How to Talk About Your Toys

Installation of the Coast Guard's 2.4 kW turbine -- Rich Hewitt

Big news from the Coast Guard this past week, according to a story in the Bangor Daily News: the installation of a 2.4 kilowatt wind turbine (!) --  announced at a press conference replete with earnest speeches and featuring, as backdrop, the plucky little machine itself, spinning away atop its tower.

Now, if you remember your film history, you’ll remember that 1.21 Gigawatts is about the energy contained in a bolt of lightning. The turbine in question is on the order of a million times less: 2.4 kilowatts. That’s almost enough energy to power a Gandhi-esque American household, or, as the article states, two homes on the base (not enough for 100 percent of both, mind you, just feeding into two homes). This strikes me as (a) not entirely press worthy and (b) a bit distracting. It’d be like my mother holding a press conference to announce that she’s taken the bold step of swapping out the old incandescent light bulbs around the house with new CFLs!!! (This, despite my father’s recalcitrant and persistent grumblings of the poor reading-quality light in the bathroom.) 

To be fair, the inconsequential turbine in question is “part of a larger green energy effort at the Southwest Harbor base that includes solar energy and renewable heat sources.” Great. That’s like saying that Captain Crunch is part of a complete balanced breakfast, if I also happen to be eating a healthy breakfast. After all, this is the Coast Guard, a massive consumer of energy and fossil fuel. So while it’s all well and good if they want to tinker around with a renewable energy technology starter kit, it reminds me that all I ever want to hear about is the actual impact or performance of a given thing, rather than the thing itself (unless it’s on the order of cold fusion and is somehow terrifically newsworthy in-and-of-itself).

For example, if, in this case, the goal were to offset the overall base energy use by a certain amount (maybe by 50 percent, maybe by 100 percent) it’d be good to know how the turbine is helping (or not significantly helping) toward that end. Context, in cases like this, is king.

Another example of this phenomenon caught my eye this past week as well, only on the opposite side of the size spectrum: the Salt Palace Convention Center in Salt Lake City hopes to install 2.6 Megawatts of solar panels on its roof (~1,000 times more than the Coast Guard’s windmill), which would make it the single largest rooftop solar installation in the country (there’s a 2.4 MW roof at a FedEx facility in Woodbridge, NJ). What’s more, the Salt Lake Tribune article tells us that the solar panels will supply 25 percent of the building’s energy needs, enough to power 261 homes. At first I thought, “Wow, that’s great!” But then I slid into the horrifying realization that the country’s largest rooftop installation can’t even power the building on which it sits (nor can the NJ installation). And it raises the question: are they just covering up an inefficient Frankenstein of a building with a handsome solar haircut? Are they one of the best performers or worst performers in terms of convention centers around the country in energy use per square foot? Again, with the information they’ve given us, it’s impossible to know.

And so I’d like to propose a simple set of guidelines for talking about environmental technologies, whether you’re the press or the PR firm or the organization itself:

1. Always describe the impact of the technology on the overall context. In other words: how much is the larger building or company or neighborhood or military base improved over where it was beforehand? Or, as in the case of a new construction project – what is the improvement compared to where it would have been without the effort?
   
   
2. Explain how good or bad the building or company performs compared to others in its class. If it’s a building (like an office building or a supermarket), what’s the Energy Star score? If there isn’t an Energy Star score (say, for a Convention Center), how does it compare with the best in class for that building type?
3. Explain how the effort or installation in question fits into the larger corporate or building-wide performance goals. If a company has a goal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from its fleets and buildings by 20%, it’d be great to know how the green efforts they’re touting in their press releases and website contribute to those goals.

Otherwise, those of us on the reading end of these articles and press releases can only guess whether your impressive new gadget is making a difference or whether it is a clever red herring, distracting us from the ugly truth.