Volts podcast: 20 years of solar advocacy, with Adam Browning of Vote Solar

In this episode, veteran solar advocate Adam Browning reflects on
20 years of running campaigns as the founder and leader of Vote
Solar, one of the scrappiest and most successful solar advocacy
organizations in the US. Browning, who is stepping down from
leadership this year, helped grow the group from four people to
40, and along the way he’s learned a few things about how
nonprofit campaigns can succeed against better funded opponents.


Full transcript of Volts podcast featuring Adam Browning,
September 17, 2021


(PDF version)


David Roberts:


There aren't a lot of positive, hopeful stories competing for
attention in the US these days, but one ray of light — if you'll
pardon the pun — comes in the form of solar power. During the
21st century it has plunged in price, to the point that it is the
cheapest available source of power in most big energy markets.
Though it provides just 3 percent of US electricity today,
analysts say it could provide close to half by mid-century. 


Adam Browning has lived through every stage of this extraordinary
ongoing story. He co-founded Vote Solar, a nonprofit that
advocates for solar energy at the state level, in 2002, to push
for solar on public buildings in San Francisco. 


Since then, he has helped build a team of 40 people that operates
across the country and has led numerous campaigns for state
policy and regulatory changes. For as long as I’ve been doing
energy journalism, I’ve known Adam and Vote Solar to be reliable
sources — smart, practical, and results-oriented. I read all
their emails, which regular listeners will know is high praise.


Now, after 20 years, Browning is stepping back, shifting to an
advisory role and handing off day-to-day leadership of Vote
Solar. Given his long experience, I thought it would be
interesting to talk to him about what he has learned, how much
things have changed for solar, and where solar and climate
advocacy need to go next.


Adam Browning, welcome to Volts.


Adam Browning:  


Thanks, really pleased to be here.


David Roberts:   


You’ve been at this for 20 years now. Tell me the Adam Browning
origin story. How did you gravitate to this particular field? It
must have been relatively soon after you were out of college; it
must have been one of the first things you did and stuck with it.
Tell us how you got into all of this.


Adam Browning:  


You're too kind. My youthful demeanor — I’ll have to tell my
stylist. It wasn't quite right out of college. I've never had a
plan that I put into place; I've always moved from the thing that
seemed really interesting to me at the time, and then was open to
that next opportunity. 


After college, I did Peace Corps in West Africa, which was in
many ways an incredibly formative experience, a moveable feast
that I continue to look back on and think about, and that
experience continues to nourish. After that, I joined EPA in San
Francisco, the Region 9 office, and worked there for about eight
years. The origin story — not of Adam Browning, but really Vote
Solar, which is probably more to the point here — was really born
out of spending a good chunk of time with the federal government
doing environmental protection. I was doing a lot of enforcement
and inspecting smokestacks, and fines were exceeding limits in
some ways.


David Roberts:   


This would have been during the Clinton years, yes? 


Adam Browning:  


Yes, and then a little bit of the Bush years. So that experience
was a wonderful introduction to how environmental protection
works and doesn't work in this country. 


When I was nearly 30, I had a beer with a college buddy, and he
was working for then-San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown. This
friend, David Hochschild, is now a California energy
commissioner, the chair of the Commission. He had just put solar
on his roof at home. At the time, solar was really expensive, and
there wasn't much of it; it was very much a hippie pipe dream.
But he put it on his house and was enthralled by it. And he was
like, “Hey man, we should try to put this on City Hall. We need
to have governments take the lead.” 


Through that beer and subsequent napkin diagramming, we came up
with the idea of a revenue bond to put solar and energy
efficiency on public buildings in San Francisco and then use the
avoided energy costs, the energy payments, to pay down the bonds,
so you have long-term, low-interest capital. It all penciled out.
That turned into first a campaign to get it on the ballot as a
ballot initiative, and then a citywide campaign to pass this
ballot initiative. That was Prop B. This is back in 2001. 


That experience was really galvanizing, transformative for me in
a couple of different ways. One: this idea of solar as an
emission-free technology. I’d been spending all this time trying
to control smokestacks; how about if we just didn't have any at
all? That really dropped for me.


Secondly, we had this campaign where you could actually do solar
— then, again, really expensive — but we could do it cost
effectively, the way that we'd had this scoped out. That just
gripped the imagination. We had legions of volunteers throughout
the city; people were really excited to be a part of something
larger than themselves. That ballot initiative passed by 73
percent of the vote, which was really high in those days. 


