The Medium Is The Message
Michael Grossman • April 25, 2026
Why Scientists And Engineers Have Such Difficulty Explaining Their Cleantech Solutions
I’m often asked why it’s so hard for some of the smartest people in the world to communicate their ideas. A book I’ve been reading, Stolen Focus, sheds some light on the reasons.
Cleantech Founders Are Trained Differently
In school (K-12, undergraduate, post-graduate), reading is a requirement for learning, and historically, the main source of that information came from books that were read linearly and required (often) hours of focus to understand.
If you’re a PhD, that means you’ve spent your entire childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood consuming information in a certain way. By the time you’re 25 or 30, your brain is hardwired to absorb and share information a certain way.
Deep concentration and focus are central to how neurons in your brain piece together that information and create new neural pathways that lead to scientific and engineering breakthroughs.
But once you leave academia or the lab, you step into a world that doesn’t consume your solutions in the same way.
It’s no secret that Americans don’t read. One large study showed that 57% of Americans don’t read a single book in a year,
and by 2017, the average American spent only 17 minutes per day reading a book, but 5.4 hours on their phones.
That number has become even more skewed over the last decade.
Your Audience Of Cleantech Investors & Customers Reads From Screens
Anne Mangen, a professor of literacy at the University of Stavanger in Norway, has been researching reading comprehension for over two decades. Reading from screens, she discovered, trains us to read differently—in a manic skip-and-jump, from one thing to the next.
“We run our eyes rapidly over the information to extract what we need,” she concluded.
Screen Inferiority
In one study, Mangen split people into two groups: one group was given information from a printed book, and the other was given the same information on a screen.
When asked to recall what they read, there was a large gap between the book readers and the screen readers. Fifty-four studies have revealed that the gap between books and screens
is big enough that, in elementary school children, it’s the equivalent of two-thirds of a year’s growth in reading comprehension.
Researchers have a term for this: screen inferiority
Why Does Screen Inferiority Matter To Cleantech Founders
According to Docsend, a partner at a VC will spend less than three minutes reviewing your pitch deck
on a computer screen. When she visits your website, she will scan the homepage, where the average viewer will spend 54 seconds before moving on.
The same principle applies to your LinkedIn post, your newsletter, or your explainer video. How much information do you expect her to remember once she moves on to the next thing in her day?
Potential pilot partners and customers are no different. You can leave your slide deck after the meeting, but just like you, they have a dozen other issues occupying their brain space. Yet you’re expecting them to carry your message through their corporate hierarchy, including all of the technical details you packed onto 25 slides?
(H2) How Cleantech Founders Can Overcome Atrophying Attentions
While it’s tempting to shake your fists at the gods of Google, Meta, and Apple for successfully hijacking our attention spans for their profit, it’s not going to get you any closer to closing your Series A round (or any round for that matter) or convincing a pilot partner to help prove your technology.
If you want your audience to commit it to memory, you need to clear away all of the jargon
and remove the complexity from your climate tech.
Some will dismiss this as reductive advice, but your audience is much more likely to remember a single takeaway that changes their world for the better, whether that’s a higher profit margin, meeting new regulations, or lowering costs.
Few people recall that Edison used carbon filaments in his original light bulb. They remember that for the first time in human history, they could see, read, and cook at night.
The science used to build the first atomic bomb is elusive to most people, but they do know what a mushroom cloud looks like and the devastation it left in its wake in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
I could go on and on with the technological innovation of the 20th century: the radio, the television, the cellular phone, and yes, the internet. Asking people to recall how they were created and what’s inside the box is a fool’s errand, but they all can tell you how it changed their lives.
(H2) Tailor Your Cleantech Message To The Medium
Your invention is impressive. Your peers at the DOE and ARPA-E say so. The United States Patent Office says so. But they aren’t putting their jobs at risk or their personal money on the line to bring your technology to market. And they aren’t making decisions based on your pitch deck or your website. More importantly, they were trained to learn the same way you were.
Then there’s the rest of us—distracted, unfocused, and addicted to the affirmations Big Tech serves us to keep us hooked to the surveillance economy.
If you want their undivided attention, you have to speak as they scroll. They are going to pick out the things that yank on their emotions.
You’ll get a “like” when you tell them you feel their pain
You’ll get engagement when they learn your solution can ease their emotional/financial burden
They will even stop scrolling momentarily when you explain how you make them money or solve their regulatory problem.
And before they look away, you need to tell them what to do next, in this case, book a second meeting when you’ll have to repeat Steps 1-3 because nothing captures attention on a screen for long except a cat playing piano.
Your climate tech pitch is getting interest—but no second meeting. Here’s why investors and pilot partners aren’t moving forward, and how to build a message that makes the business case clear and drives real decisions.
Most cleantech companies compete on performance. The ones that win become the reference point everyone else is compared to. Here’s how category leadership actually works—and why clarity, not specs, determines who gets remembered.
Support for renewables is weakening, and data centers face backlash. Here’s why energy projects are getting caught in the crossfire—and what developers must change to win approval.
When your value proposition turns into a list, deals slow down. Learn how one clear promise helps investors and buyers understand, explain, and approve your cleantech solution faster.
Why clean energy projects fail permitting in 2026—and what developers must change: early outreach, local messengers, and digital campaigns that define the fight before opposition does.
Denmark leads on climate—but even there, utility-scale solar is facing backlash. The community fault lines around clean energy projects worldwide can be overcome.
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.
AI produces familiar marketing based on what’s already worked. Cleantech companies need messaging that drives adoption, not repetition.
Learn why many clean energy projects fail before construction. Local opposition, permitting risk, and public narrative shape outcomes more than technology.
