let’s have a conversation.

Aaron Nichols:Right. And then you have people fighting for you and trying to get that across the finish line with you rather than you fighting upstream.

I mean, as someone who grew up in a small town, I can definitely tell you, you know, like, if you grow up in a town of 2000 people, if you piss off Jim, we’re all pissed off. Like Jim is gonna tell Sally who works at the cafe. Sally is gonna tell Jane who works at the flower shop and pretty soon, everyone is against what you’re trying to do.

Ayelet Hines:No, the rumor mill starts with the first knock on a landowner’s door or when that first letter hits a land owner’s mailbox that alerts the community that you are in town snooping around, so even like an interest letter to a land owner.

If you don’t get out and ahead of that, you are too late and your problem just got more difficult and more expensive to solve.

Aaron Nichols:That’s interesting. Do you think that there’s something there that people misunderstand about rural Americans? Because I think it could be possible that, you know, for people who live in cities, maybe they don’t know their neighbors in the same way. And maybe they are just come in and they don’t understand how things work.

Ayelet Hines:Yeah, well, I highly recommend a book called The Rural Voter, written by two political scientists at Colby College. They don’t pay me to shill their book, but I do it whenever I can, available on Audible also. But they usually have the best and most data on rural voters.

And just in case you don’t read the book, I’m going to give you the punchline. So rural Americans perceive a shared fate and have shared grievances that cause them to vote in certain ways and those three things are belief in hard work and equal opportunity, and that’s good for us because that’s where private property rights fits in.

Cultural precarity, they believe that their culture and way of life is threatened, so it is incumbent upon us to demonstrate that we are not a threat, that in fact we can help them keep what they love about the place that they live, because the third is civic pride. They love where they live. They feel safe. Cities are dangerous, full of people who don’t work as hard as they do. They believe they live in the real America.

So those shared grievances and that shared fate have helped make rural American an identity.

Aaron Nichols:Okay, well thank you for the recommendation and for sharing the three main points of the book. I mean that’s incredibly helpful and I can absolutely, you know, as someone who grew up in a small town, 100% verify that those are all true.

So to bring it home, because we are unfortunately out of time, even though I could clearly talk to you for hours, I ask every guest who comes on the same question, and it has to do with the fact that a couple months ago I was at my grandma’s 80th birthday party, and I realized as I was sitting there doing the math that her turning 80 means she was born into a world where what we call renewable energy did not exist.

We only knew how to go find things, dig them up, burn them, run out of them, and then dig more things up to burn. Those were the only ways we knew how to generate energy. She was born 10 years after the Rural Electrification Act, so where she was living had just gotten electricity. Her parents had come of age in a non-electric area. Windmills only pumped water and the first solar PV cell wasn’t invented until nine years after she was born in 1954.

Then Jimmy Carter put solar panels on the White House in 79 and then on and on and on to where we are today. I am curious just if you want to theorize, spitball, moonshot, whatever. What do you think energy is going to be, the dominant energy source, because it’s the cheapest energy source and it’s the fastest to deploy?

Ayelet Hines:I do think that if we ignore community engagement like it’s not a side show, it is the fulcrum on which this industry lives or dies. If we ignore building local support, like the political cover we build for local permitting officials is the same support that we show up and down the political food chain.

That is, like, building local support is how we get a better federal policy landscape. Until we do that we’re going to continue getting stepped on like the current administration is doing, trying to kill this industry. But I do think that in 80 years we’re going to see a lot more deployment of renewables because reality.

Aaron Nichols:I can’t wait for it. I mean we, I think we share a similar mission. We both want to tell emotional clean energy stories and, you know, make it cool to the people who don’t think it’s cool.

So I’m very grateful that you came on today. I yell at Heinz, if you want to be found where can you be found?

Ayelet Hines:You can find me at A-hines at tigercom.us, T-I-G-E-R-C-O-M-M dot us. I am leading a training on this skill set on December 3rd at RE Plus Midwest in the Chicago area.

It’s a four-hour training, very hands-on and it is by far the most economical way to get trained in this skill set. So I hope to see your listeners out there at RE Plus Midwest on December 3rd. And I’ll send you the link to the registration, you can put it in your post.

Aaron Nichols:Oh fantastic. Thank you very much. And for everyone listening, that’s been this week in solar, and we will talk to you next week.

Ayelet Hines:Thank you.

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