Then we started getting calls from around the country — how can
we do this in our city? — which was when we decided to quit our
jobs and take this grassroots campaign to a much larger campaign.
We had this theory, we had analyses that showed that the way to
get cheap solar was through economies of scale: you needed to buy
a lot of expensive solar, you needed to show a long-term market
for this technology, in order to induce the manufacturers and
would-be manufacturers to invest their capital into scaling up
factories and the whole supply chain.


David Roberts:   


Solar has changed so fast: the technology, the prices, the social
mores around it, how it's viewed. So take us back to 2002: Was
anybody even thinking about solar? Was it viewed as just a hippie
affectation? How much did it cost? What was the world of solar
like in 2002? 


Adam Browning:  


So back then, solar was about $9 a watt.


David Roberts:   


We're closing in on $1 a watt now, is that right? 


Adam Browning:  


For the actual panels themselves, you're looking at 25 cents a
watt. Utility-scale installations are well under $1. So
essentially, nearly an order of magnitude less expensive right
now.


There was 163 megawatts total installed in the US. So, yeah, back
in them old days, people knew of solar; I think it was understood
as something that had some degree of promise, but again, the cost
put it out of reach for being taken seriously as a long-term,
significant portion of our energy resource.


David Roberts:   


So were people planning for it? Like DOE, when they did their
projections at the time — were people saying it was going to grow
into something big? Or was it viewed as a niche thing for the
century? 


Adam Browning:  


I would compare it to the algae that you see Exxon always
advertising. It was ARCO and Mobil that had these investments in
solar; Shell did as well. There were many really wonderful,
well-meaning people involved in that, so I don't mean to diminish
the seriousness of their efforts. There were a lot of oil majors
that were investing in it. DOE was putting money into serious
research and development. But it all seemed very far off. It was
this thing that did not yet exist, and we all hoped that someday
it would. 


Solar then suffered from the start-stop-start-stop of market
incentives. Particularly in the California Central Valley, there
were installations around with the large parabolic troughs, SEGS
plants that had seemed promising, and as soon as everybody scaled
up to respond to the incentives, they were then pulled. You never
could take advantage of that momentum.


So the early history of solar, again: a lot of research and
development, not a lot of smart, long-term market support to
bring it to scale. 


In early years, that underestimation of solar's potential really
helped in many ways. Like when you scored the federal investment
tax credit, no one thought it would really take off, so it scored
really low, and that was actually helpful for it to go through.


David Roberts:   


So you have wildly expensive solar that you can make
cost-effective in certain limited applications. You have cheap,
patient capital and entities willing to wait for it. I'm sure it
was just a series of short-term campaigns at first, but at what
point did you have a long-term plan? In retrospect, was your plan
as optimistic as reality turned out to be?


Adam Browning:  


I would say no, the plan was not as optimistic as reality turned
out to be, although it was very specific and accurate as to what
would happen. There are often times when you have policy that
promises an outcome and fails to deliver on it; here was
something that absolutely, bullseye. 


We had analyses of comparable technologies. Solar is basically a
semiconductor; you had examples of integrated circuits that were
developed and funded by the military, who was willing to pay an
enormous premium in order to have a technology that was much
lighter than the capacitors it replaced, and through that
investment really brought down the cost through economies of
scale. So we had examples of other technologies. 


We had this report from KPMG Netherlands that Greenpeace had paid
them to analyze; it said, in essence, that if you brought about a
global market that could support a factory that would deliver 500
megawatts a year of solar panels, you would be at grid parity.
That was directionally accurate, but we now have factories that
are much, much larger than that, of course.


So the cost drop of solar exceeded expectations, though it was
definitely bumpy. Even though we had predicted this effect by
virtue of what these policies would do, this whole long-term
market demand, at the same time, we didn't really anticipate that
we would be passing legislation this quickly that would require
100 percent clean energy. 


Yesterday, the Illinois House passed, finally, a bill that will
require 100 percent clean energy. It's expected to pass through
the Senate on Monday. That makes the tenth state; well over 35
percent of the people who live in this country now live in a
state where carbon-based electricity is illegal, will be legally
mandated to phase out by a certain date. That's on the basis of
having this scale availability of cheap, zero-emission power.


David Roberts:   


It was not that long ago that the idea that any governmental
entity of any size would target 100 percent clean energy was
absolutely out of the universe. Early in my career, I remember
projections that solar would catch up around 2070; coal was still
expected to dominate well past 2050. The scale of the changes is
really hard to cram in your head. 


But now the energy wonk community has developed a pretty good
sense of how you scale up a technology and make it cheaper.
There's a more formalized understanding of that; solar is the
model now of how you go about doing it. But of course, back in
2002, you didn't know that.


