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And the answer is: you can have them in any colour as long as it’s black…or in the case of solar panels, a sort of silvery dark blue. Ok, so the analogy isn’t great, but the premise behind it is the same. Much like the iconic early twentieth century car, say the phrase “solar installation” to someone, and it’s usually only one single colour that springs to mind. Images of a shimmering expanse of solar panels, spread like a sea over the countryside or shining from our rooftops, conjure up many well deserved accolades of sustainability and efficiency, but a thing of beauty? Not such a common first reaction. Indeed, solar installations are often criticised for their appearance. One of the most common objections to large scale solar projects is the visual impact. How are these futuristic looking developments going to fit in with England’s green and pleasant lands?
It’s understandable why people are worried, but they needn’t be. The answer lies with changing people’s perceptions of solar. It can be beautiful – it can be art. Solar artwork is a creative genre which challenges the common misconceptions of solar by creating solar powered art installations.

Solar Collector: Image credited to Gorbet Design Inc

Take the Solar Collector, for example. A sculpture created by artists Matt Gorbet, Rob Gorbet, and Susan LK Gorbet, this large scale project features several shafts which create patterns of light performed at dusk each evening. And yes, it’s entirely powered by solar. You can even create your own pattern online.

Or take the beautiful works of Sarah Hall – photovoltaic installations that look more like stained glass. She captures images of waterfalls cascading down buildings, or leaves floating across a wall, and makes you forget that this is a working solar installation. It’s generating electricity as you look at it.

Leaves of Light by Sarah Hall: Image credited to Sarah Hall

The possibilities for combining solar with aesthetically pleasing design are endless. Take the Blue Forest project in Abu Dhabi, for instance. Working in collaboration with Solar Artworks, Blue Team Architects are creating a public area, shaded by solar panel “trees”. When the sun goes down, the clean energy that has been collected can be used to power LED lights to illuminate the space after dusk.

So solar plants and visually appealing installations need not be mutually exclusive. Whether on a large or small scale, with a bit of ingenuity and a whole lot of creative talent, I envisage it won’t be long before the phrase “solar installation” conjures up a very different image indeed.

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With Earth Day activities in progress across the Unites States and the rest of world, I am wondering what relevance this day of activism still has. In an excellent blog post, my colleague Lena Davie rightly points out that it is great that people dedicate a day to the environment, but action on just one single day each year is hardly going to have much effect. This is a timely reminder. While Earth Day has become part of American national culture and as such is important on a symbolic level, it is questionable how effective it really is in light of today’s environmental challenges.

Historically, Earth Day certainly was significant. A recent study by the historian Adam Rome, The Genius of Earth Day, reminds us of the scale of the original 1970’s event, and tracks its impact. Rome shows how the idea of a nation-wide environmental teach-in, proclaimed by Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson on September 20, 1969, inspired more than 12,000 events across the country on the original Earth Day on April 22, 1970. This success was largely due to the fact that Nelson was smart enough to hire dedicated staffers to organize the teach-in but also allowed his idea to go viral by not insisting on top-down control of the individual events and their messaging.

And so a diverse group became a movement, consisting of liberals looking to better the quality of life; scientists concerned with, and documenting, the level of pollution of water, ground and air; middle-class women worried about their deteriorating environment; young activists interpreting the fight for the environment as just another incarnation of the fight against the ‘system;’ and conservationists active since the era of Teddy Roosevelt. Nelson didn’t mind these groups taking ownership of his idea, and this helped the idea to go viral and ultimately to form a generation of environmentalists and environmentally conscious citizens. So nothing is as powerful as an idea whose time has come, it seems. And indeed: Earth Day 1970 highlighted an environmental crisis in the U.S. that quickly became apparent and tangible to every citizen. Remember, this was before any efficient regulation of polluting industries was in place.

Rome’s study also shows, however, that the original Earth Day was about much more than these tangible quality-of-life issues. While pollution of rivers, lakes and the oceans, of air and soil certainly stirred up much attention, it was also largely noncontroversial that this was not a good thing. The questions posed by the movement in 1970, however, were more fundamental. I find two points are of particular interest today: What I would call the question of a sustainable way-of-life, and the question of sustainable growth.

