America Has Been Here Before: How To Get Clean Energy’s Meta Message Groove Back.
Michael Grossman • April 16, 2026
Why People Said Yes To Wires, Poles, and Towers
America accepted a massive land-altering energy buildout when ordinary people could answer a simple question: What do I get, and why does it matter to my family and my town? The case was tangible. Electricity meant light in the house, water on the farm, refrigeration for food, and equipment that cut drudgery. It was sold as daily life getting better, not as a moral abstraction and not as a distant benefit captured somewhere else.
That is exactly where the current energy-and-data-center story is weak.
AI Is A Lightning Rod, And Clean Energy Is Standing Very Close To The Static
The new Pew energy survey
shows that the national consensus around renewables is thinner than many in the industry want to admit. Overall, 57% of Americans still say the country should prioritize wind and solar over fossil fuels, but that is down from 79% in 2020. Among Republicans and Republican-leaning independents, only 28% now prioritize renewables, while 71% say the priority should be oil, coal, and natural gas. Republicans have also become more skeptical of wind and solar on reliability, cost, and environmental benefit.
At the same time, the data center story is in even worse shape.
Pew found that Americans are much more likely to say data centers are bad for the environment, home energy costs, and nearby quality of life than good for any of those things. The gaps are not close: 39% say data centers are mostly bad for the environment versus 4% who say mostly good; 38% say bad for home energy costs versus 6% good; 30% say bad for quality of life nearby versus 6% good. Even the upside categories are soft. Only 25% say data centers are mostly good for local jobs, and 23% say mostly good for local tax revenue.
The Washington Post–Schar School polling
out of Virginia (the state with the most data centers) is even more alarming because it captures what happens when people live next to the buildout rather than read about it in the abstract. Support for a new data center in one’s community fell from 69% in 2023 to 35% this year. In that same poll, Virginia voters were more likely to say data centers hurt the local environment than help it, 59% to 14, and more likely to say they raise home energy and utility bills than lower them, 57% to 14. They also saw harm on household property taxes by a 47% to 20 margin, even while acknowledging some upside for jobs and county funding.
Now put those two datasets together and the political problem comes into focus.
The Numbers Explain What’s Happening In The Room
Renewables are losing ground with the red half of the country.
Data centers already carry a weak social license. AI carries its own credibility problem because too many people hear “productivity” and translate it into “my job gets cheaper.” Gallup’s latest workplace polling
found that 18% of U.S. employees think it is at least somewhat likely their job will be eliminated within five years by technology such as automation or AI, and that rises to 23% in organizations where AI has already been implemented.
The Narrative That Follows Every New Megawatt
That creates a dangerous narrative chain:
A developer wants more power infrastructure.
The public hears that the power is feeding data centers.
The public hears that data centers are feeding AI.
The public hears that AI is coming for jobs.
Now the substation, solar field, transmission line, or gas peaker is no longer a grid asset. It becomes local evidence that someone else’s machine economy is being built in your backyard.
That is how narratives take hold, and the neural pathways for processing fear far outnumber the pathways for hope. And once that thread is in people’s heads, “this powers your smartphone” is nowhere near enough. So is “we’ll write a check for a playground.” Those are side benefits. They do not answer the underlying question of whether the bargain is fair.
The Electrification Bargain Is A Template
The rural electrification parallel matters because it shows what a successful public bargain looks like.
People accepted towers, poles, wires, substations, rights-of-way, and public financing when the project could be tied directly to their own household economy and to the survival of their community. They also accepted it through trusted local structures. Cooperatives mattered because the community was not being told to absorb the footprint for someone else’s gain. The community was part of the system itself.
That is what the industry is missing now.
The Missing Meta Message
It does not have a persuasive meta-message for conservative and rural audiences, and it barely has one for data centers at all.
The missing message is not climate. It is not innovation. It is not “the future.” It is not “AI will cure cancer.”
The missing message is a local bargain stated in plain English:
You are being asked to host physical infrastructure. Here is what your town gets in return. Here is what your household gets in return. Here is how we keep rates reliable and fair. Here is how we protect land, roads, water, and tax base. Here is what stays local. Here is who is accountable if the developer fails to deliver.
That is not glamorous, but it is how durable support gets built.
Facts & Press Releases Won’t Carry The Day
In a bifurcated media ecosystem, that case also has to be carried differently than it was in the era of rural electrification. Back then, the work included local meetings, local co-ops, extension-style education, and trusted community validators. Today, local news is weaker, social platforms reward emotional content, and misinformation moves faster through self-selected ideological clusters.
Researchers at UNC’s Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life
warn that the decline of local news has created an information vacuum where misinformation flourishes, while social platforms intensify polarization and spread falsehoods more efficiently.
That means the industry cannot treat public support as a press-release problem.
It needs campaign discipline.
Audience segmentation. Trusted validators. Repetition. Local proof. Rapid rebuttal. Direct channels through email, text, Facebook groups, church networks, farm organizations, chambers, school communities, and county-level messengers who already have social permission to speak. The point is not simply to “correct misinformation.” The point is to fill the meaning vacuum before opponents do.