So I'm curious, when you were thinking about advocacy, what was
your plan? What was your instinct about what kind of policies
would be both politically possible and efficacious at scaling
this up?


Adam Browning:  


That's a great question. In the beginning, when we first
launched, we were like, OK, we’ll do a bunch more of these
city-led initiatives: the power of energy democracy to drive
choice in energy supply. Solar was this perfect technology
because it circumvented the decisionmakers; you could put it on
your own roof, you didn't have to wait for the utility to make
the right decision. You could take that power and do it
yourself. 


So we initially said, we're going to do a bunch more of these
city-led efforts. We got our grant from the Energy Foundation,
$50,000, our first grant, and we started looking at some of these
other cities, and it was like, oh, wait a minute. Actually, there
is state-level policy infrastructure that enables people to be
able to install solar upon their own roof and generate their own
energy, and those were the preconditions for being able to do a
city-led initiative. So that caused us to reevaluate our strategy
and really focus on the state-level policy infrastructure. 


When you're looking at a solar market, you're only as strong as
your weakest link. It's never the one thing; it is the four or
five things that you have to link together. So one of the key
insights that we had early on was that the solution was really at
the state level; that was where most energy decisions are made,
and you're much closer to democracy there. I don't know how to
pass anything through the federal government. I don't know that
anybody does. But at the state level, on the legislative side,
you are much closer to being able to actually influence the
outcome of legislative battles. 


The other large piece of this, of course, is regulatory, through
the public utilities commissions. Our first effort was the
California Solar Initiative. This was something that a wonderful
advocate, Bernadette Del Chiaro, who headed Environment
California then, had been working through the legislature for
many years, and it kept not being able to pass.


We then, in collaboration with others, worked really hard to get
it through the California Public Utilities Commission. So you had
then-Governor Schwarzenegger, who really stood out as a strong
leader for this, establish a goal for a million solar roofs. It
was an ability to get it through the public utilities commission
to implement that — that ended up being about a $3 billion effort
to incentivize rooftop solar with a really elegant market design
through these declining incentives that got you down to grid
parity, when you wouldn't need any incentives at all
afterwards. 


David Roberts:   


When did that pass? What year was that?


Adam Browning:  


It was around 2004, 2005, that we finally got those through. That
was then also passed through the legislature afterwards and
confirmed, which was quite helpful. 


But that was a really big eye-opener for policymakers and for
energy nerds everywhere. That was a large chunk of money,
designed to last over 10 years; that was this signal to the
manufacturers of the world, to the installers of the state, that
this industry, this market is going to be around. There is a
commitment to it, time to scale up, go big. 


Then once you have the fifth-largest economy in the world commit
to it, it no longer seems so esoteric. Both Japan and Germany
then also were really strong leaders as well, so it was
definitely a global effort. But California really helped catalyze
that in the early 2000s with this type of campaign.


David Roberts:   


After California — which in terms of progressive policy, is the
low-hanging fruit — did you continue on trying to expand in
California, or did you move on to other states? What was the plan
of attack?


Adam Browning:  


A little bit of both. There's a story of how you actually run and
grow a nonprofit advocacy organization. So you are fundraising;
philanthropy is the lifeblood of your efforts, and you have to be
able to fundraise in order to feed your ambitions on this. For
many years, we were two people, three people, four people. We
were very small. It wasn't until 2008 that we were able to open
an east coast office.


So I would say, over the course of Vote Solar's history, we had a
70/30 split. The majority of our efforts were in places where we
thought we could get traction, that there was a political
appetite, that we could have a real line of sight to success.
Then we spent a non-trivial part of our time in lonely places
where there wasn't much going on, but if we didn't help catalyze,
if we didn't plant the early seeds, it wasn't going to happen.
Somebody needed to do it. We always wanted to be an organization
where we weren't just, me too; we wanted to be involved in fights
that weren't going to be won but for our involvement. That was
why we also put so much investment in places that it took a long
time, a long fuse to actually pay off. 


So immediately after California: Arizona, New Mexico, and some of
these sunnier western states, then really invested in a lot of
the east coast policy as well. We opened an office in New York in
2008. Then, gradually, a couple of the midwestern and
southeastern states. It was the Turner Foundation that brought us
into Florida and Georgia, where there wasn't much going on at the
time. But we sent one of our best, smartest advocates down to
scope out a plan for how we could help catalyze something in
Georgia. That campaign was completely different from what we did
and what we looked like in California, but in collaboration with
some awesome local advocates, we were able to help move the
needle there as well.