Inquiring about a sustainable way-of-life, for instance, was largely questioning the suburbanization of the United States. A lot of attention in the late 1960s was given to the fact that with the growth of suburbia the natural land is shrinking, and often valuable habitats are destroyed. This criticism of suburbia has great implications, because suburbia is the home of hydrocarbon man and to a large degree based on the availability and affordability of cars and fuel. With suburbia come motorways, and traffic, and the national fixation on the gas price. Living in New York City it is easy to forget, but my impression from recent travels is that the Earth Day movement did not succeed in changing this, but that the development of ever more suburban sprawl continues today. And with it, the issue of sustainability.

The question of sustainable growth is even more interesting. The argument was that gross national product (GNP) is an insufficient indicator of wealth because its logic suggested that polluting and cleaning up would be more desirable than not polluting because the cleaning-up effort would also contribute to total GNP and thereby factor into the national wealth. If this ‘wealth’ includes negative environmental impacts, the argument goes, it is questionable that ‘wealth’ is so desirable after all. Sustainable growth would need a combination of quantitative and qualitative measurements which would allow marking pollution and counting it as a negative. Again, as fascinating as this argument is, I am not sure that this idea has much traction amongst economists and the informed public today. (It would certainly create a number of issues on its own.)

Coming back to the question of Earth Day’s significance today, I’m afraid it is a mixed bag. While it is great to have a dedicated, nation-wide day to think and learn about the environment and about sustainability, tangible action would be much preferred. I personally think that the only way to achieve real change would be an adequate price on pollution. Recent experiences with carbon trading in the European Union do not support much optimism.

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The German government is unlikely to support import tariffs for solar panels made in China despite domestic opposition to their policies. Veterans of the German renewable energy community, such as Hans-Josef Fell, have suggested that the German government’s decision to significantly reduce Feed-in-Tariffs for solar photovoltaic energy would be destroying the German solar industry. While it is true that the entire sector has come under increasing pressure, this is hardly a phenomenon that is limited to Germany. China, in fact, currently seems to suffer just as much as any other country, as the recent bankruptcy of Suntech suggests. And despite the recent stock price surge for First Solar, this doesn’t seem to be much different in the U.S., despite the trade war the country started with China.

It is important to keep in mind, that behind the push for protectionism in the U.S. is a German company, SolarWorld, which has a significant manufacturing footprint in the United States. In a paper published last year by Germany’s Heinrich Böll Foundation as second installment of a series on the German Energy Transition, Craig Morris explains why. The quick answer is, as a leading exporter Germany cannot afford a trade war with China. Morris quotes Fell acknowledging that.

More importantly, however, is the business case behind it. And Morris lays out how Germany benefits economically even if the panels installed are made in China. There are two main reasons for this. Firstly, the German solar industry is strong all along the value chain which leads to the fact that products made in China will likely lead to some value creation in Germany. Germany is particularly competitive in the equipment sector which exports production lines to China which is a more sophisticated technology than producing solar panels. Secondly, the value of services and components that are needed to install and connect the panels is actually higher than the value of the panel, and the services can only be sourced locally. Morris estimates that more than 50% of the total value creation is local.

So far, so good. Morris states that a large solar market helps Germany to secure these advantages. And here is where I would start questioning his very positive assessment of the economic benefits on Germany. The fact is that the solar boom in Germany is paid by all consumers of electricity, with energy-intensive industries paying a much-reduced fee. The size of the German market is driven by the level of Feed-in-Tariffs that the German renewable energy law guarantees. So to answer the question whether Germany really profits from local installations of solar panels made in China, we would need to consider the question whether (a) the subsidies are necessary and (b) efficiently allocated.

It seems to me that while German electricity consumers are doing the world a favor by driving down the cost of solar with the demand created by the Feed-in-Tariffs, they may not profit that much themselves as the total cost is still quite high. Morris is right to call for the U.S. to jump into solar now, because with the more beneficial weather conditions the cheap panels make even more economic sense. The U.S. would only need to brush aside bureaucratic hurdles, and a solar boom may be coming.

