Kayla Ventura, Conservative Energy Network - Communicating the Clean Energy Transition | EP162

The conservative energy network is here to help be the premier place on the right for clean energy. So we want to have the conversations and and have them through a conservative lens and think about what we can do. What common sense conservative policy solutions can we enact across the nation?

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Today on the Clean Power Hour, the importance of communication, I'm Tim Montague, your host check out all of our content at cleanpowerhour.com Give us a rating and review on Apple and Spotify and most importantly, tell a friend about the show. We want more people to know about the Clean Energy Transition, the ins and outs, all of the technologies and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, of decarbonizing the economy. It is a huge economic opportunity. I'm so excited to bring a special guest to the show today. Her name is Kayla Ventura, she is the digital communications manager for the Conservative Energy Network, a national organization dedicated to eating good information for local communities that are wrestling with the energy transition, quite frankly, these are wind solar battery projects, at cetera. Kayla and I have developed a relationship over the last month, because the conservative energy network now has a podcast, the conservative energy podcast, he is the host of that podcast. And that podcast is now going to be represented on the Clean Power media network as well. So check them out at conservativeenergynetwork.org. And with that, welcome to the show, Kayla.

Thank you, Tim, I appreciate being here.

The Clean Power Hour is brought to you by Denowatts, if you're a solar PV asset manager or performance engineer, you need better data and better business intelligence. With Denawatts digital twin benchmarking technology you get more accurate, efficient, and faster performance measurement results. The fourth generation Deno recently completed a technical review by DNV, you can download the report at Denowatts.com. That's D E N O W A T T S.com. Now back to the show. I'm so excited to bring your content to my listeners here on the Clean Power Hour. And to bring your show to our collective audience. Right it is through floating all boats that we will truly make an impact on society. And so I'm just tickled that that conservative energy network is willing to participate in the clean power media network. But tell us a little bit about yourself. Kayla, how did you come to the conservative energy network? And what is it about their mission that really sparked your interest?

Thank you, Tim. I came to the conservative energy network. As a consultant, I started in the political space, I was doing some campaign work and found myself just not really connecting to that issue. So I moved into the consulting space. And the conservative energy network was actually one of my clients. I was working on their website, helping them with messaging. And I just saw the passion that the network has. One of the greatest things about the conservative energy network is that it's some of the most unique experience, people that you'll ever meet from all walks of life from all sides of campaign and nonprofit space. And I was just I needed to join them. So about two years ago, I was given that opportunity, and I came over to start helping message the national team. It's really important when you're having these conversations about clean energy to make sure we're bringing in all parts of the conversation. So the conservative energy network was the place where we were having conversations on the right for clean energy issues. And I found myself just really connecting there. What I'm doing for the network now is continuing a lot of the messaging working on our social media. But by growing this podcast and starting the conservative energy podcast, which launched this January, what we were able to do there which was to start telling our state team stories across the nation. We have some really wonderful teams that are doing great work getting steel in the ground in there. counties and growing clean energy across their state to be able to tell their stories and tell them well, it's something that I'm passionate about and happy to be able to be doing.

Well, that is great. And I also want to give a shout out to Tyler de Velious, who was on the show. Thank you to Mike Casey of Tiger comm for introducing Tyler to the show, we did a wonderful panel discussion with my Casey and Tyler on a project in Michigan related to wind energy. And but it all boils down to getting local communities to be more accepting and understanding of what clean energy projects mean for their communities. For the tax base for the land, what kind of changes are coming to the land? And how do the economics work for landowners and non landowners in rural communities where most of these utility scale projects are being cited? So Kayla, tell us a little bit about the podcast a little more about the podcast, I know that you're, you're you're shining a light on your regional offices and their impact. And that's and that's a wonderful thing. But for our listeners, put some flavor to that give us an example of, of who are some of the your guests on the show? Who are the networks? Or who are the regional offices? Where are they? And how can people find those networks as well?