We are now 40 people working in about 26 states across the
country; over 20 years, that's been a lot of growth for a very
different organization than we started. 


David Roberts:   


To focus in on these early years: Were you 100 percent about
advocating for policies? Was there any communications campaigns
or, god forbid, awareness campaigns? Or were you a strictly
policy advocacy shop?


Adam Browning:  


I think you've written beautifully about “change doesn't happen
just because you're right.” So there's a huge power-building
component to this. I can't overemphasize how much collaboration
and partnership with local place-based, community-based
organizations in everywhere we've worked has been absolutely
crucial to success. 


Vote Solar as an organization brings pretty deep sophistication
around solar policy and then brings some campaigning expertise,
as well. So our model has typically been this inside-outside
game, where if you're doing legislation, passing bills, you
really need to power map who can actually get something done,
what kind of campaigns are they going to be receptive to,
building all the information necessary in order to get it passed,
and then, of course, following the lead of the local
organizations that have the relationships, that have the local
voice, that have the power as to how that actually happens. 


Similarly, for the regulatory campaigns, these are legalistic
processes in public utility commissions. You have to have a
lawyer intervene, have standing, create a docket full of math,
full of actual demonstration of facts. You never win just because
you're right. You also, at the same time, have to build an
outside game, a parade that these policymakers can jump in front
of and be responsive to. You need to make sure that policymakers
know what the public wants and that they feel accountable to
answer to them. That takes a lot of communications work, a lot of
grassroots organizing work, a lot of partnership with
community-based organizations. 


Increasingly for us, this has been also about
environmental-justice communities. Over the past five years,
everything that we have done has been with equity groups and
environmental-justice campaigners, listening to them,
establishing partnerships with them, and following their lead on
these campaigns.


David Roberts:   


Over 20 years, you’ve run a lot of different campaigns in
different places with different people you're targeting. If you
had to generalize, what is it that makes a campaign successful?
What are the markers that distinguish your successful campaigns
from the unsuccessful ones? What needs to be in place?


Adam Browning:  


Winning, for one. But that's a little too flip.


I actually love campaigning, and the parts of it I like are
finding creative ways to get people engaged. So much of
environmentalism has been about no, and not about, but what do we
say yes to. So an organizing ethos of Vote Solar was centered on,
this is something that people want. In fact, we poll around the
country, and this has been consistent over the past 20 years with
some fluctuation in the numbers, but directionally,
supermajorities of people in this country on both sides of the
aisle want to see this transition.


David Roberts:   


This is something that is utterly remarkable about solar, and,
especially in 2021, almost unique: It polls through the roof. It
always has. Were you ever surprised by how resilient and broad
that support is? It seems to defy political gravity in a way
almost no other issue I can think of does.


Adam Browning:  


It is remarkable, and we always tried to lean into that by
letting people bring their own reasons for why they should go
solar to the campaign and not defining it for them. In places
with different political outlooks, different hues, the words that
we used were different. Some places, this is about freedom; some
places, it's about jobs; other places, it's about climate. You
need to be very thoughtful as to how you talk about the rationale
behind it, but we generally tried to leave a space where people
could bring their own rationale. They like solar, we're not going
to tell them why they like solar. Let them bring that to the
campaign itself. 


To further reflect on your initial question around what
distinguishes a good campaign, I think a good campaign engages
people. Positive messaging, giving people that positive
alternative, what we want to do, a bright outlook — people want
to be a part of something larger than themselves. I think that is
a core insight into the human psyche. 


David Roberts:   


I've heard a lot of people around campaigning and the activist
world say some version of: it's easier to make people angry than
it is to get them to support something. It's easier when you have
a clear thing you're saying no to. Do you think that's wrong? Or
does solar just have some sort of magic fairy dust that switches
that over? 


Adam Browning:  


What you describe certainly powers most of my political giving
and my presidential election campaigning on my personal side, so
I definitely feel you, I get that. I'm not immune to that. We
definitely articulate, ”Why aren’t we seeing more solar? Who's
blocking it?” and it definitely creates the accurate picture of
why we're not seeing more. You can campaign against that. 


That said, we've done things like had billboards outside of the
Capitol that had the tagline, right after the Gulf oil spill,
“When there's a huge spill of solar energy, it's just called a
nice day. Yes on bill X.” That got in the paper and had ripple
effects. We had airplanes pulling sky banners that said, “This is
the prescription for oil addiction” at the same time that we had
large rallies with people dressed up in doctor outfits. I guess
you had to be there, but it was funny at the time. 