As to the question of why Germany is against a solar trade war, I think Morris is right: The question of Feed-in-Tarrifs aside, free trade is Germany’s best option.

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The Washington, DC office of the Heinrich Böll Foundation, a think tank close to Germany’s Green party, recently concluded a series of short papers on Germany’s Energiewende (energy transition) which aims to explain what is going on with Germany’s energy policy, and why. As the question what the world could learn from Germany’s experiment, if anything, is a major concern of my blog posts, it is worthwhile reviewing the articles individually.

The first installation of the series, Angst or Arithmetic?, by Paul Hockenos, a Berlin-based American writer and author of a well-received book on Joschka Fischer and the German green movement, is looking to put the German energy transition into perspective. The author is making the case that Germans are neither irrationally afraid of nuclear energy nor is the nuclear phase-out driven by “postwar angst”. Quite to the contrary, the author claims, Germany finds itself in the midst of other European nations such as Sweden, The Netherlands, Belgium and Switzerland, all of which are phasing out nuclear as well. What does make Germany’s energy transition unique in the author’s eyes, however, is the fact that the country is aiming to phase-out nuclear while maintaining its status as an industrial heavyweight and meeting ambitious decarbonization goals.

To make his point, Hockenos skillfully lays out the development of the anti-nuclear protest movement in Germany, starting with demonstrations in the early 1970s in Wyhl, where conservative farmers were joined by conservationists and left-wing environmentalists to force a powerful utility company to cancel plans for a nuclear power station. This headline-making success catapulted the movement to national prominence and consequently helped to form its national footprint. Decisive then, in Hockenos’ eyes, was the fact that experts, some from Germany’s nuclear industry, like Klaus Traube, joined the movement to create a fact-based approach which was, if you want, political education based on liberal enlightenment ideas. These experts published widely read bestsellers and also formed think tanks, such as Öko-Institut, or Institute for Applied Ecology, which still exists today. Finally, Chernobyl, which almost created mass hysteria, with closed playgrounds, destroyed produce, and kids and pregnant women ordered to stay inside, made the risks of nuclear energy obvious to everyone. The author concludes that the nuclear phase-out is not “the reaction of a spooked people to Fukushima” but that it “has arguably been part of Berlin’s energy agenda since the early 1990s.”

While the historical facts are correct, it strikes me that the initial question is only superficially answered, if at all. Hockenos is certainly right when he claims that the German anti-nuclear movement was well entrenched in Berlin’s political class, if not hegemonic, before the Fukushima nuclear disaster. Just think of the first Atomausstieg (nuclear phase-out), which the Schröder-Fischer government (“red-green” coalition) negotiated with the nuclear power utilities in 2000 and which became law in 2002. But he fails to address the question, why this was the case. Here are three factors which I believe need to be taken into consideration:

Firstly, Germany’s anti-nuclear movement is, to a large extent, a not-in-my-backyard coalition which prima facie is interested in (a certain understanding of) the good life, here and now, but does not necessarily act politically responsibly. Hockenos provides great insights in the local roots of the movement and its broad coalitions, from Wyhl to Gorleben (which was long planned to be the permanent repository site for nuclear waste), but fails to analyze this critically. I would argue that a small group of anti-nuclear protesters, mostly academically educated activists from urban areas with experience in previous protests (using tactics they learned from the American civil rights movement), used the protective instincts of conservative local groups and skillfully turned this into a movement. The nuclear power plant was not supposed to be built here. This legacy still resonates when, today, local “green” groups protest against desperately needed grid extensions to transport wind power from the North to the South because they literally do not what the pylons in their backyard. Politically, this is obviously not very satisfying, because it does not provide a solution to the problem but only criticism. (Arguably, the national leadership of Germany’s Green party is aware of this now and addresses this critically and responsibly.)