Absolutely. And thank you for this opportunity to talk directly about the podcast. I'll talk about the last episode that launched and it went out in June, we covered this this was a special episode where we covered some travel that we did as a network, we went up to DC in coordination with a cress energy that's citizens for responsible energy solutions. They focus on a federal solution where we focus more on a state based solutions. So partnering together, we always have strong impact. We were up in DC, getting our state teams directly in the offices of the leaders that they have in their hometowns, and the impact of that, being able to bring the message of clean energy from their state, up to DC. There's a connection there, you start to see the wheels turn when you're having these conversations in person rather than when you're having them on a screen. One of our leaders that I interviewed on our last episode, Sarah Spence, she is the executive director of the Ohio conservative energy forum. Sarah has been doing these types of meetings for years. And she identifies that in person is the main way to continue to show the impact and really strengthen the asks that we have, to our legislators when we're, we're in person. One of my favorite episodes that we've did was a few episodes ago, and it featured Ed rivet, who's our leader on the Michigan team, that's the Michigan conservative energy forum. And as a former radio host, former president have the right to life and just has so much life when he talks about these energy issues. He calls himself a energy geek, a self proclaimed energy geek, I will say, Amen. He has geothermal systems that power his home, getting to listen to him talk about how in his day to day light in his job, and in the way he powers his home, he is truly living our clean energy transition. It's leaders like Ed that just make my job so easy. I can jump on and follow their passion, follow his knowledge and just really learn from the network.

Yeah. As we were talking in the pre show, you know, it is really through our collective knowledge that we humans are an impactful species, both US and in the world at large, but also us in society and how we are influencing society for good, bad or ugly, right. You know, humans discovered this thing called fossil fuels, which was coincidental. It happened to be a game changer because it is a very dense energy source. And it really made us a much more productive species. And there were byproducts called civilization. It gave us this wonderful thing called the modern life. And now we have alternative technologies called wind, solar and batteries, primarily, which are going to give us a second very good life. But we really have to leave fossil fuels in the ground in order to not ruin the future for future Jen. aerations because that carbon pollution that is accumulating in the atmosphere is somewhat of an existential threat, it won't make humans extinct, but it could ruin the good life that we have. And, and we just don't want that for future generations for our children and our children's children. So anyway, Kayla, one of the one of the things that I wanted to talk with you today about was an event that you recently attended. It was a training on messaging and communication. And if you would share a little bit about that, and who, when you, you know, signed up to go to this training, what was the motivation, we're all communicators, whether we know it or not, right? We all use language, and other forms of communication, writing, podcasting, and other forms of media creation. And we can all learn to be more effective in that venture, whatever it is that we're doing, and I think that's kind of underneath this. But tell us a little bit about what inspired you to go to the training. And then let's dig into what you got out of it.

The conservative energy network has been going through a transition period. In May, we started with we on boarded our new CEO, John Socha. He's a former legislator out of North Carolina, and just really hit the ground running. One of the first things that he identified was that the podcast is great. And he identified that I had had some speech training, and wanted to see how we could improve the rest of the team. So what we did was we started with senior staff, we started with regional directors and people that have a lot of employees under them, we gathered them up wanted to make sure we had the the main messengers of the organization, and I found a speech training coach, it was one that John had worked with in the past, I worked really closely with him to build a session that would be good based for us on how to give our message how to really be effective as communicators, not only in person, but via zoom, which we have done so much of in the past few years. And we'll continue to do a lot of one of the main things that I took out of our sessions with Alan is the importance of eliminating filler words from your speech and from your messaging. And how to do that is by slowing down, something that I needed to learn to do. And I'm doing a lot better. And we had a The other great thing about our time with Alan was, it was a way for the team to encourage each other. This wasn't an easy thing, either. It's not easy to jump up and speak in front of your colleagues, especially colleagues that you're not always with, I found that we all we all felt the pressure a little bit with each other. And so that could kind of help us get stronger, us get closer. And now beyond our training, we hope to encourage each other to continue to practice. That was the most important thing I'll say that I took off, I'll say it twice. The second most important thing that I learned was, you can go to as many speech training sessions as you'd like, you can read books, and you can watch videos, and that's good. But you're not going to grow and you're not going to change if you do not practice. And so watching yourself, recording yourself listening to yourself, that's some of the most important skills that you can have. And being able to look at your performance critically, with hope to grow and change. Now my team jumped on a meeting with each other this morning. And you can see we're all trying a little harder, or sitting up a little straighter, the eye contact is there, thinking about the words that we're saying before we're saying them eliminating those filler words. And our CEO, John is now started to tell us when we start a sentence with a filler word. So that'll be fun to work out the details of but we learned just so many skills, so many important skills that we'll continue to take with us.