We tried to work in Texas; Texas is a hard place to work. But we
were sponsoring a bill and did analysis that showed how many jobs
there would be if this bill passed, and then we ran ads in the
Midland newspaper saying, “Help Wanted: 10,000 workers for the
solar economy. Call the legislature and tell them to pass X.”
Again, that then turned into a press piece on witty campaigns
that had a much larger impact than the $230 for that help-wanted
ad in the Midland Tribune. So those were parts of the campaigns
that I really enjoyed.


The thing about nonprofit campaigning is, you are always going to
be outspent. You are always going to be out-lobbied. You need to
figure out how to bring people-power to it. That is the part that
I have enjoyed the most: solar in so many ways is democracy in
energy and environmental decisionmaking. We’ve tried to make that
true.


David Roberts:   


I have been gritting my teeth waiting for polarization to swallow
solar’s popularity too, as it has swallowed everything else in
our public life. But as far as I can tell, it's mostly held up.
I’m wondering if you’ve seen any movement in that direction; are
you seeing it start to polarize? Are you seeing it associated
more now with democratic socialism whatever, or is it still
defying political gravity?


Adam Browning:  


I don't think solar is immune, per se, to being attacked, to
politicization. Look at Solyndra, which was an absolutely
manufactured scare-quotes scandal of an entirely successful
program that made money for the American people. That wasn’t
organic, that was — as many things in our politicized culture —
advocacy-driven, cynically so.


But I have not yet seen this. Right before the 2016 election, in
September, there was a Pew poll that showed that 87 percent of
would-be Trump voters supported solar and 92 percent of would-be
Clinton voters supported solar, despite the obvious division
between the two. 


I do think that solar needs to continue to earn and hold its
social capital and abandons that at its own peril. I do think
part of the pathway forward is trying to recapture manufacturing
for just that reason; we cannot offshore our supply chain if we
expect solar to supply nearly half the power of this country
going forward, which is why I think passing the Ossoff bill is
absolutely critical. It's our last hope for reshoring the
manufacturing.


David Roberts:   


That's a great segue to my next question. The solar campaigns
focused heavily on state-level policies: net metering to
encourage rooftop solar, renewable portfolio standards to ramp up
the percentage of solar. Those have been wildly successful; as
you say, something close to half the population lives in a state
now with these requirements. You have the policy pull for solar
in place. So what's the next frontier for solar advocacy? Is it a
turn to manufacturing and materials? Where do you see it going?


Adam Browning:  


There are three main things, and I could keep adding on, I could
go to 10. But let's just stick with these three right now. 


One is: the original premise behind my thinking around Vote Solar
is, once you made it cheap, it would just continue under the
gravitational pull of economics. Solar PPAs right now in sunny
spots are like 2 cents per kilowatt hour. They're just crazy,
it's awesome. Yet you still see places where they are trying to
build ginormous new fossil fuel. Duke Energy, for example,
largest utility in this country, knows very well how cheap solar
is. It's made these public commitments to net zero by 2050. Their
press announcements are wonderful; their plans that they file
with regulators tell a very different story. They're trying to
build massive amounts of new gas plants. It is still necessary
for advocacy to have a seat at the table and drive
deployments. 


We just saw the DOE come out with their solar roadmap for 40
percent by 2035. That will require, according to their numbers,
30 gigawatts a year of solar deployment through 2025 and then 60
gigawatts a year through the next decade after that.


David Roberts:   


For reference, it's about 15 GW a year now. So we have to double
that for the next five years, and then double that for the next
15 years to get to that target. It's pretty big.


Adam Browning:  


It's all totally doable, but it won't just happen because it's
cheaper and cleaner. There are still entrenched interests that
want to continue to profit from the fossil-fuel infrastructure
and legacy that we have.


David Roberts:   


When I say to people that it’s cleaner and cheaper, their natural
first question is, well then why isn’t everybody already doing
it? In a market, it's capitalism, economics ought to be dictating
things; at least that's people's intuitive sense of it. So what
are those forces now causing utilities or states to still push
for fossil fuels, even if it is true that they could get cheaper,
renewable energy?


Adam Browning:  


I think there are two things here. One is, in much of this
country we have vertically integrated utilities. That is to say
that you have a monopoly: they own the wires, they own the
generation, and they in essence get paid based upon how much
capital they deploy. There are regulators that are there to
approve their investments as prudent and in the customers’ best
interest, but there is a real capital bias towards getting a
return on equity for how much money they spend. So that's a big
part of it. 


