Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESSes) are the latest battleground in the power struggle between Big Oil and carbon drawdown, fought with the usual weapons of mass disinformation. Here are some combat tips.
This article describes a new variation of the ‘Not In My Back Yard’ tune. It separates the rational from the emotional, and suggests possible responses to replace knee-jerk reactions with evidence-based climate action.
BESSa nova
If you’ve not yet heard of a BESS (Battery Energy Storage System), you soon will.
BESSes are the new love/hate character in climate comms long-running wrestling match:
- In the Black corner, the fantasies peddled by Big Oil.
- In the Green Corner, the laws of atmospheric physics.
BESS joins a stable of established hero/villain wrestlers like ‘Net Zero’, ‘Giant Windmills’ and ‘Green Subsidies’.
In the real world, BESSes are a humdrum answer to the rhetorical question still triumphantly flourished by climate sceptics:
‘What happens when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine?’
Three millennia ago, the inhabitants of Girnar, in modern Gujarat, India asked a similar question about another critical resource, water:
‘What happens when the rain doesn’t fall and the river doesn’t flow?’
The answer then was human civilization’s first recorded artificial water reservoir.
BESSes are today’s renewable energy reservoirs. They are part of the infrastructure required to ‘balance the grid’. Like water reservoirs, they ensure a constant supply of electricity without having to fire up coal/oil/gas power stations whenever energy demand exceeds available supply.
- When the wind blows, the sun shines, and demand is low, wind farms and solar arrays charge the batteries.
- When it’s still, or dark, BESS power boils our kettles, powers our broadband routers, smelts our steel, facilitates our ChatGPT queries, charges our EVs, runs our trains, keeps our lights on etc.
A BESS isn’t much to look at. Imagine a flattish area with rows of shipping containers housing big batteries, usually lithium-iron.
No moving parts mean there’s not much to see. Unlike power station cooling towers billowing white clouds of steam and smokestacks belching black clouds of soot, turbines towering over the landscape, or fields full of shiny panels, you can’t spot a BESS from afar. Like tucked-away electricity substations, you’d have to take a wrong turn to even know one existed.
A BESS is about as exciting to watch as a field full of car batteries, which is basically what it is – important, dull, infrastructure.
So why, the next time you hear about a BESS in the news, is it likely to be next to words like ‘protest’, ‘controversial’, ‘dispute’ and ‘bitter’?
Truly, madly, deeply suspicious
Here are some anonymised comments made about a proposed BESS in south east England. They are:
- The views of real people, not bots, made in a private WhatsApp group of ten lifelong friends, now mainly retired, that‘s existed for around a decade.
- The group is usually used to arrange meet-ups, discuss holidays, recommend books and films etc.
- One member characterises its members as ‘left-leaning female friends, who’d all identify as being ‘green’’
- These are the initial exchanges of a longer series of comments in the same tone
PERSON 1: We have developers applying to destroy our green fields with a BESS. The land is just south of our church. Poor access, small roads. Cheaper than brownfield. The BESS developments are going up all over the UK without any joined-up thinking by the government. Not even ‘green’ energy.
PERSON 2: Milliband is a lunatic. There are places for these substations as there are for data centres. Brownfield sites away from communities.
PERSON 1:There are many which are not investigated. Less lucrative for the hedge funds that back these developments.
PERSON 2: I am deeply suspicious of anything supported by a hedge fund.
PERSON 1:This one is. The local farmer will get £175,000 per year for 45-yr lease
PERSON 2: Blame it on Brexit. Farmers have been encouraged to diversify.
PERSON 1: Well,I do have sympathy for farmers though I know a lot of them voted for Brexit stupidly. So hard to make money.
PERSON 2: In general, yes. But these farmers are in fact doing well.
Were this a screenplay, it could be the opening sequence of a movie called Attack Of The Killer NIMBYs’.
NIMBY clues
The subtext of this exchange is so clear it barely qualifies as ‘sub’: ‘Not In My Back Yard’ (NIMBY).
There’s no greater good to offset their long list of perceived local negatives, no cost/benefit analysis, but a litany of downsides.
Volume
In the 48 words that spark the exchange, Person 1 cites or implies seven excuses for not building a local BESS:
- Ecological: destroy our green fields
- Sacrilege: just south of our church
- Logistics: poor access, small roads
- Avarice: cheaper than brownfield.
- Hyperbole: all over the UK
- Incompetence: without any joined-up thinking
- Hypocrisy: not even ‘green’ energy
That works out at 6.85 Words Per Excuse (WPEs, or ‘Whoopsies’).
Pithy.