I mean, one of our jobs as advocates for the clean energy transition is to educate and influence. I see myself first and foremost as an educator, because there is a lot of misinformation in the world about for example solar. Some people think solar panels poison the ground. And I note that well solar panels are hermetically sealed. heated glass. And yes, there may be some dangerous chemicals inside the solar panel that you don't want blowing around in the environment. But they are designed to be out there in the wind, rain, hail snow for 30 years, and be hermetically contained. And and so there is a lot of education needed. Let's face it, solar only took off in 2010. I mean, the very early adopters in the US got into solar and maybe oh six. And so at best, you know, we're, we're knocking on 20 years of an industry, right? The industry is very young. And so the vast majority of Americans have no direct personal experience with solar, maybe more so with wind, and it's a regional thing, of course, right? If you're in California, you see solar panels around in the built environment, on homes, on businesses, you see windmills, if you're in Iowa, you see windmills, you don't see a lot of solar, but 40% of their grid power comes from windmills. And so there are a lot of windmills. And people know what they are. And there's good things about them, and not so good things about them. I am glad I was a solar developer, not a wind developer. I think it's harder to be a wind developer. It doesn't mean wind is bad. We need clean energy. And wind is one of those great sources of it. And there's there's multiple sides to every technology. But back to this thing about educating and influencing. And if you would, you know, how do you see this as for as far as yourself and your organization, as a, as an organization that is interfacing with the greater world at large? I mean, you have a very specific title, conservative energy network. And, and maybe you could address that to like, who is your target audience? And what is your mission?

Absolutely. So the conservative energy network is here to help be the premier place on the right for clean energy. So we want to have the conversations and and have them through a conservative lens, and think about what we can do. What common sense conservative policy solutions can we enact across the nation. One of the things about our organization is we have state based organizations and that work at the state level. But we also have a grassroots organization, those are our land and liberty leaders. And they are so good at being on the ground. These are our leaders that are in the counties, they go to township meetings, they speak to county commissioners, and they are in the places where industry is and where these clean energy projects are being enacted out in rural America. They are teaching community members the benefits, the vast, vast benefits, not just energy that will be created with these clean energy projects, but the benefits that will continue to come to the community for 510 30 years to come. What we do at the conservative energy network is we go where the conversations are. And we help we take a fact based approach to clean energy solutions. And we help educate. It's been really great to see the way our state teams have grown to see our land and liberty leaders grow. That organization is about five years old now. So we're starting to see, you know, it takes a while to get physical projects steel in the actual ground that takes 18 months, three years beyond and that's a quick moving project. So we're to the place where we've started to see our leaders start working on projects that are to fruition, that are creating power in their communities, and to be able to see that happen is fantastic. And it's a model that we will continue continue to multiply and duplicate and go throughout the whole nation.

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Absolutely. And we have different leaders from the organization that do message down differently. So I talked about our land and liberty organization, those are our people that are educating people on the ground. But then also in that room was our Director of External Affairs, Tyler Delius. Similarly to your audience, Tim Tyler goes out, and he's speaking at energy focused events. So the message that we have is the same, but the way that we explain the message and the words that we use to portray the message are the things that change. So Tyler might talk about more technical points of energy. Well, our land and liberty leaders aren't going to assume that there is any technical knowledge of energy, we take it from a not a 12th grade education, but maybe a sixth grade education because we never want to assume anybody's knowledge. So we find that our land and liberty leaders really are educating from base knowledge. And when they can come in and start educating from a lower level, they can help change misperceptions that are already in community members minds, so maybe they can help smooth over any negativity before the q&a is even opened up.