The other part of it also leans into ease, or laziness. When we
go into an integrated resource plan, this is when a utility says,
“We want to build X,” and if it's gas we'll say, “Well,
renewables are cheaper.” First they say they want to do it for
economic concerns; then, when we show them renewables are
cheaper, they next say, well, we need it to keep the lights on,
we need it for reliability. So the moat we have to cross here is
cost, but that's the real castle keep: reliability. Because for
policymakers, this is a career-ending thing to get wrong. It's a
big trump card they play. 


I was going to lay out the three things that we need to work on:
We can run a system nationally with majority renewables in terms
of variable generation, and we need to make some changes to make
that work. We need to introduce a lot more flexibility into the
system. Partly that's batteries; partly that is a focus on demand
flexibility, essentially paying people to change when they charge
or give them incentives to be good grid citizens. We can talk
more about that if you’d like. It is also to some degree some
transmission that helps expand balancing areas, interconnects the
load centers with the best generating profile. 


So the reasons why we don't see this happen just because it's
cheaper and cleaner and better for everybody have to do mostly
with economics, in terms of perverse incentives inside of
utilities. It is a lot easier to have a gas plant; you just flip
a switch on rather than transforming the system to be more
flexible and resilient.


David Roberts:   


OK, so you said three areas for solar advocacy these days.


Adam Browning:  


The last — I should have led with it as the number one — is
inclusivity. As we make this transition from fossils to
renewables, we absolutely have to make sure that it benefits and
includes everybody. We cannot continue to replicate some of the
inequities of our fossil fuel system. 


Over the past five-plus years at Vote Solar, we've completely
changed how we go about planning our campaigns, how we go about
the policies that we work on, and it has really benefited
everybody by making this transformation. When we look at some of
these largest, most comprehensive climate bills, none of these
would have happened if it weren't for the leadership of the
environmental justice community. This goes from California’s
SB100 to the New York Climate Leadership and Community Protection
Act, to, as of this week, the Climate and Equitable Jobs Act in
Illinois. 


Across the board, beginning with developing partnerships with the
communities that we wish to serve, co-creating the policies to
make sure that they include benefits for everybody that everybody
can participate in, just builds these much stronger, much more
powerful coalitions that can get big things done.


I firmly believe that this is the path we need to double down on
as we continue to move forward in getting that further deployment
of solar. Broadly speaking, the more beneficiaries, the more
power building you have in order to make big changes happen.


David Roberts:   


Solar is everybody's favorite success story. It's one of the few
things that give me any hope at all. The tech and the economics
and the advocacy all worked together really well for solar, in
such a way as to really turbocharge it, and it's been amazing
these last 20 years.


But of course, solar is not the only thing we need for climate
mitigation. So how much of solar’s success is unique to solar?
This adaptability to different values, this image of
wholesomeness that is seemingly undentable: how much of what has
made solar advocacy work can be transferred to other pieces of
the puzzle that we need for clean energy, like home power
management and storage? Is solar's mojo transferable?


Adam Browning:  


Yes — and, that's a two-part question. One of the things that's
been awesome about solar is these monumental cost declines, from
something that was 10 times more expensive than the alternative
to something that is quite a bit cheaper than the fossil
alternative.


Can you see similar cost declines in other climate-necessary
technologies? I would argue, absolutely. I would also argue that
longtime readers of Dave Roberts will know that the path forward
for success is to electrify everything and run it all on
renewables. So having this cheap renewable energy is a foundation
for our hopes in other sectors as well. 


But if you're looking at mobility, batteries have come down 87
percent in the last decade, and they are far from done yet, both
with the battery technologies that are currently extant and the
new ones that are all being worked on. I think you could make a
similar argument for the electrification of buildings, for heat
pumps, which are nascent.


David Roberts:   


Make heat pumps as sexy as solar, Adam. That's your next goal.


Adam Browning:  


Sexy is one thing, but the first question is, can the technology
get cheaper through scale? Absolutely. Both the hardware as well
as all the soft costs associated with the workforce knowing what
the heck it is and then being able to efficiently install it,
removing all the bugs and the permitting and etc. So there's a
ton of work that can be done to reduce those costs. 


The other part of this — and I think the key to sexiness — is,
does it make your life better? Tell me, what's Tesla's
advertising budget?


David Roberts:   


Right. Zero.


Adam Browning:  


They shoot a car into space and they go on Twitter, and that's
it. It has zero advertising budget because it is absolutely
compelling. All the reservation lines for the Rivian trucks; the
F150, when they went electric and you could charge your house
with it, their reservation lines were absolutely huge.