This density is maintained once Person 2 joins in, adding a further 13 justifications in 108 words.
- Mental illness: Milliband is a lunatic
- False equivalence: these substations
- Guilt by association: as there are for data centres
- Deflection: Brownfield sites away from communities
- Conspiracy: many which are not investigated
- Corruption: deeply suspicious of anything supported by a hedge fund
- Greedy Farmers: The local farmer will get £175,000 per year for 45-yr lease
- Democracy: Blame it on Brexit.
- Gullible Farmers: Farmers have been encouraged to diversify
- Good Farmers: I do have sympathy for farmers
- Stupid Farmers: a lot of them voted for Brexit stupidly
- Poor Farmers: So hard to make money
- Rich Farmers: But these farmers are in fact doing well.
Twenty excuses for inaction in 156 words. That’s a Whoopsie of 7.8.
Emotion:
Each excuse carries emotional baggage.
For left-leaning people, ‘Brexit’ and ‘hedge fund’ are powerful pantomime villains. Like WWF baddies, mention their names and you provoke booing.
For those on the left of the UK’s governing Labour Party, the capitalist stooge, sell-outs ‘centrists’ who dominate the party are villains too. (‘lunatic’ Ed Miliband is the UK Minister for Energy Security & Net Zero).
The six roles assigned to ‘farmers’ in this exchange show how modern city-dwellers flip between casting them as heroes and villains. Apply the same label to a) saintly providers of our daily bread and b) billionaire landowners gaming agricultural subsidies, and you’re bound to contradict yourself.
But in this context it doesn’t matter, because farmers are just props supporting Person 1 & 2’s a priori argument that a BESS should not be built in their back yard. All Good Farmer or Bad Farmer need do for the purposes of justifying inaction is to provoke emotional reactions.
Emotion-based arguments are immune to facts or reason. If your emotional attachment to not wanting decarbonising infrastructure built near your home is stronger than your rational adherence to ‘saving the planet’, logic loses.
Even people who describe themselves as ‘green’ ventriloquise pro-fossil fuel talking points planted by Big Oil’s PR shills. For dupers and duped, it’s a win-win:
- Big Oil: Retard attempts at decarbonisation
- Left-leaning Retirees: reinforce each other’s self-righteous indignation, remain the heroes of their own narratives
1 Local BESS application + 20 emotional baggage carriages = 1 rhetorical runaway train.
Fact-free
Persons 1& 2 exchange a series of opinions and assertions, sandwiched by two verifiable facts (which we suppose both came from the regional TV news report that triggered this discussion between friends):
- Local planning application for a BESS (the ‘inciting event’, in screenwriter parlance)
- £175K/year 45-year lease paid to the landowner.
Here’s are some questions a responsible journalist might ask (it’s not clear from this discussion if the inciting report included them):
- How will the local community gain from a BESS?
- How do BESSes contribute to national energy security?
- What’s this BESS’s carbon reduction impact?
- What are BESS safety/ security risks?
The ex-journalist group member who alerted us to this exchange took a few seconds to search ‘BESS safety record’ online, finding an authoritative-sounding and detailed DMC Response Note from East Hertfordshire local government District Management Committee. Its 5 pages start with:
‘BESS are not inherently unsafe and are strictly regulated and have to follow very stringent safety standards’
This assertion is supported by dozens of verifiable facts, references and links, directly related to NIMBY concerns.
If the NIMBY was amenable to evidence shifting their emotion-driven position.
Tone
Persons 1 & 2 disagree on some secondary issues (farmers), but these don’t matter so long as they support their conclusion (no BESS here).
Argument-from-conclusion is the opposite of the scientific method, which formulates a hypothesis in order to subject it to verifiable, objective, repeatable interrogation.
This anti-science trick is popular with populists. They know people like hearing what they want to hear, and don’t like being lead through a sequence of logical steps in search of an unknown conclusion.
For such manipulators, ‘experts’ are trial-by-combat champions. Skip explaining the science that makes them ‘experts, just oil them up to parade them in the ring, more muscular than your opponent’s bespectacled boffin.
These experts appear on screens and stages to rally those that agree, maybe to convert, but not to have their science challenged.
In the WhatsApp chat, however, the audience is 8 old friends. Even a small, closed group like this betrays a performative/proselytising impulse.
If the question is ‘Why is this person saying this?’ the answer is usually ‘Because, one way or another, it confirms their status as the hero of their own narrative’.
The nature of NIMBYism
For Big Oil’s battalions of PR mercenaries, NIMBY is a key tactic in their mission to ‘Drill, baby, drill’ until the last drop of oil is ‘exploited’.
