The Future of Energy Communities and Social Innovation with Dorothy Grandia

Demand is critical to ensure security, reliability and affordability. Managing demand as we have seen in the past few years, relying on the trade of fossil fuels across countries comes at a huge cost. It is just not a direct cost and so we haven’t factored it in very well, but the invasion of Ukraine and the subsequent energy insecurity reminds us all that fossil fuels come with an enormous cost that is social and economic, let alone environmental.

Let’s talk about how we define efficiency. If you define efficiency at the device level, it is different than defining efficiency in the systemic level and I’m talking about the whole economy and society. Often you see countries in the West trying to encourage efficiency with subsidy and the problem is the unevenness of those subsidies. So, when it comes to energy efficiency, the question is always who is benefiting and who is paying for it, and that is a big policy question with subsidy and tax in general. The approach to energy efficiency at the connection point level, so on a consumer level, whether that consumer is a public school or your grandmother’s apartment, is heavily dependent not only on electricity consuming devices but also on how we handle heating, especially in Northwestern Europe. How you handle heating is then highly dependent on who owns the building and who owns the building is part of the big problem of efficiency and with the energy transition in general. One way we are handling a lot of policy is to say that from now on these kinds of devices that are replaced every x years have to have this amount of efficiency or ability to be flexible. That is a good thing, and certainly it is not a problem when you look at relative standardization of devices across the planet. This is not necessarily the case for how we handle any kind of thermal efficiency. Then you are really looking at a much more difficult question which is not sort of a plug and play answer like just tell all the washing machine manufacturers that they have to comply with this kind of efficiency standards. 

Having said that, it would be good if we had more uniform approach in this global world to managing device efficiency, but I think what we should also manage is the concept of efficiency and why it matters. In the beginning years of solar and wind, there used to be a lot of complaints from the fossil-fuel world that solar panels are not efficient because their capacity factor is so low, which means they aren’t producing a 100% of what they could produce all the time. And when you finance a centralized power plant over its lifespan, you are financing on the basis of the capacity factor. So, that is the concept of efficiency for people with fossil-fuels background, in investment at least. But the question is, philosophically, do we need to worry about efficiency if we are fully renewable?

If we could harness all the available solar power, all the available wind power, all the available hydro power and find a way to both distribute and store it, we don’t have an efficiency problem, what we have is a distribution, storage and demand management problem that is more localized. Part of the problem when you are talking with people in the existing energy landscape, or the traditional energy landscape is that the nature of renewables is so profoundly different than the nature of fossil-based energy and this sets an important thought to keep in mind particularly in communication. If we continually extrapolate our solutions out of the pre-existing system as opposed to designing an energy landscape of the future and figuring out how to get there, the more we extrapolate from the past, the more frankensteinian the results. We don’t talk enough about the realities of what is coming, not what we should do. But it is coming, the realities of a renewable energy-based landscape are profoundly different, so we need to start talking about not just how we provide renewable, affordable, sustainable and secure energy and mobility next year or 5 years from now. We really need to start talking about 2050. We need to start talking about how to make the bridge between where we are now and where we want to be in the future and instead of just taking incremental steps that are going to go certain way which might be completely inefficient route, we need to talk about which steps are going to get us to this destination faster.

When I was 30, looking at myself as a 57-year-old, I expected to feel wise, experienced and tell people how to do things. What I think I experience now, working as an academic in an atmosphere of asking questions and then examining whether it is the right question to ask, is that communication needs to keep an open and a curious mind. What astonishes me is how often I can learn things from younger people and what I learned from younger people is to challenge the way that I think. The way that I think as a 57-year-old is a product of a lot of experience, wisdom and socialization that was rooted in the 60s, 70s and the 80s and Cold war thinking. That is just the reality of my upbringing, and I am not unique. It doesn’t matter how intelligent you are, how educated you are, how many titles you have, after you’ve been around for a half century you need to ask yourself: “How is my perspective, my idea, my communication on an issue informed by my biases that are coming from that astounding number of years of socialization?” Essentially, it is where a lot of bias comes from. 

We need to listen to young people more and I think what young people are actually good at is that you question everything about my generation. One of the things you question is the rampant consumerism, the “more, more, more”. I come from a generation of bigger, better, faster, further and it becomes sort of ingrained in your ego after a while. Younger people are better at setting boundaries, expectations for themselves, their peers and how they’re going to behave throughout the day. If this is the case, if young people are going to be the 50-year-olds 25 years from now, they are going to be bearing the brunt of the climate crisis. We owe it to ourselves to quit thinking of young activists, no matter their techniques, as something that young people just do and that we should go on making the decisions.