I went to the launch of the Tesla Model 3, and nobody had ever
seen a picture of it, no one knew how many wheels it had, and
Elon got over a billion dollars worth of free money in terms of
$1,000 down payments on reservations. Before anyone had even seen
a picture of it! So yes, at least in vehicles, it's definitely
sexy. 


When it comes to home automation: I'm a customer of OhmConnect,
which is this company that's trying to help reduce grid costs
when the grid needs it most. First it was just by changing
behavior, sending people a text and asking them to turn off
lights. But now, all my major loads are on wifi-enabled plugs,
and when the grid needs it, it automatically turns off my
freezer, turns off my fridge.


Now, when my kindergartener daughter opens the fridge door and
the lights don't go on, she's like, “hey, Daddy, it's an Ohm
hour.” We all know every time that happens, for every 15-minute
increment, we're making a quarter. Every time they touch our
Nest, we're making 75 cents. So you can expect to make somewhere
around $300-$400 a year. You don't lift a finger, it's all
automated.


So, is getting paid to do nothing sexy? For some people, it
is. 


David Roberts:   


Yeah, that's my dream. 


Have you changed your mind at all about the state focus? If
anything, it seems even more apt now than it was when you settled
on it. Is that still your primary hope for climate progress?


Adam Browning:  


We do have a generational opportunity right now to get something
done with this Congress, especially if we were to get rid of the
filibuster, as longtime listeners and readers of your insight
well know.


I do think there is a way to get to what would effectively be an
iteration of what has worked so well in the states: a federal
standard for clean energy. You could make that happen. The entire
Biden administration has surprised me with their ambition, and it
is just rife with superstar leaders. I'm a committed west
coaster, but I definitely have some FOMO; working with those
people would be awesome. So this is the best scenario that we're
going to see on the federal level that we could possibly imagine
for quite some time. 


We've had a longstanding rule of thumb that if your plan involves
the federal government, or if your plan involves Congress, you're
gonna need another plan. That has always stood us in good stead.
But with Jigar Shah over at the Loan Program Office, they're
doing some really cool and innovative financing that will create
some durable models that will exist beyond his tenure there. The
federal government has a lot of money and a lot of power and can
do a lot of good; getting stuff through Congress is just another
matter entirely. So let's hope we can get something through, but
then double down on the states. 


We're going to continue to have to have state-level advocacy
going forward, and we have proven time and time again that you
can make big things happen that will have additional impacts
elsewhere: by bringing down costs; by bringing the jobs that
will, again, impact places where you're not doing it directly; by
advocacy; with solar, solar is cheap. There are utilities in
Indiana right now that are going ahead and doing their own math
and really digging deep on solar, and you just love to see it.


David Roberts:   


I want to ask about your experience founding an organization and
then running it for 20 years as it grows from two people to 40.
Navigating that shift, from “we're a tiny band of people who all
know each other and are good friends” to an actual organization
that’s something like a bureaucracy with levels and managers, is
a very difficult transition no matter what you're doing, but
especially in the nonprofit world, which is difficult to survive
in the best of circumstances. What do you feel like you've
learned about how to build an organization? What have you taken
away in terms of managerial wisdom?


Adam Browning:  


That is a great question, and we could do another hour podcast on
just that. I don't think that this is something unique to the
nonprofit side; there's a literature replete with founders that
are good at starting things and less good at scale. For me, I
didn't have many models of what a good boss looked like, what
successful management structures look like. That was exactly it:
we began as a couple of passion-driven, like-minded people, and
then grew. 


There were three, maybe four, big step changes of complexity,
where what worked before broke and I had to either learn
something new or get out. I tried to take that seriously, to
continuously ask myself, am I the best person to run this
organization right now? I had to grow a lot. I had to learn a lot
of new skills. I had to learn a theory and practice of management
that I was not born with. It has been far from a smooth road, but
it's been a lovely road full of a lot of those learnings that
we've all grown from.


But you’ve got to fundraise all the time, and you have to show
success in order to be a successful fundraiser all the time. It’s
part of what it means to run a nonprofit. Some of the historical
regrets I've had were, frankly, being so far attuned to looking
at all the external opportunities and wanting to have impact and
knowing that I could make change if I hired another campaigner
here, or regulatory person there. I wish throughout I had
invested a lot more on infrastructure, on the human resources
side. We had so many lovely, idealistic, mission-driven people
that were constantly overextended and overachieving under budget.
There's just a lot more foundational work to a larger
organization that I wished I'd invested in earlier. 