Silicon Valley Overlords are adept at the twin tactic, YIMBY ‘Yes In My Back Yard’, deployed on national and regional governments vying to offer tax breaks to become locations for multi-billion-dollar data centres. Just reverse the benefit/cost trick – talk about investment, jobs, growth and modernisation, don’t mention their massive electricity and water needs, that they’ll provide hardly any new jobs, but provide splendid new terrorist targets.
The WhatsApp group exchange quoted above demonstrates how NIMBY/YIMBY can turn natural enemies into inadvertent allies. Persons 1&2 consider themselves ‘green’, yet act as highly effective model mouthpieces for Big Oil.
They’d probably be shocked at this suggestion, which is why this kind of anti-activism is so effective. Why use climate deniers to retard decarbonisation, when tree-huggers are happy to oblige?
The asymmetry of incumbency
Every victory for decarbonisation is a defeat for those who profit from fossil fuel, and vice versa.
Big Oil hold many asymmetric advantages in this zero-sum game – money, power, media control, government capture – but the biggest may be incumbency.
Most games favour the status quo. Lawyers say ‘possession is 9/10ths of the law’. Tennis players seek to ‘dominate the T’. In our WWF scenario, Big Oil, in the Black Corner, occupies the centre of the ring, and only needs to fend off attacks to win.
Carbon Drawdown, in the Green Corner, must expend much more energy just to move them an inch, let alone toss them from the ring.
Unless they employ some ju-jitsu, and use their opponent’s weight and power against them.
New Bottle, Old Whine
NIMBY tactics work because, despite claiming to be ruled by reason, most humans allow their hearts to rule their heads.
When emotional attachments wrestle with facts, statistics and logic, they tend to become the immovable objects. Ask Greta.
Emotional anchors make NIMBY defences, once erected, robust. NIMBY logic creates gravity-defying engineering marvels, imaginary bridges spanning huge cognitive chasms, supported by nothing more than misinformation and our need to be the heroes of our own narratives.
The WhatsApp discussion shows how easily unrelated, but entrenched, narratives (Brexit, hedge funds, farmers etc.) are hitched to NIMBY arguments. BESS applications are to Big Oil what refugee centres are to xenophobes, and social housing developments to snobs.
NIMBYs only need excuses to justify inaction, not arguments to change the status quo. The more plausible they sound, the less challenged they are, and the more loudly they’re amplified by the media, the more likely they’ll succeed.
Trigger words
Populists, demagogues, cult leaders and advertisers all know the importance of repeating lies. Hear the same lie, unchallenged, many times in different places, and you’re quids in.
Here are some common climate lies, with a few diagnostic trigger words:
- Wind Turbines: blot landscapes, desecrate nature,kill birds, confuse whales
- Solar Farms: take up farmland, make us vulnerable to China, depress house prices
Big Oil’s PR mercenaries are expert saboteurs. For decades, they’ve been seeding misinformation/disinformation like retreating armies scattering land mines. The longer they delay effective climate action, the longer they have to keep squeezing profit from the ground.
- Electric Vehicles: range anxiety, expensive, emit more carbon than they save
- Air-source Heat Pumps: noisy, expensive, untested technology, devalue properties
Sustainability activists do their best to confront this misinformation head-one. Anyone genuinely curious about the facts can easily find online resources, like Carbon Brief’s Factcheck: 16 misleading myths about solar power.
Such rebuttals, however, only work on people prepared to be moved by facts, evidence, science or statistics.
Given that most people are much more inclined to cling to their irrational beliefs, what alternative tactics to stat-bashing does the street-smart climate activist have?
The Ju-Jitsu approach
Responding to a BESS Nimby, or anyone citing reasons to justify climate inaction, listen carefully.
Their excuses usually include contradictory things. Instead of pointing them out, identify the one that appears to move them most, mentally plot a course that starts there and ends in taking action to reduce carbon. Neither agree nor disagree with anything they say, but wait until they’ve run out of steam before taking a view on whether it’s worth your time to engage with them.
This is important, as engaging with certain people wastes time for both of you.
See Through Target Audience Taxonomy is designed for this triage. There are only four categories, and knowing which type you’re facing makes your own activism much more efficient.
In reverse order, the four categories are:
‘Willing Inactivists’: Climate deniers and denialists.
Action: Walk away.
There’s no point in engaging with someone who’s arguing from different premises.
You could try taking them on a very long route ‘around the houses’, via a series of interconnected things you can agree on, such as saving money, but the chances are that when you finally reach the crunch point – BESSes, ‘windmills’ etc. – emotional attraction to narratives will trump avarice.