Secondly, the German perception of nuclear energy can only be understood in the context of the cold war and the fear of nuclear annihilation. This fear proliferated in Germany from the 1970s onwards and culminated in the Friedensdemonstration, or peace demonstration, in Bonn, the old governmental seat of West Germany, in 1982. Roughly half a million citizens protested NATOs “double-track decision” and, more broadly, American nuclear weapons on German soil. While the history of the so called Friedensbewegung, or peace movement, is complex, it is fair to say that is built on 1950s protest against German rearmament, 1960s radicalism and criticism of the Vietnam war, as well as specifically German ideas of a “third way” between Russian communism and American capitalism which have a long intellectual genealogy in Germany and which gained momentum in the 1970s. The German anti-nuclear movement is intimately linked to the peace movement, and managed to link the public’s fear of nuclear annihilation with questions about the civil use of nuclear energy. So when German’s think nuclear, they think death. I am not so sure that this is rational, even while I may have the same thoughts, as I am a (German) child of my time.

Finally, Hockenos fails to address the German Technikskepsis, or skepticism of technology, which is deeply rooted in the country’s political culture and crucial to understand the German debate on nuclear energy. While Germany has a globally renowned engineering expertise, there is also a long intellectual history of fearing the (unintended) consequences of widespread use of technologies. Note that the German term Technik only inaccurately translates into the English word technology. Technik it is much closer to the Greek τεχνικός (technikós) which includes human systems, and is distinct from the German Technologie, a distinction that is absent in the English language. Technikskepsis, again, is a complex matter, and while this blog-post cannot adequately spell out its genealogy, it is worth noting that it has roots in Martin Heidegger’s philosophy from where it spread to political ideas on the left with Herbert Marcuse, a student of Heidegger who later joined the legendary Institute for Social Research. It’s most influential rendition is arguably Hans Jonas’ The Imperative of Responsibility (Das Prinzip Verantwortung, German 1979, English 1984) which lays out an ethical principle for the age of technology: “Act so that the effects of your action are compatible with the permanence of genuine human life.” And this imperative, of course, is precisely what the critics claim nuclear energy cannot meet. If, and how, these ideas are compatible with a sustainable energy transition in Germany is a different question which I will address in another blog post.

For now it suffices to conclude that Hockenos short analysis is a great start of what should be a much bigger project: to bare the roots of the German anti-nuclear movement and the Energiewende.

It is said of Napoleon that the key question he would ask before deciding whether to promote someone to the rank of General would be to ask “Is he lucky?”  He believed that whether or not they had a track record of lucky breaks would be a good predictor of future success on the battlefield.

Certainly, we all know people who seem to have one disaster after another and others who glide through life unscathed by the “slings and arrows of outrageous misfortune”.

In the case of the Canadian oilsands industry, recent events suggest they would fail Napoleon’s test. There has been one unlucky break after another.  The latest came on the eve of a Canadian government news conference, aimed at assuring the population of coastal British Columbia that the authorities had robust idol spill defences in place and therefore need not be unduly concerned about the prospect of bitumen exports to Asia.

The event didn’t quite go as planned, as you can read here.

The UK solar industry has had an interesting time of late. From the rise of large scale installations and the important role for solar in the Renewables Roadmap, to the confusion over government tariffs and the lack of any new emphasis on solar in the budget, there’s been a lot going on. If this has left followers of the market overwhelmed, spare a thought for China, where their booming solar industry is poised on the brink of uncertainty after two accusations of anti-competitive behaviour.

Photo credit: Photonut on rgbstock.com

In the beginning, there was expensive solar…
The issue began with the Chinese solar industry’s ability to manufacture solar panels and components at a much cheaper price than any other market. And as the most attractive market for renewable energy in the world, this had quite an impact on prices globally. Chinese manufacturers were able to flood the market with solar components, all offered at a price that made it hard for US and European markets to compete. So why was China able to do this? Recently, the Chinese Government has placed great emphasis on cutting their carbon emissions and increasing the share of energy generated from renewable resources. As a result, solar panel production in China is heavily subsidised by the Government, making Chinese solar panels the cheaper option for installers in the US and Europe. This allows China to increase their share of the global solar manufacturing market at the expense of manufacturers elsewhere.