As I step down from Vote Solar, I want to put in this plug: as we
look back over this history of success and achievement, this is
not my success and achievement. There is such a legacy of awesome
alumni and current team members that have made all of this
happen. So the extent that I was able to do this was my ability
to provide the resources and then to get out of the way of
wonderful people doing wonderful things. Trust your people, give
them the resources they need, figure out what is blocking them
and what their problems are, and then focus your effort on fixing
those. That would be my best lessons learned.


David Roberts:   


What is it from all this experience that you would like to jump
back into and do again? Or, what is it that you are looking to do
differently now that this 20-year chapter is over?


Adam Browning:  


That's a great question. For me, the time is ripe right now for
me to step aside for a couple of reasons. One is, I do want some
new adventures, some new experiences. I am so grateful for this
experience, it has been a labor of love every step of the way.
Yet I also have a feeling that I want to take on some new
challenges. 


The flip side of this is, it is time for some new perspectives,
some new voices, someone with radically different life
experiences that looks at the world in a different way to have a
chance at running what I think is an incredibly impactful
organization. I am encouraged by that type of change. I think
it's healthy. As I've shared my decision internally, it's been
like a jolt of adrenaline running through the entire org as we've
seen everybody step up, step in, and step forward with their
individual ways of leadership. It's just lovely to see.


I think this is going to be healthy for this organization that I
will continue to support for the rest of my life, and I encourage
everybody else to do so, because it is a necessary organization
going forward; I'm just not necessary to it, is what I came to
the conclusion. 


For me, I’d like a little rest for a bit. This fall isn't in the
end turning out to be like I thought it would be, travel isn't in
the cards for me right now. But that's OK. I also find I am
invigorated by the challenges of climate, I am going to stay in
the climate space. I am definitely mission-driven on this front.
Look at what we did collectively around solar: there was
something that needed to exist but didn't yet, and with a global
campaign, we made that happen. There are a lot of other similar
blank spaces in the climate sphere, things that we know need to
exist, but don't yet. That's where I'd like to focus my
efforts. 


I feel like I'm an entrepreneur at heart. I am kicking around
some private sector ideas that I’m going to look to pursue. My
entire life has been on the public service side, and I think I
would like to try the private side. But in my heart of hearts,
I'm a campaigner, I'm an advocate, I love the rush of going out
against all odds with the plucky band of joyful solo warriors and
winning.


David Roberts:   


If listeners are looking to get into this the same way you did 20
years ago, where are those blank spaces where they could make a
real impact?


Adam Browning:  


There's a lot of people that will have their own list of these,
depending on how far you pull back the lens. 


I'm on the board of this awesome organization called Power for
All, which is in many ways Vote Solar but for the billion people
on this planet that don't have any access to electricity at all.
There is the ability and the potential to bring decentralized
renewables to provide electricity and electrified services in
many different business models. It's just an incredibly dynamic
space. That is a passion project of mine. 


When I look closer to home here, the challenge of introducing
flexibility into the grid, whether it be through storage or
demand response, it does feel nascent compared to where it needs
to be. If you read the RMI reports on clean energy portfolios,
I'm absolutely convinced that demand response is a gas killer. We
need to have it. The policy models for it feel like solar 2007:
there's competing different business models, we do not have good
transactional space for the value that it can bring. That's a
policy problem that needs to be solved. The opportunity for huge
scale is there, but there's a lot of roadblocks in the way. 


I look at electrification of transportation. I'm not a super car
guy, but I do think that this premise of interconnecting tons of
really large batteries onto the grid provides an opportunity for
solving so many other problems, through managed charging as well
as potentially, in the future, vehicle-to-grid charging, and a
couple of other things besides. That is an enormous opportunity
for bringing in efficiencies and bringing down costs for
participants and nonparticipants alike that needs a lot further
exploration. 


I could go on and on. But those are some of the ones that are top
of mind for me right now.


David Roberts:   


Well, thanks for that perspective, that's really interesting.
Maybe in 20 years, there'll be another Adam at the end of another
20-year career and we'll find that demand response is sexy and
ubiquitous.


Adam Browning:  


You know, here's hoping.


David Roberts:   


Thanks so much, Adam, for taking the time, and thanks for your 20
years of work.


Adam Browning:  


Both this hour and the past 20 years have definitely been my
pleasure. David, thank you for being such an incisive and
insightful reporter in this space. No one does it better than
you. I've enjoyed reading your stuff for the last 20 years as
well.


David Roberts:   


Well, I'll get you that check later. Thank you for that. Thanks a
lot, Adam. Goodbye.


Adam Browning:


Take care. Bye.


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