What’s the story? – New narratives for the energy transition

Amid a rise in negative narratives that characterise the green transition as restraining, disruptive, and overly costly, the development of positive clean energy messaging is more urgent than ever. Effectively communicating the benefits of renewable energy, energy efficiency, and more can shape perceptions and drive progress on green policy implementation.

A new brochure from the Energy Efficiency Watch 5 (EEW5) project provides guidance on how to shape these positive narratives with helpful tips, strategies, and angles to approach the subject. The brochure gives a detailed overview of the project’s outcomes through key policy recommendations and narrative case studies, while also providing a summary of a survey report conducted by EEW5.

Key Findings

EEW5’s policy recommendations include 10 rules to help communicate the benefits of renewable energy and energy efficiency, thereby facilitating the implementation of relevant policy initiatives. These rules are designed to develop positive connotations with renewable energy and energy efficiency topics while challenging counter-narratives that promote stagnation or regression of the energy transition:

1. Understand the relevance of the right narrative
2. Manage the meta-level connotation of your narratives
3. For the sake of broad political consent, avoid mingling economic and other – e.g. ethical – arguments, if one creates more buy-in than the other
4. Use a full set of economic parameters – rather than focusing only on short payback times/advantage of energy cost savings
5. The world is changing, so must our narratives – understand who your target group is and adjust your message to the societal and time related context
6. Put people in the focus of your narrative and take them along
7. The framework is the solution not the problem – don’t steer by technocratic targets but by enabling key stakeholders
8. Never get into reaction mode! Always establish an upfront communication strategy
9. Put each narrative under a positively connotated guiding principle
10. Yes we can! Communicate the success, not the struggle

Additional key outcomes of EEW5 that are covered in the brochure are 10 case studies on narratives, which detail strategies and angles to best communicate the energy transition. The cases covered are as follows:

1. Creating Trust – On the connotation of change
2. Image – Transformation goes better than you think!
3. Experience as an asset – The power of active transformation
4. Competitiveness & Innovation – The need of a fast and firm industrial transformation
5. Opportunities – New value chains
6. Preserving value – The relevance of a modern building stock
7. Security and Freedom – The geopolitics of the clean industrial deal
8. Economic rationality – Avoiding political polarization
9. Priority – Avoiding policy fatigue
10. Resilience – The key role of EE & RE

The brochure also provides an overview of the Energy Efficiency Watch Survey Report 2023, which consulted 1,376 energy efficiency experts from all 27 EU Member States on their countries’ progress in implementing energy efficiency policies.

What is EEW5?

EEW5 is a 3-year project under the EU LIFE programme that aims to develop and support narratives that can effectively communicate the European Green Deal‘s alignment with European competitiveness and a better quality of life. The development of these narratives is instrumental in communicating the benefits of the Green Deal to a broader audience across the EU. EEW5 builds on the work of previous Energy Efficiency Watch projects, which promoted comprehensive policy packages and laid the ground for narrative research.

Download and read the brochure to gain insights and strategies to effectively communicate the benefits of the energy transition to a broad audience!