Obviously, this was not an ideal situation for the global solar PV manufacturing market, and in May last year, the US became the first country to introduce anti-dumping tariffs on all solar imports from China. Dumping, in this context, is a form of predatory pricing which involves selling products in an international market at a price too low for producers in the export markets to compete with. US Senator, Charles Schumer, confirmed that these measures where tough, but also necessary if the interests of the American solar manufacturing market were to be protected. China’s Commerce Ministry spokesman, Shen Danyang, counteracted this assertion by declaring their intention to fight this “unfair” ruling.

The result of this is the setting of a precedent for other global markets to follow suit, with Europe being the most recent of these. Last September, EU Prosun, an industry action group, launched a campaign against Chinese imports into Europe, asking the European Commission to investigate any alleged anti-competitive behaviour. Despite a strong counter-argument that any tariffs would damage the global solar market by pushing up installation prices, the European Commission announced their intention to continue with their investigation into the Chinese market. 

So what does this mean for the UK? 
Following the EC’s announcement, the European Union imposed the mandatory registration of all solar components imported into the EU from China. Between March 2013 and the predicted resolution date of 6 June, any Chinese solar imports have to be registered. This will allow the EU to retroactively impose anti-dumping tariffs should the Commission rule against the Chinese manufacturers. The impact of this move is already being felt in the UK market, where solar providers are facing cancelled orders from installers. With a high level of uncertainty over whether tariffs will be imposed retroactively, importers are unwilling to take on the risk, instead passing this on to installers in the form of price increases. In a report commissioned by AFASE, a body representing European solar manufacturers against the trade duties, Swiss analysts Prognos announced that the move could ultimately cut the UK solar industry by 80%, as well as costing the UK economy £3.46 billion and 38,600 jobs. The Solar Trade Association has voiced their opposition to any trade duties, asserting that any tariffs would damage confidence in what is already seen as an unstable market. Furthermore, the Chinese Government has announced its plans to retaliate if any duties are imposed.

In short, the imposition of trade duties on Chinese solar imports will have a far-reaching impact on the European and UK market. Manufacturers will gain a level playing field and an increased ability to compete, but at the cost of a severely reduced solar industry. The end customer will bear the brunt of price increases, and, in a fragile industry, the fate of many wholesale solar importers and installation companies hangs in the balance. So the question remains, is the cost of this investigation, and the price of market intervention, simply too high?

In my previous two blogs postings, we looked at two of the reasons why so many energy companies have been getting into trouble and finding the implementation of infrastructure projects to be so hard in many developed countries:

•  The end of the Age of Enlightenment has produced societies less persuaded by facts and more swayed by emotion.
•  The arrival of the Postmodern Age, in which there is a widespread acceptance of the notion that there is no such things as absolute truth and that “what is true for you need not be true for me”.

 The challenging environment has been further complicated by the rise of the Internet, which has profound implications for many companies, not least those in the energy industry.

 Every significant development in communications technology has had societal implications well beyond what the technical innovators could have imagined:

•  The fact that the printing press was introduced in Europe at the time of the Reformation was not a coincidence.  This revolutionary technology turbocharged the spread of new ideas.
•  More recently, it was the fax machine which effectively brought down the Iron Curtain at the end of the Cold War.  This (very) slow-motion Twitter enabled like-minded individuals to network and the Communist authorities lost their monopoly control of the mass-dissemination of information.

 If knowledge is power (and it always has been), then, in our own era, the Internet is moving power from institutions to networks.  The Internet enables individuals who share a common interest to identify each other and then coordinate and organise at close to zero marginal cost.  This is bringing tremendous benefits in areas such as medical research and less desirable outcomes for those engaged in anti-social or criminal activities.

 Many companies in the energy industry have yet to think through the implications of this shift in power.  In their project management, for example, they still think in terms of linear, predictable regulatory approval processes, while the unfolding reality is something much more akin to political theatre as a number of hitherto extraneous actors make uninvited but impactful appearances on a stage which the companies thought they controlled.