Indeed. So when I think about communication, I think about education and influence, and a call to action. One of our calls to action at the Clean Power Hour is speeding the energy transition. We want society and energy professionals and prosumers. To understand that we have to have a sense of urgency about the energy transition, the energy transition in the greater scheme of things is actually the easy part of stepping back from the brink of climate chaos. There are 800 or a billion tons of carbon pollution in the atmosphere that we've accumulated since the 1700s, when we started to industrialize, and the economy is only 40 Giga tons. It's chump change, relatively speaking. And there's so much money flowing into the energy transition now that it's going to happen one way or another. Will it happen faster or slower as a question? And as jigger likes jigger Shaw likes to say, he's the head of the loan program office at the DOA. He says deploy, deploy, deploy, right, we have the technologies that we need in order to decarbonize the economy. And we've identified the technologies that we need actually to, to remove those 800 or trillion tons 800 It's 800 billion or a trillion, depending on how you count tons of carbon pollution. And those technologies are surprisingly simple. I would point our listeners to a new book called Climate restoration by Peter for kowski. So check that out. But when I think about influencing people, Kayla, I think of ones twos and threes. This was I don't know who invented this framework originally, but it was something that I learned from my father there. And and and this is just me, so Take it for what it's worth. But the ones get it, the twos will get it with some education, and the threes will probably never get it. And when you when you think about the public at large, around technology, I think that that is a useful framework. And I'm okay with some portion of society, never wanting to go solar or to electrify transportation, because the day will come when there are only EVs on the on the car lot, whether they like it or not, the ice engine is going to go away because of economic forces that are way, way, way beyond their control. On the other hand, I do want to connect with the ones and twos and inspire them to come from some parallel industry and get into electrification, if they're so interested, right. And so I'm providing a, a hook or an opportunity for them to grab on to something that they may not otherwise, and thereby, bringing more people and more ideas and brain cells and initiatives to the energy transition. But when I talk about this, you know, education and influence, and then, you know, audience and different types of audience, what are your thoughts?

I think that's exactly what we deal with every day, the ones, the twos and the threes and being able to identify, Okay, we're not going to get the threes. And that's okay. We can educate to them, we can talk to them. But we think about our message as caring what is going to bring along the twos. We already have the ones we have those people that are going to stand next to us no matter what. So it is it's all about those two's, how can we get those people that are on the fence to be on our fence, one of the things that you talked about is the transition is going to happen. We say that all the time, it is an inevitable transition to clean energy. So let's take it now. Let's start making those steps. Let's make them in a common sense way.

Yeah. I love that. So what were some other takeaways that our fellow fellow communicators, you know, many of our listeners are podcasters, or writers, or project developers, right, and project executives who are going to these meetings and interfacing with communities and trying to be effective communicators with the twos in the audience. with mixed results, admittedly, we have to be better. As an industry as a, as solar developers and wind developers and battery developers, we have to be better, we cannot rest on our laurels, or sit back and say, well, it's inevitable, right? We have to strive for, for for faster, and more effective. So what else? What other nuggets can you share with our audience?

I would say to trust yourself as the messenger. And so know that you are the expert of your expertise. Trust yourself, slow down. And the biggest thing is, especially when you're speaking in person is to not give up on your eye contact, make sure that you're connecting with the audience. And now when we talk about eye contact, we're not talking about darting around every part of the room. But intentionally taking time with thoughts and sentences. And moving on beyond to next. Finishing a statement and continuing to move forward. I really found that there's strength in pauses, and taking a break, taking a beat not only for your audience, as they're listening to you, you don't want to throw a long monologue at them. It's a way for yourself as well to gather and collect your thoughts as you're moving into your next segue.

It is a challenge when you're in a conversation or a dialogue, right? Because you've got your train of thought, and then you're trying to absorb the other person's train of thought or understand where they're coming from, and perhaps meeting them in the middle and finding common ground or creating a new common ground if you can't identify an existing common ground. I often like to say that we humans have way way more in common than we have differences. In the political arena. I think we often pretend that our differences between for example, Democrats and Republicans are extreme somehow, and I don't share that belief. I when I, when I look at the United States, I see as a system that has been corrupted by the influence of money and power. And that is among Democrats and Republicans. And I, you know, I want a society that inspires its citizenry, to be participatory in the system in the democracy, and not take it for granted. But I think that a lot of Americans have kind of given up, because they don't, they don't feel like the government is on their side, quote, unquote, or that the government is something that needs to be shrunk, so small, that it can be drowned in a bathtub. And yeah, so since I digress a little bit here, but I would love to hear a little more about, you know, your, your wisdom for our audience, and what they can do to be more effective communicators. And this won't be the last time that you and I get to speak. So just see this, if you're a listener, and you're excited about this conversation, see this as a part one, we will we're bringing Kayla and her colleagues at the at the regional offices to the show, and of course, some of their shows are represented on the network. We already have the energy, energize Wisconsin show, with Ryan hoops. And we're very excited to have Wisconsin in our midst at the Clean Power Media Network, check out the Clean Power media network at clean power dot media, and go to the About Us and you'll see all the shows there. But in our last few minutes together, Caleb, what other pearls of wisdom do you have for our audience,

