A Clean Energy Tipping Point

Let me tell you what happens when you start to feel momentum. You push harder.

It looked like it happened overnight, but those of you who've been with us from the beginning know that we knocked on doors and talked to strangers about balcony solar at farmer's market. What you might not know, though, is that for nearly six months, we talked and emailed with NYT, AP, and NPR reporters trying to convince them what you already knew - there is a story here in balcony solar. A big one.

This is the tipping point we're pushing toward. When consumers adopt clean energy because it's the rational economic choice - when, as we project in our forthcoming white paper, average payback periods for plug-in solar fall below 3 years - North Americans will adopt it in the tens of millions. When adopting plug-in solar becomes a choice driven by cost savings alone, we couldn't stop this train even if we wanted to. But this train can't even leave the station until we do something that might seem counterintuitive to die-hard environmentalists like me - we need to pass deregulatory legislation.

I hope you join me and Sam Matey, author of the Weekly Anthopocene, on September 21 at 4 pm PT as part of the Sun Day celebration to discuss deregulation and the economics of the energy transition and, while you’re multitasking on the webinar, you’ll work toward this vision with all the other participants by telling your legislator that we need to deregulate balcony solar in this country and we need to deregulate it now. 

And that’s how it's going to happen. Hard work first, seemingly without progress, and then – seemingly overnight – we win.