 Many of these NGOs are small, but they are savvy in their use of the new technology and, like the mass of tiny Lilliputians, can tie a giant Gulliver down to the ground with their thousands of individually tiny strands.

 The creation of networks is of course, a game that two can play, but energy companies will need to completely re-think their approach to what now needs to effectively be a political campaign strategy in the light of this new reality.

 The Internet is also, counterintuitively, contributing to a feeling that, while many of us are more connected than ever before, we also feel more alone.  This observable increase in alienation is one of the reasons why we’re seeing a marked decline in trust in many types of institution: a subject we’ll get to in the next blog posting.

In a recent interview with the German business webpage manager magazine online, Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Austrian-born bodybuilder, actor and former governor of California, sharply criticized U.S. energy policy, or, as he put it more pointedly, the lack thereof. Schwarzenegger, a champion of renewable energy during his tenure as governor, says he admires Germany’s determination to switch to (a mostly) renewable energy production in a single generation, while he despises what he sees as a lack of strategy and coordination of energy policy in the U.S.

Schwarzenegger’s endorsement of German energy policy is pretty light on facts. He doesn’t bother to discuss the Energiewende’s issues, which committed readers of this blog may be familiar with. But he is not alone in criticizing the lack of vision and coordination in U.S. energy policy. In fact, both business leaders and environmentalists are united in their criticism of current policies.

Tellingly, Schwarzenegger doesn’t offer any pragmatic proposals. He doesn’t map out which fixes would help the U.S. to become more like Germany in energy terms. He suggests that the German energy transition is better policy altogether because it is a daring plan. While enthusiasm for planning in the realm politics has yielded mixed results in the past, there is an underlying question here which deserves some scrutiny: Is Germany’s approach to energy policy more effective and more politically and economically sustainable (i.e. smarter and cheaper) than Obama’s “all of the above” strategy? I.e., is the Energiewende, which could be dubbed “either/or” in policy terms as it plans to first phase out nuclear and then fossil fuels altogether, better suited to tackle climate change and cheaper than Obama’s approach? Note that this question is asking for actual effects rather than lofty rhetoric and long-term planning objectives.

The question couldn’t be timelier, as with last week’s nominations for the relevant cabinet positions, the outlines of Obama’s second term energy policy became clear. It is marked by three goals: (1) Provide affordable energy for a growing economy and a recovering middle class while (2) reducing the United States dependency on energy imports from unfriendly and/or undemocratic nations and (3) pragmatically tackling climate change. While Germany’s Energiewende may tackle the latter more explicitly, and may render Germany more energy independent in the far future, it is certainly failing on the first goal and moreover relying on Russian imports for about a third of its natural gas.

But let’s have a look at the U.S.: Obama nominated Ernest Moniz, MIT physicist, as energy secretary, and Gina McCarthy to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, where she is currently working as assistant administrator. At MIT, Moniz currently runs the school’s energy initiative, a position in which he oversaw research on pretty much any energy source known to mankind. After the Fukushima nuclear disaster, he wrote an influential article in Foreign Affairs, defending nuclear power on environmental grounds: Nuclear power plants don’t emit any CO₂ which is why we need them to tackle climate change. McCarthy may be less outspoken, but her job at the EPA may require precisely that. Coral Davenport reported in the National Journal, that Obama remains quiet about Climate Change for strategic reasons, but his administration is determined to tackle the problem nonetheless: not through legislation, which is currently unthinkable in Washington due to Republican denial of climate science and their determination to kill any relevant bill, but through the regulatory authority of the EPA, and in consultation with industry and other business leaders. She writes:

“Inside Washington, in a warren of back rooms at EPA, dozens of environmental officials are working to craft landmark climate-change regulations that they hope will curb industrial pollution—and withstand a tsunami of legal and political attacks. To help them do it, they’re inviting in heads of the industries and businesses that will soon be forced to implement the rules. Business leaders, although they’re not happy about the coming regulations, are jumping on the opportunity to communicate their concerns and perhaps help shape the rules they’ll have to live by. And the Obama administration hopes that the dialogue will help defuse some of the opposition to come.”

