Americans Don’t See Renewable Energy as an Affordability Solution…Yet
Americans believe renewable energy can be cheaper than other electricity sources – but they don’t believe it will lower their own energy bills. The 2025 elections showed how important energy affordability is as a political issue. But in Shearwater Strategies polling and focus group testing on renewable energy and energy storage projects, messages about energy savings underperform.
Why? People do not think system-level savings will reach their household or business. We hear in focus groups that they expect utilities to capture the savings while still raising rates. Emily Pontecorvo’s interesting piece in Heatmap offers clear data that supports this intuition.
If developers and advocates want to position renewable energy and storage as energy affordability solutions, they need to speak directly to individual bills, not aggregate system savings. Highlighting real examples of projects that delivered measurable ratepayer-level savings – behind-the-meter systems, rural co-op contracts, or other proofs of concept – makes broader energy affordability arguments more credible.
Shearwater Strategies uses custom audience research to help clean energy and climate technology firms understand what their key audiences really think – and turn those insights into strategies that resonate, like positioning renewable energy and energy storage as core affordability tools.
This week, we are sharing findings that may help developers, communicators, and advocates improve their strategies around affordability, technology, and environmental benefits (see links in comment section). If deeper insights into your core audiences would improve your strategy, please reach out.
Who communicates about affordability well? My friend Chris Moyer and the team at Echo Communications do great work on energy affordability. Many commercial solar installers are also excellent at communicating about project economics because they frequently make the case to skeptical business owners — Casey Feezle, Adam Seamen, Andrew Skinner, and Russ Edwards come to mind.
Are you seeing policymakers, voters, or business leaders struggle to convince people that renewable energy and storage will save them money?