That means we need to shift our conversations away from debate and away from discussion, which is always looking for an answer or a solution, and never asking questions: “Are we trying to solve the right problem? Are we just doing a mandate?”. We need to head to dialogue. This problem is too big and too complex to just put a million and a half band-aids on little issues and not take a systemic approach to the complexity.

What we need to do is learn how to incorporate dialogue into not just our policy making efforts, but organizational efforts and collaboration efforts. We have to start listening to each other better. Active listening is a process of not just delaying your own thoughts for a moment but ensuring that you understand the meaning, the perspective and the intent of the person who’s speaking and that’s what doesn’t really happen right now. And I believe the only way to get a really high-quality energy transition going is for us to spend more time. It’s counterintuitive. You think you need to act fast, so we better talk fast, debate and fight past, but what we actually need to do is slow down and think consciously and awarely about the nature of our communication. “Are we inviting? Are we clarifying our understanding of meaning and perspective and are we asking the right questions and discovering the right shared interests?” Because, until we find out what is the shared interest that we all have in discussion or conversation or a dialogue, our communication tends to devolve into a discussion with an idea that there’s an obvious answer, and there just never is in something that’s so complex. Not one person knows the answer to this.

I don’t have sufficient experience as a communication strategist on behalf of any of those kinds of companies. I can only tell you what I noticed from the outside and it’s the dynamic that informs the communication. People do not realize how transparently and unintentionally transparent, their communication reflects their industry background. You can even see in someone’s body language their educational background, their functional orientation and energy industry is the whole palette. I would even say, if you’ve got a 100 people in a room and half of them were grid operators and the other half were energy providers, I could just stand with you and point out physical, facial, expression and language differences between grid operators and energy providers. Having said that, the main job of energy providers is not to provide energy, it is to make money. You hear it in the way they frame and structure their communication. I’m not meaning to demean the intellect of people working in big energy companies. They are smart people, they are people with a good intention as well and we must realize that fossil fuel-based energy providers have gotten us to where we are now, not just in a bad way resulting in a climate crisis, but in a good way. Although things could have been done differently, the fact that we have made all the progress globally in the past 100 years of course is strongly correlated to access to affordable energy. We shouldn’t forget to honour that for the value that it brought to us. That is not easy, but we should, we should say thank you. It is like when someone retires, at the retirement party, you don’t say: “We can’t wait for you to leave so the next person can redesign all the processes you use because your processes are old and stupid.” and we shouldn’t do that with fossil-fuels as well. 

One of the major challenges of energy providers right now is the shareholder problem. On the one hand, we like to think of ourselves as big strategists, thinking 10-20 years in the future. On the other hand, you need to keep your shareholder dividends rolling in. You’ve got big institutional investors that are counting on your company to be a reliable investment. In the short term, if I see any movement at all, it is in shareholder activism, both in the way that really irritates energy providers, and the way that providers really start to listen to it, which is big institutional investments. “We are not sure how reliable this investment is over the longer term so we may need to get out.” As soon as you hear that, you hear the communication change. 

But speaking of changing the communication inside of the energy company, first of all, no one listens to the commercials like “We are an energy company, and we really care.” No one believes that, so stop, just don’t do that anymore. It is time for energy companies to come up with less slick marketing. I think in terms of profit-making companies one must always think in communication about whether you are on the listening or the delivering side. On the delivering side, be transparent, be specific, don’t be vague, don’t be general. The more vague and general you are as an energy provider in your communication, the more it sounds like you are trying to tell a happy story and hide what it is you are actually doing. Be specific in a way that means something. Don’t say: “We are building TW of capacity.”, rather say, and it often is the case in their public communication, “We are building enough capacity to keep the lights on in 48 000 homes.” Make it real, make it understandable, make it clear, with less jargon and less cliché. Also, in the policy making discussion around how we deal with the commercialization of energy, we need to be a little bit more clear about who benefits, who pays and how taxes and subsidies really work.

The energy transition is a transition requiring technological innovation which is complicated and social innovation, which is complex. The social innovation part of the energy transition is radically more difficult than the technological innovation part. We have all the technology we need, it is either usable now or in development. What we need is the social innovation to make the decisions of investment and rapid upscaling of every kind of capacity, not just electricity capacity, but labour capacity, digital capacity. All these big challenges, including how we strand assets, these are all social decisions, and these are notoriously difficult which is a power fight unless you have good leadership. 