The Message Must Be Delivered By The Right Messenger
A non-profit called Renewable Energy Farmers
is spot on for who should be delivering these messages. The idea is sound because it starts from the right premise: rural America is more likely to hear a credible case from people who live on the land than from an executive flown in for a hearing.
Your bridge across the urban-rural divide will not be built by asking rural communities to subsidize metropolitan data demand out of civic duty. It gets built when the project is tied to local income, local tax stability, and local reliability, but most of all, local dignity.
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Clean energy developers do not lose projects because their technology fails. They lose projects because they misunderstand how decisions get made in the communities where those projects are proposed. If you spend enough time around project development, you start to see the same pattern. A site pencils. The resource is there. Interconnection works. Capital is lined up. Then the project enters the public process and something shifts. Opposition forms. Local officials hesitate. The project stalls or disappears. That outcome is not rare. Roughly one out of every three large clean energy projects in the United States never reaches construction . At the same time, the environment around these projects is getting harder. Research from the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University tracks hundreds of renewable energy projects across dozens of states facing organized opposition, along with a growing number of local laws restricting development. Across the country, local resistance is no longer episodic. It is structural. Most developers respond by trying to improve how they explain their projects. That is not where the problem sits. The most common messaging mistake clean energy developers make is this: They treat communication as explanation when it is actually coalition building. The Illusion Of Stakeholder Engagement Developers often approach communication by identifying “stakeholders” and building a plan to engage them. The list is familiar. Elected officials, regulators, adjacent landowners, business groups. Those people matter, but they are not the community. Communities are not organized through formal roles. They are organized through trust . Influence sits with people who do not appear on stakeholder maps. A pastor, a co-op manager, a respected farmer, a small business owner. These are the people others listen to when they are deciding what a project means. When engagement is limited to formal stakeholders, developers miss the informal networks where opinions actually form. That gap is where opposition gains ground. Developers Try To Be The Messenger Even when developers engage early, they often assume they should be the ones delivering the message. They have the data. They understand the project. They can explain the benefits. That logic makes sense internally. It is less effective externally. People trust those who share their lived experience . A developer entering from outside the community is asking for trust before it exists. A local voice does not need to make that same ask. This is not a communications nuance. It is the difference between being heard and being discounted. Projects that move forward tend to have credible local voices who can explain the project in terms that make sense to their neighbors. Projects that fail often rely on the developer to carry that burden alone. What is actually at stake These dynamics are easy to underestimate because they are not reflected in financial models. A utility-scale wind or solar project in the 50 to 100 megawatt range typically requires $75 million to $200 million in upfront capital, depending on technology, location, and interconnection costs. Over a 20 to 30 year lifespan, those projects can generate hundreds of millions of dollars in contracted revenue, particularly when backed by long-term power purchase agreements. When a project fails at the permitting stage, that capital is not redeployed cleanly. Time is lost. Development costs are written off. Market windows close. This is not a marginal issue. It is a core risk to the business model. The New Pressure: Data Centers The stakes are rising because demand is rising. The rapid growth of artificial intelligence and cloud computing is driving a surge in data center development across the United States. These facilities require enormous and continuous electricity loads. Recent analysis from Pew Research Center notes that data center electricity consumption in the U.S. is expected to increase significantly as AI adoption expands, placing new pressure on regional grids. At the same time, research from Columbia Business School highlights a growing race to secure power for these facilities, with developers competing for access to clean and reliable electricity. Additional analysis from Environmental and Energy Study Institute warns that data center demand is already reshaping grid planning and could complicate climate goals if new supply does not come online fast enough. This creates a collision. On one side, data center developers need large volumes of electricity, increasingly from low-carbon sources. On the other, local opposition is making it harder to build the very projects required to meet that demand. The result is a tightening constraint on both infrastructure and timelines. Coalition Building As A Development Function In this environment, coalition building is not a communications add-on. It is a core development function. Projects that succeed tend to follow a different sequence. They identify credible local voices early. They invest time in understanding how the project intersects with local concerns. They allow the community to shape how the project is discussed rather than introducing a fully formed narrative late in the process. This work often happens before a project is publicly announced. It rarely appears in investor updates. It is difficult to quantify. It is also one of the clearest predictors of whether a project moves forward. A Different Way To Think About Messaging If you treat messaging as explanation, your goal is clarity. You want people to understand what the project is and why it matters. If you treat messaging as coalition building, your goal is different. You are working to ensure that when the project becomes public, there are already trusted voices within the community who understand it, can speak to it, and see a place for it. That shift changes everything. It changes who speaks. It changes when conversations begin. It changes how opposition is received. The Broader Implication The clean energy transition is often framed as a technological and financial challenge. Those elements matter. Progress on both has been significant. At the same time, the growing number of local restrictions, the scale of organized opposition, and the surge in electricity demand from data centers point to a different constraint. The limiting factor is not always whether a project can be built. It is whether a community is prepared to accept it. Developers who recognize that early and build coalitions accordingly get projects built. Developers who do not often find themselves trying to explain a project after the decision has already been made.
