Communicating through change: Five lessons from the evolving energy narrative

The clean energy conversation is changing quickly.

Affordability. Reliability. Resilience. Energy security. AI and data centers. Grid capacity. American energy abundance.

These themes increasingly shape how policymakers, customers, investors and the media talk about energy. For clean energy companies, that shift presents both a communications challenge and a significant opportunity.

Antenna Group CEO Keith Zakheim recently joined Amy Heart, SVP of Public Policy at Sunrun, and Andy Newbold, Senior Director of Corporate Communications at Enphase Energy, for a webinar hosted by Latitude Media exploring how the energy narrative is evolving and what communications leaders can do to help their companies meet this moment.

The conversation ranged from rising electricity demand and distributed energy resources (DERs) to data centers, virtual power plants, community engagement and the changing role of the media.

One idea connected nearly every part of the discussion: the energy transition doesn’t have a technology problem as much as it has a translation opportunity.

Here are five takeaways from the conversation.

1. Lead with value, not virtue

For years, much of the clean energy industry communicated primarily through the lens of climate action and decarbonization.

Those goals remain important. But the environment around them has changed.

Consumers and policymakers are increasingly focused on electricity costs, reliability, resilience and energy security. At the same time, AI and data centers, electrification, extreme weather, tariffs, inflation and geopolitical uncertainty are converging to make energy a much more immediate issue.

As Keith noted, periods of rapid change can leave people searching for a sense of control. That creates an opportunity for the energy transition, and distributed energy in particular, to offer something tangible: greater agency over how people produce, store and consume energy.

For communicators, that means moving from technology to outcomes and from product attributes to customer value.

People don’t necessarily need another explanation of how a technology works. They need to understand what it can do for them.

Can it lower or stabilize their electricity bill? Keep the lights on during an outage? Give a business more certainty? Make a community more resilient?

Those are stories people can immediately understand.

2. Simplify the story without simplifying the stakes

The energy industry speaks a language most people don't.

Kilowatts. Megawatts. Capacity markets. Dynamic rates. DERMS. Net metering.

These concepts matter enormously inside the industry. But leading with them can make an already complicated energy system feel even further removed from everyday life.

One of the most compelling examples came from Enphase. Rather than describing distributed solar and storage purely in megawatts, Andy explained its potential by comparing aggregated home energy systems to the output of conventional power plants, giving audiences a familiar frame of reference for understanding their scale.

That same principle applies across clean energy communications: make the impact tangible.

As Keith put it, communicators should look for the verbs rather than the nouns. What does the technology do? What changes because it exists?

Simplification doesn't mean dumbing down the energy transition. It means making its value easier to see.

3. There doesn't have to be one winning energy narrative

Climate. Affordability. Energy independence. Reliability. Resilience. American manufacturing. Consumer choice.

Which is the right clean energy message?

Potentially all of them.

A central theme of the conversation was the importance of understanding who you're talking to and where they are.

A homeowner in Texas, a regulator in California, an installer in the Netherlands and an investor in New York may arrive at the value of distributed energy for entirely different reasons.

That's okay.

As Amy argued, the industry doesn't need everyone to agree on why a solution is valuable before they can agree that it is valuable.

National narratives around affordability, reliability, resilience and abundance can provide a foundation. But effective communications increasingly require those ideas to be translated through local economic realities, cultures and concerns.

That means listening before messaging.

4. Trust is built locally and through experience

The most persuasive spokesperson for an energy technology isn't always the CEO, engineer or policy expert.

Sometimes it's the homeowner whose battery kept the lights on.

Or the local installer who employs people in the community.

Or the small business owner who avoided an outage.

Amy described how customers can often explain the value of distributed energy more effectively than industry experts because they're talking about something they've actually experienced. Giving reporters and policymakers opportunities to meet those customers or visit installations themselves turns an abstract policy conversation into something real.

Keith expanded on that idea by distinguishing education from trust.

People don't necessarily trust a technology because they understand every component behind it. Trust develops when something works, delivers value, behaves predictably and meets expectations.

And the messenger matters.

Depending on the community, the most credible voice might be a customer, mayor, business owner, installer, athlete, clergy member or another local leader.

For communicators, community engagement therefore can't simply be a scaled-down national campaign.

It needs to be a conversation.

5. The data center debate is a communications opening for distributed energy

Few issues have pushed electricity into the mainstream conversation as rapidly as AI and data centers.

The scale and speed of projected electricity demand has generated legitimate concern about grid infrastructure, generation and consumer electricity costs.

But the panel argued that this conversation also creates an opening to rethink the role of distributed energy.

If data centers are being asked to bring generation to support their enormous new loads, why shouldn't households and communities also be empowered to bring their own generation and storage and be compensated for the value those resources provide to the grid?

Solar, batteries and virtual power plants can help turn consumers from passive ratepayers into active participants in the energy system.

The challenge is demonstrating that value at meaningful scale and turning technical evidence into stories people remember. The panel pointed to examples of rooftop solar reducing system load and virtual power plants supporting grids during periods of peak demand as the kinds of proof points communicators need to elevate.

And with electricity demand rising rapidly, the conversation is increasingly moving away from choosing a single "best" energy technology.

As Amy put it during the webinar: “We need every single electron.”

From energy transition to energy participation

Perhaps the biggest communications opportunity ahead is changing the role people believe they play in the energy system.

Keith closed the conversation with a vision for the next several years: homeowners becoming active participants in the transition; distributed energy being treated as infrastructure embedded within the grid; and companies, utilities, policymakers and other stakeholders aligning around the value these resources can provide, even when their reasons for supporting them differ.

That future won't be unlocked by better technology alone.

It will require better storytelling.

For communicators, the mandate is increasingly clear: simplify complexity, make value tangible, meet audiences where they are, elevate trusted messengers and connect the energy transition to the issues already shaping people's lives.

The opportunity is there. Now we need to tell the story.

Watch the full Latitude Media webinar featuring Antenna Group, Sunrun and Enphase Energy here.

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