Recent Economics Nobel Prize winners have demonstrated how we often act against our own economic interests. Don’t waste time trying to disprove them.
The good news is that the number of Category 4 Willing Inactivists is small and declining. The 89% Project website provides evidence that 80-89% of people want their governments to do more to address climate change.
The bad news is that the 10-11% of Willing Inactivists tend to hold all the levers of power, have most of the money, and control much of the media, old and new.
‘Unwilling Inactivists’: Accept climate change, but feel powerless to do anything about it
Action: Retrench and nudge
Unwilling Inactivists, as the most amenable to changing their minds, deserve the most time and attention.
Climate Activism’s Pit of Despair is wide and inviting. Most of us resign ourselves to sliding in to join everyone else. As this Pit is home to 80-89% of the human population, we’re in good company.
But dangle the ladder of empowerment, and people who are not too far gone will want to grasp at it happy to climb out. Despair is an unhappy place: all but the most depressed would rather escape it.
Helping the Inactive become Active requires training and practice.
See Through’s Top Ten Tips for Ju-Jitsu Carbon Drawdown Nudgers
- Sidle up to an Unwilling Inactivist.
- Stand shoulder-to-shoulder with them, not face-to-face.
- Chat in a friendly tone about That Thing Over There you can both see.
- Find points of agreement.
- Talk in their language, adopt their vocabulary and register.
- Avoid dropping the C-Bomb, where C= ‘climate’, ‘carbon’ or other ‘green’ trigger words that close their ears.
- Favour personal stories over statistics, jargon and references at your fingertips, but have both to hand.
- Don’t shout.
- Sometimes whisper, in case ‘the others’ might hear. People like being the first.
- Encourage them to think it was all their idea. Once carbon reduction action makes them the heroes of their own narratives, they’ll do your proselytising for you.
‘Ineffective Activists’: focus on minor/futile/mitigating individual behaviours, not government regulation, and spend much of their activism either talking to fellow Cat. 2s, who already agree with them, or arguing with Cat. 4. (see below), who never will
Action: Move On/Maybe Nudge
Persons 1 & 2 present as typical Ineffective Activists.
- They sound like model recyclers who might volunteer for community litter-picking, believing activities contribute to ‘saving the planet’.
- They would be upset if you pointed out neither recycling nor litter-picking reduce any carbon, and actually support the petro-chemical industry by guaranteeing continued demand for plastic.
Ineffective Activists are not high-value targets for those seeking to speed up carbon drawdown.
If you have a choice between convincing an Ineffective Activist ‘doing their bit’ that what they’re doing is futile, and offering an Unwilling Inactivist an escape route from the Pit of Despare, take the latter, every time.
But there’s no harm in trying, of course, so we also suggest ‘Nudge’.
Effective Activists: focus on changing government regulation, not individual behaviour, use behavioural psychology to meet goals defined by atmospheric physics, measure success in tonnes of CO2 equivalent reduced or sequestered, not funding, views or clicks.
Action: N/A.
Effective Activists, by definition, would not take a NIMBY position.
If they do, re-categorize them as Ineffective Activists and see above.
What would you say in your friends’ WhatsApp group”?
If you were one of the other 8 members in the WhatsApp group, reading the posts of Persons 1&2, what would you do?
They’re not rival protestors, strangers or politicians, but your close friends. You share innumerable experiences, from birthday celebrations to beach holidays, book clubs and family events.
If your good friends, whether on social media, at the school gate, in the pub, at a dinner party, start sounding off about opposing BESS in your back yard, what would you say?
You might, like our source, post something like:
Where do you think they should be sited? Obviously they are needed to store energy for the grid if we want to reach carbon zero but it seems practically all local communities are against them.
What would you do when Person 1 responds with a terse, passive-aggressive:
Brownfield sites obviously.
Is this an Unwilling Inactivist opportunity? If so, you could sidle up to this debate and:
- weigh the pros and cons of repurposing brownfield sites vs greenfield construction in general
- Apply such calculations to your closest local brownfield site in particular
- Search online and find that East Hertfordshire DMC report on BESS safety (as she did)
- Cite similar surveys on brownfield site contamination issue
- Examine how important BESSes are in decarbonising the grid
Or, as our source did, you might diagnose an Ineffective Activist performative debate, think better of risking personal friendships over an issue like this, make a tactical retreat, and think about alternative, more effective ways of reducing carbon.
Climate activism, like fossil fuels and life, is a finite resource.
Use it wisely.
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To find out how your skills and experience can contribute to the See Through Network’s Goal of ‘Speeding Up Carbon Drawdown by Helping the Inactive Become Active’, email: volunteer@seeethroughnews.org