How fossil fuel companies keep your energy costs high | Jon Powers

Host Elise Hu introduces clean-energy entrepreneur Jon Powers, who says solar energy and storage are among the fastest and cheapest ways to add electricity to the grid and account for most new U.S. power capacity. Yet towns across the country are pausing or banning new projects. Powers argues that the opposition is increasingly driven by misinformation campaigns operating at the local level, rather than by a broad rejection of clean energy. Powers says he co-founded a company more than a decade ago to build solar and storage projects nationwide, when public sentiment toward clean energy was much more favorable. Now developers encounter anti-solar lawn signs and local political resistance. At a town meeting in upstate New York, one supervisor claimed projects would drive up utility bills, while another said they would poison water and kill wildlife. Powers says these claims are false, but he does not characterize the supervisors as enemies: they are trying to protect their communities while being bombarded online by anti-clean-energy influencers. He points to battery-storage fire images and even anti-solar lawn signs that can be ordered online as examples of the campaign. In his account, fossil-fuel interests are motivated by the threat to their bottom line and are spending far more politically: 27 to 1 compared with clean energy, based on publicly tracked spending. One in four U.S. counties now has restrictions on solar or wind construction, and in New York, 120 towns have passed moratoriums or bans on energy storage.

Powers connects the local backlash to the broader need for more electricity. He says clean energy employs three times as many Americans as the fossil-fuel industry, while data centers are increasing both electricity demand and costs. In his view, solar and storage are the fastest, cheapest, and cleanest ways to add supply, and greater supply should lower prices. He cites the solar industry’s growth and says 70% of new electrons added to the grid last year came from solar and storage. His proposed response is a coordinated, rapid-response “war room” that brings together developers, clean-energy advocates, and pro-development environmental groups. The group would detect a local problem, coordinate the appropriate response, and deploy trusted people and practical tools before a temporary moratorium becomes a permanent ban. Powers emphasizes that a moratorium is often not a declaration that a town is anti-renewable; it is a pause, usually lasting about 180 days, while officials try to understand the technology and determine how to regulate it. Powers explains the idea through his military experience. He spent 15 months in Iraq as a U.S. Army captain in Baghdad’s most hostile sector, later served as the Army’s first special adviser on energy, and became President Obama’s federal chief sustainability officer. In Baghdad, a dining-room table served as a war room where commanders, intelligence officers, and logistics experts turned incoming information into plans. When intelligence suggested a wanted member of Saddam Hussein’s “deck of cards” was nearby, the team changed its plan after learning he would visit the base for lunch, capturing him without firing a shot. Powers says clean energy already has a playbook; it needs to execute it intelligently.

Powers says his model is already operating in New York through the Energy Resilience Coalition, a war room funded by developers and philanthropy. Previously, a developer who heard from a town supervisor that a moratorium might be coming had nowhere to take that warning. Under the coalition, the information can be brought to a coordinated network that identifies the town’s concern and matches it with the right people and resources. In one example, a town was especially worried about battery-storage fires. Local officials would normally turn to the town supervisor or volunteer fire chief, so the coalition worked with New York organizations to supply information and messengers for those conversations. Powers says individual organizations have useful tools, but no single organization has all of them. One group trained a firefighter to meet with another volunteer fire chief, explain the new technology, and help create a fire-response plan. Because the approach worked, the coalition is seeking funds to train and send several more firefighters. Another organization contributes technical expertise, helping town permitting staff understand best practices for permitting battery-storage facilities. Powers presents this as a way to answer legitimate questions rather than dismiss local concerns. The objective is both to make projects safer and easier to evaluate and to give town leaders enough reliable information to make decisions during the limited window created by a moratorium.

Powers says technical answers alone are not enough; the industry must also change the local political narrative and give supporters tools to respond. He shows a Facebook post from the rural New York town where his mother-in-law lives, describing solar as “anti-American, anti-human, anti-environment.” He says this kind of message, rather than the benefits of clean energy, is what residents are often encountering in their own communities. He counters that solar manufacturing has helped the United States move from 14th to third in the world over the previous few years, that more than 50 million homes are powered by solar, and that the industry now knows how to permit and build battery systems safely. He also argues that solar can enhance an ecosystem when it is developed correctly, not merely address climate change. His main example is a rural New York music festival in a community covered with anti-solar signs. The coalition found a local farmer with solar panels and had Powers interview him onstage. The farmer explained that solar income was helping him keep the farm in his family for the next generation. He also said solar powered 25% of the town’s residences and that crops, including pumpkins, were being grown under the panels and sold locally. Residents approached afterward with questions because they trusted the farmer as the messenger. Powers says firefighters, farmers, and other familiar local figures can create the credibility that outside developers often lack.

Powers closes by saying the opposition is spreading across the country, with requests to bring the war-room approach to states including Illinois and Massachusetts. He acknowledges that every state has different partners and tactics, but says the basic model remains consistent: coordinate quickly, identify the community’s actual concerns, and put trusted voices with useful information in front of local decision-makers. His conclusion is that the country is at a decisive moment over whether the future will include clean, affordable energy. He frames the issue not as a single national policy debate but as a series of local contests over permits, moratoriums, and public understanding. The clean-energy industry, in his view, has benefits to communicate—lower-cost electricity through added supply, domestic manufacturing, jobs, energy security, and opportunities for farmers—but has failed to organize effectively against fossil-fuel-funded local campaigns. Powers therefore calls on developers, advocates, environmental groups, technical experts, firefighters, farmers, and other community champions to get involved before projects are stopped. His final message is that the industry needs to “get in the fight,” become coordinated, and work hyper-locally to win back the hearts and minds that will determine whether new solar and storage can be built.