If we accept that Obama will tackle climate change through enhanced regulation by the EPA, two major differences between the U.S. approach and the German approach remain: Nuclear power, obviously, but more importantly shale gas. While Moniz’ nomination was sharply criticized by environmentalists because of his favorable position on fracking (even if DoE does not have jurisdiction over that issue, as some acknowledge), Germany is effectively rendering fracking in the country impossible and is instead using lignite to back-up the intermittent renewable energy production. This negatively affects Germany’s over-all CO₂-emissions, because gas burns cleaner than lignite. While the U.S. is reducing its carbon footprint by switching from coal to gas, Germany is struggling to do the same even though it invests heavily in renewable energy.

This means, however, that despite the lofty rhetoric around Germany’s Energiewende – and Mr. Schwarzenegger’s endorsement, the de facto effects of these policies are not that convincing. The U.S. “all-of-the-above” energy policy may be better policy – if it includes serious attempts to tackle climate change. And it may be politically and economically more viable.

In my previous posting, I looked at the problems that very fact-based enterprises, such as energy companies, were having with the end of the Age of Enlightenment.  This is an environment in which “non-factual factors”, such as emotion, faith or superstition are increasingly accepted as a valid basis for opinions.  This is a world in which it has become acceptable to say “your facts don’t change my feelings”; a world which is hard to navigate for very fact-based individuals and organisations.

 To make matters worse for such companies, they’re also trying to operate in the Postmodern Age.

 Part of the Wikipedia entry on Postmodernism reads:

 “Postmodernism was developed by academics in the 1950s-1960s in a reaction against scientific efforts to explain reality objectively.  It was a fashionable and dominant mode of analysis in many academic circles in the last decades of the twentieth century.  Its appeal may be explained partly by the cultural vertigo that can result during periods of rapid social change, where established values may seem to have rapidly eroded and a steady stream of new technological advances produces large changes, heightening uncertainty about the future.”

 We’ll come back in a future post to the issue of “cultural vertigo”, because that’s also providing difficulties for many companies (not only in the energy industry), but crucial to today’s post is the “reaction against scientific efforts to explain reality objectively”.

 This has resulted in a widespread acceptance of the notion that there is no such things as absolute truth and that “what is true for you need not be true for me”.  Confronted with such an attitude, people such as the engineers in energy companies often have great difficulty in relating to this world view.  After all, their training has all been very fact-based: either the bridge that you have designed will withstand the loads placed upon it, or it won’t.  Theirs is often, of necessity, a relatively black and white world which has difficulty in dealing, not just with shades of gray, but with completely different colour schemes.

 Coming on top of the end of the Age of Enlightenment, this postmodernism is therefore an additional reason why stakeholders will no longer be convinced by being educated by “the facts”, since, as I said earlier, what is true for you need not be true for me.

 How to move forward in such a world?

 When I got married almost thirty years ago, my father-in-law gave an excellent speech.  Among the many pearls of wisdom that he shared that day was the following:  “Peter, every so often, you’re going to have to sit your wife down and give her a damn good listening to”.  It was wise advice and, whenever I’ve failed to do that on significant matters (or just life in general), I’ve usually got myself into situations where I had to end up doing it anyway.

 Energy companies need to do the same with those who are concerned about their activities.  Shouting “the facts” from corporate websites and brochures may make you feel like you’re doing something, but it’s seldom achieving anything.

 Instead, time spent really communicating (listening at least as much as talking), building relationships, walking a mile in each other’s shoes and looking for areas of common interest will be increasingly essential to success.  It may feel costly, time-consuming and lacking in the reassurance of foreseeable process, but the old ways, which had the appeal of misleadingly seeming to offer speed, cost-effectiveness and certainty, simply aren’t working any more.

 Consultancies like Hill+Knowlton, as they work with their clients to create the external relationships and understanding which enable their clients to succeed, are increasingly going to be in the conflict resolution business.

 Next, living in the Internet Age….