How to talk about energy blockchain
Communicating the technology well is as important as what the tech can actually do
A lot has been said about blockchain, including within the energy sector in particular. It’s a disruptor! (Or is it?) It will revolutionize the world economy. It is the next big thing for renewable energy. It will decentralize electricity supply.
These make for great headlines in the media. But how should you really talk about energy blockchain? How should you communicate about this technology with colleagues, executives, and others in the industry who may be new to this promising tech?
Follow these three tips to take your energy blockchain communication from clickbait headlines to pragmatic discussions that will resonate with your audience:
- Anchor in familiar terminology
Yes, blockchain is a new ‘thing.’ Yes, we want it to stand apart and get noticed as something ‘different.’ It’s easy to disappear down the rabbit hole of that newness and otherness and emphasize all the aspects of blockchain that separate it from what has come before. Tokens! Validators! Consensus mechanisms! Block rewards!
But this same newness can make blockchain feel unfamiliar, breeding skepticism, resistance, or even fear. Instead, consider talking about blockchain in the language and context of pre-existing, known variables.
By way of example, consider two ways of describing the same thing:
OPTION 1: a regional aggregation of coordinated, customer-sited, software-controlled energy assets
OPTION 2: a virtual power plant (VPP)
There’s no question I’ll take Option 2, every time.
To those of you in the energy sector, a VPP is likely an inviting and already-familiar term. But why? One important reason is because it defines a new ‘thing’ (the VPP) in the context of familiar language. Everyone already knows instinctively what a power plant is. A virtual power plant takes a familiar concept and starts to evolve and redefine it.
Blockchain has already taken baby steps in this category, being a distributed ledger technology vs. familiar, old, centralized ledgers and databases. How can you take that further? How can you describe your blockchain initiatives in familiar language with known reference points? (For example, if you look at our project with APG and how we’re applying EW-DOS and the EW Flexhub to their frequency regulation market, you could probably describe most of that project without ever using the word ‘blockchain.’)
2. Highlight superior attributes
When it comes to emphasizing blockchain’s attributes, don’t tell me what it is, tell me what it can do better.
Look back at the press release Apple put out when the company revealed the iPhone to the world 13 years ago in January 2007.
First, to point #1 above, Apple defined the new iPhone in the language of known variables, describing it as “combining three products — a revolutionary mobile phone, a widescreen iPod with touch controls, and a breakthrough Internet communications device with desktop-class email, web browsing, searching and maps — into one small and lightweight handheld device.”
Second, and perhaps more importantly, Apple touted all the things that an iPhone could do superior to its mobile phone predecessors. It had Visual Voicemail that allowed a user to review a list of messages, rather than having to listen through each of them in turn. It had a camera that put other mobile phone pictures to shame. It had a touch-sensitive, widescreen display that auto-rotated if the phone was tipped. And the list went on.
The story is similar with electric vehicles—whether Nissan’s debut of the LEAF in 2009 or Tesla’s reveal of the Model 3 in 2016. It was all about their superior attributes relative to internal combustion engine automobiles: zero tailpipe emissions, quiet, full torque for exciting acceleration from a stop, new interfaces and driving experiences (from the Model 3’s large, touchscreen UI to the LEAF’s largely one-pedal driving that balances acceleration and regenerative braking).
The bottom line? It’s less important to emphasize the nuts and bolts of what’s under the hood of energy blockchain, and more important to highlight all of the things that blockchain can do uniquely or better than the incumbent tech alternatives. (That’s why when we talk about the EW Origin SDK—which recently announced a sweep of updates—we focus on all the ways Origin improves energy attribute certificate markets rather than describing it in the language of smart contracts.)
3. Don’t over-promise
It’s tempting to allow our energy blockchain enthusiasm to boil over into hyperbolic statements about the technology’s potential. But nothing feeds into the ‘hype’ portion of Gartner’s famous Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies like overblown statements.
Yes, we collectively believe as an Energy Web community in the transformative potential of blockchain for our industry. But there’s an important distinction between believing it and saying it.
Grand promises of a technology’s ‘revolutionary’ potential—even if possibly or even likely true—generally fall into two categories: 1) Most such statements don’t age well, because the promise never materialized into reality… or fell woefully short of its original claim. 2) A select few go above and beyond even early ambitious claims and truly embody the ‘revolutionary’ moniker (witness the markets that smartphones have unleashed in the decade-plus since the iPhone’s launch).
But I’m personally of the opinion that it’s better to show me than to tell me. And to show me requires commercial deployments, confirmed results, and thus some benefit of hindsight. Yet we’re still in the early-ish days of energy blockchain, even as commercial deployments are growing. Which means that it’s probably better to temper our claims with a small dose of modesty. It’s otherwise too easy to be dismissive of messages that make big, bold proclamations.
When it comes to striking the balance of ambition vs. modesty, I like to abide by the 80/20 rule. 80% of your message should be rooted in some measure of today’s reality. 20% of your message can ‘stretch’ and convey the scale of your future ambition.
I’m reminded of the old maxim common in scientific research circles, “In God we trust, all others bring data.” We as an energy blockchain community may trust in the technology’s potential and envision a certain future in which it plays a central role, but we owe it to the broader global energy sector to back up our boast.
Legendary boxer Muhammad Ali famously said, “It’s not bragging if you can back it up.” So let’s build out more proof points, and then start humble-bragging about energy blockchain. Until then, better to guard against over-promising.
Putting blockchain messaging into practice
As an energy blockchain community, we’re talking to many different audiences: other departments within our own companies, senior executives at the top, the regulators that oversee our sector, blockchain and other software developers, NGOs and advocate organizations, the media, and the list goes on.
Ultimately, whether you follow my three tips or not, this is about being intentional in the language and messages that we use to describe our work writ large. The energy blockchain community is a tribe. We speak one another’s language. But we mustn’t forget that we are part of a much bigger tribe—that of the global energy sector—whose buy-in we need if blockchain is to succeed. To do that, we must speak their language. We must make blockchain feel familiar, relatable, and believable… even as we elevate excitement around its tremendous potential.