We are looking for the best leadership of the energy transition and what we know from research is that quick, deft decisions that are relatively simple but urgent and uncomplicated are best made by leadership or groups that are homogeneous whether that means gender or educational background or nationality or ethnicity. But the more long-term your decision-making, the more collaboration or coordination required across stakeholders and the more you need to take into consideration a broad range of variables and potential outcomes, the less well homogeneous groups perform. That constitutes a big problem for the energy transition. It constitutes a big problem for the transition to sustainable healthcare, for effective political systems and governance systems. So, there is a lot of transitions in the world taking place and when we have homogeneous leadership as we do now, we are having a sub optimal decision-making quality. That is a difficult conversation to have, to look systemically and strategically at the big, not just organizational challenges, but big socio-economic challenges and realize we have a system which does not serve those organizations or societies well enough. 

What we need is inclusion and I don’t mean the happy rainbow type of inclusion where everyone is smiling on a picture that you can look up on Google Images. I am talking about the challenging, time-consuming, confronting work of reconciling different perspectives and making those different perspectives useful. In communication especially, one of the toughest but most valuable approaches we can take is not shying away from conflict or avoiding it which is often what we do when we are finding new talent or hiring new leadership. We go with what we know, we self-replicate, it is familiar, it is not going to challenge us, it reminds me of me, which is going to be easy in a challenging circumstance. But in a conversation, especially in the context of the challenge, it is not good to avoid the conflict. Don’t make a conflict out of where you go for lunch, it doesn’t matter if you accommodate someone. If you don’t like Chinese as much as you like Mexican food and you go for Chinese once a week, it is fine. But on big important decision-making that is part of organizational performance and part of socioeconomic changes, we need to engage in differences productively. We need to learn from them, we need to remain curious about understanding different perspectives and we need to not rush into decision-making and that is essentially the value of inclusion and particularly gender inclusion. We must in the world of gender always flip our thinking instead of asking ourselves. We’re all the women we need to ask, why are there so many men here?

Part of communication thoughtfulness that we like to engage in ECWO is to always challenge your own thinking and one of the things that we have discovered is that using that flip method works a lot. When you hear, women don’t like to study hard sciences, we can often just challenge ourselves and think, math is a fairly learnable skill for most people. It is mostly about practice and mostly about support and mostly about giving time.

We need to challenge how we think about what is valuable to the society and how we understand the nature of the transition we are making from the 20th to the 21st century. In the past, technological innovation has accounted for a huge amount of economic growth. We can fly everywhere now, we have more efficient use of energy, bigger and better and production gains, etc. and a lot of it is based on the hard sciences. What I am also going to suggest is that hard sciences are important in innovation, but in their execution, the intelligence required to execute and innovate the execution of developments in technological innovation is actually a complex skill that requires not math skills, but complex understanding of systems and that is a humanities approach. Women as a gender are socialized to carry a lot of the role of understanding where people are coming from and caring for them. Both men and women expect women to do a lot more systemic work in the society, understanding groups, understanding communication, understanding systems and understanding how they work. This is complex, these are not repeatable processes like canning fruit. So, as a result, you get this kind of funny economy where there is a lot of men doing operational work, labour-oriented work, technical oriented work, repeatable processes, execution of technology and a lot of women doing complex social problems. Difficult to measure and difficult to track does not mean less important, it means more difficult. What we have unfortunately come to in our Western world is that we like commerce and the market to solve the easy problems, and we give the really tough problems to policymakers and the government to solve, because it is not profitable, and it is not easy. You see that in the energy transition as well. Demand resource aggregators end up cherry picking the easy to balance, easy to leverage devices to balance the grid and then for everything else they let policymakers fill in the rest because it is more complicated and more complex, more difficult. We need to stop thinking this way. We need to stop thinking, math is hard, and guys do math and women don’t. This is just nonsense thinking. 

In ECWO, what we are trying, we are not blaming men, we are not fixing women, we are looking at systems, we are looking at the relationship of gender and gender bias in systems and outcomes and we are especially taking a research-based approach to asking the question what can full inclusion offer not just to organizational performance, but to solving grand socio-economic transitions and their complexity. There is a lot of research that suggests that the more women, but also more diversity in general, and not just outward diversity, but experiential and thinking diversity, the more that you add that into decision-making groups, the better they perform. It is kind of a hard truth for the current system to hear.

