As someone who enjoys Excel, even I know if the buying process includes building a financial model then the market is broken.
Last weekend, my mom called me ahead of another brutal summer to help her pick a plan. With 15 years of experience in energy, an MBA, and a career in finance, I still needed to build a small analysis to find the answer, and I’m not even confident it was the right one.
The options are convoluted at best and a complete disaster at worst. Providers added fees for underconsumption and credits for overconsumption. Open your windows on a spring day, didn’t use enough power, that’s a fee.
Firms like Energy Ogre exist, but you shouldn’t need a service to choose a common good that we rely on daily.
Retail energy isn’t the only broken market within the energy transition. We’ve overcomplicated other purchases too.
When buying an electric vehicle (EV), the customer is responsible for the tax credit, time-of-use plan, and charging installation. Customers should be able to walk in, buy the car, and leave knowing everything else will be taken care of. That’s how you accelerate adoption.
Carbon markets and emissions monitoring face similar issues. What defines quality? What’s in a scope? The test is simple: Is the company buying more clean energy? Are they electrifying fleets? Is their packaging recyclable? If so, they’re moving in the right direction.
We shouldn’t and don’t need complex measurements to do right by the environment. Make it easy to make good choices and report them, and then the rest will follow.
Whether it’s a free market (like retail energy in Texas and EVs) or highly regulated (like carbon), sometimes the best solution is simplifying things for people. Enable people to easily save money, change habits, or make environmentally friendly choices, and adoption will follow. Complicate the process, and we slow everything down.