I would be remiss if I didn't talk about the setup that we have right now, which is on Zoom. So you really should be thinking about if you're doing any type of zoom meetings, any type of recordings, especially upgrading your zoom setup with external lighting, external microphones and videos, this is what people will continue to see and listen to. So making sure that your audio and video are the best that they can be, will take you a lot further.

Amen for that, and it is a challenge. Dealing with all kinds of professionals in all kinds of settings, who are not professional podcasters. They don't realize the importance of audio, for example, and having a good microphone. And, and that's and that's on me too. I need to get better about educating my guests about what are your options, it doesn't, you don't have to spend a lot of money to have decent sound. But it makes a big difference in terms of the audience willingness to sit through something for more than two minutes.

And the other note that I'll make is about lighting. As we all transition to working from home and working on Zoom, we all bought a ring light. And you know what we did we parked it right in front of our face. And you've seen these speakers that are sitting right in front of the ring light and what do they look like Tim they look completely washed out. Thinking about lighting as you need multiple points of focus so you can truly light yourself as a subject and putting a background up. Little things like that can really just improve your setup.

Yep. Well, how can our listeners find you Kayla, what is the best way to connect with you and what else if there's another call to action that you would like to make I welcome that.

Thank you. My call to action is going to be to give a listen to the conservative energy podcast. We are live on Spotify, Google podcasts as well as Apple podcasts. But then you can also find us on YouTube at conservative energy network. You can find us online at www.conservativeenergynetwork.org. That's one of the best ways to connect with us. You can see what states that we are spread throughout there 24 states in the nation that we have active chapters in so please see if your state is one of them and connect with us there.

The Clean Power Hour is brought to you by Denowatts. If you're a solar PV asset manager or performance engineer, you need better data and better business intelligence. With Denowatts digital twin benchmarking technology you get more accurate, efficient and faster performance measurement results. The fourth generation Deno recently completed a technical review by DNV you can download the report at denowatts.com That's D E N O W A T T S.com. Now back to the show. Excellent. Well thank you so much. Kayla Ventura with the Conservative Energy Network for being on the show, check out all of our content at cleanpowerhour.com Give us a rating and a review on Apple and Spotify. Tell a friend about the show. That is the best thing you can do to help us grow our audience and speed the energy transition. With that, I will say thank you, and let's grow solar and storage. I'm Tim Montague. Take care. Hey, listeners. This is Tim, I want to give a shout out to all of you. I do this for you twice a week. Thank you for being here. Thank you for giving us your time. I really appreciate you and what you're all about. You are part and parcel of the energy transition, whether you're an energy professional today, or an aspiring energy professional. So thank you, I want to let you know that the Clean Power Hour has launched a listener survey. And it would mean so much to me. If you would go to cleanpowerhour.com. Click on the About Us link right there on the main navigation that takes you to the about page. And you'll see a big graphic listener survey, just click on that graphic, and it takes just a couple of minutes. If you fill out the survey, I will send you a lovely baseball cap with our logo on it. The other thing I want our listeners to know is that this podcast is made possible by corporate sponsors. We have two wonderful sponsors today, chint power systems, the leading three phase string inverter manufacturer in North America, and Denowatts, a performance monitoring platform for utility scale solar. So check out CPS America, and Denowatts. But we are very actively looking for additional support to make this show work. And you see here our media kit. With all the sponsor benefits and statistics about the show. You know we're dropping two episodes a week. We have now over 320,000 downloads on YouTube. And we're getting about 45,000 downloads per month. So this is a great way to bring your brand to our listeners and our listeners are decision makers in clean energy. This includes projects executives, engineers, finance, project management, and many other professionals who are making decisions about and developing, designing, installing and making possible clean energy projects. So check out cleanpowerhour.com both our listener survey on the about us and our media kit and become a sponsor today. Thank you so much. Let's go solar and storage