I think there is a wonderful framework for understanding how people maneuver through conversations when there is conflict involved and I don’t mean angry conflicts, I mean just a lack of agreement. There is looking out after your own interests at the expense of others, which is a very competitive approach, there is looking out at the other’s interest instead of yours, which is very accommodating, very social and there is avoiding the conflict altogether, looking out for neither’s interest at the moment, which is sometimes the right thing to do. It is very much a timing issue. 

Most of the time the middle is seen as a compromise zone. You get a little and I get a little bit. This is often only a really useful approach if you are looking at decisions or agreements of low value. But when it comes to big complicated or complex transitions or big social changes like we are experiencing, the most productive approach is collaborative in a conversation. Collaborative is a cliché word now, but what it means is looking out for your own interests and looking out for someone else’s interests together, while you explore unrealized potential for value for both, for all parties in an agreement. That again requires a lot of dialogue, it is not a fast way to make a decision. The standard analogy is if we have an orange and we both want the orange what we are likely to do if we have equal powers is just to cut the orange in half and each of us walk away with half an orange. In negotiation with impact, what we are working towards is finding out you know when it is good time to collaborate which takes more time, but if I find out that you are wanting orange juice and I just want the peel for my baking what it turns out is that we can get the full value out of the orange without either of us sacrificing anything.

I think what I’m going to call the biggest challenge in communication is the tightrope. The tightrope is effective because of gender bias of both men and women about both men and women. We expect men to project a lot of confidence in what they are saying, and we expect women to be warm and inviting and engaging. Both men and women can be quite persuasive in communication if they learn how to use both confidence and engagement at the right time for the right reason. However, and particularly in male-dominated environments, the norm of communication is you dive in, you make your case, you debate, you discuss, you use a lot of confidence and assertiveness in communication. When women do that often they are perceived as confident but unlikable and they pay a price for being unlikable. If they go the other direction, and they cushion, they say: “Well you know, this is just my opinion, I just think maybe it would be good for our team if we took a different approach in this process.” and they use a very engaging, warm and inviting kind of approach, then women are perceived as likable but not credible. So, women often find themselves in communication walking that tightrope between “I just have to be right here, where I’m both credible and like” and that is hard, men have a wider tightrope there. 

In negotiation however, women often have some advantages, as long as they are trained to understand. So, I would rather speak about how women can overcome gender bias and get better results in negotiation. In distributive negotiation, which is not complicated, we don’t have a relationship, I’m just buying something from you at a market stall somewhere on vacation, I am never going to see you again and it is an even exchange. If it is just an exchange of money or goods, then an assertive style gets the best value. Know your boundaries, know what you want and take a competitive approach. But in a complex situation, that is mostly the ones we are in at work, where we may be negotiating for resources today, but we are going to be negotiating for resources again in 6 months with the same person and we need to preserve the relationship and negotiate, women have a twofold advantage if they learn how to use it. 

Number one, when women spend more time finding out in advance of the negotiation, understanding the perspective of others, really listening, asking questions that help them to produce a more productive dialogue then they understand more of the interests, the constraints, the motivations of their counterparty and that provides a better outcome in negotiations then just the straightforward competitive approach. 

The second thing that women can do to improve their negotiation outcomes is to learn that gender bias may prevent women from having better outcomes if they are very competitive. Men are like “I want this and I won’t do it for less than 85000 a year.” If they take that competitive approach people think “Wow, he’s really tough”, but they don’t give them a penalty for being tough. If a woman says: “I am not going to do this for less than 85000 a year”, then she is considered unlikable, and that is a penalty. When women learn to frame the value of a negotiated outcome as it benefits other people, they can work around that problem. “If I have 85000 a year for this project, what we can achieve is not only a better outcome for the company, but we can start to develop talent in the team for this project, and also for the company in the future, which really works out not only for your aims on this project, but for these team members, we would like to keep in the company for more than the next 2 years.” So, framing the value of the negotiated outcome for others helps women get around the tightrope because they are acting to stereotype, acting to gender expectations.

You are going into a field of great complexity. Have a vision for the energy transition and its value for economy, society and planet that is long term and start communicating in a structured way the relationship of what we need to do right now, the resources we need to do it and how that resource and action contributes to the larger goal, so that you become a person with vision and also with action, and that we see the relationship between the two, action and visionary outcome. And that helps us to close the gap between all the million tiny steps and implementations we need to take into thousand different arenas and the shared outcome that the planet and the people ought to have in 2050 or whatever date you choose.