Volts podcast: 20 years of solar advocacy, with Adam Browning of Vote Solar

In this episode, veteran solar advocate Adam Browning reflects on 20 years of running campaigns as the founder and leader of Vote Solar, one of the scrappiest and most successful solar advocacy organizations in the US. Browning, who is stepping down from leadership this year, helped grow the group from four people to 40, and along the way he’s learned a few things about how nonprofit campaigns can succeed against better funded opponents.

Full transcript of Volts podcast featuring Adam Browning, September 17, 2021

(PDF version)

David Roberts:

There aren't a lot of positive, hopeful stories competing for attention in the US these days, but one ray of light — if you'll pardon the pun — comes in the form of solar power. During the 21st century it has plunged in price, to the point that it is the cheapest available source of power in most big energy markets. Though it provides just 3 percent of US electricity today, analysts say it could provide close to half by mid-century.

Adam Browning has lived through every stage of this extraordinary ongoing story. He co-founded Vote Solar, a nonprofit that advocates for solar energy at the state level, in 2002, to push for solar on public buildings in San Francisco.

Since then, he has helped build a team of 40 people that operates across the country and has led numerous campaigns for state policy and regulatory changes. For as long as I’ve been doing energy journalism, I’ve known Adam and Vote Solar to be reliable sources — smart, practical, and results-oriented. I read all their emails, which regular listeners will know is high praise.

Now, after 20 years, Browning is stepping back, shifting to an advisory role and handing off day-to-day leadership of Vote Solar. Given his long experience, I thought it would be interesting to talk to him about what he has learned, how much things have changed for solar, and where solar and climate advocacy need to go next.

Adam Browning, welcome to Volts.

Adam Browning:

Thanks, really pleased to be here.

David Roberts:

You’ve been at this for 20 years now. Tell me the Adam Browning origin story. How did you gravitate to this particular field? It must have been relatively soon after you were out of college; it must have been one of the first things you did and stuck with it. Tell us how you got into all of this.

Adam Browning:

You're too kind. My youthful demeanor — I’ll have to tell my stylist. It wasn't quite right out of college. I've never had a plan that I put into place; I've always moved from the thing that seemed really interesting to me at the time, and then was open to that next opportunity.

After college, I did Peace Corps in West Africa, which was in many ways an incredibly formative experience, a moveable feast that I continue to look back on and think about, and that experience continues to nourish. After that, I joined EPA in San Francisco, the Region 9 office, and worked there for about eight years. The origin story — not of Adam Browning, but really Vote Solar, which is probably more to the point here — was really born out of spending a good chunk of time with the federal government doing environmental protection. I was doing a lot of enforcement and inspecting smokestacks, and fines were exceeding limits in some ways.

David Roberts:

This would have been during the Clinton years, yes?

Adam Browning:

Yes, and then a little bit of the Bush years. So that experience was a wonderful introduction to how environmental protection works and doesn't work in this country.

When I was nearly 30, I had a beer with a college buddy, and he was working for then-San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown. This friend, David Hochschild, is now a California energy commissioner, the chair of the Commission. He had just put solar on his roof at home. At the time, solar was really expensive, and there wasn't much of it; it was very much a hippie pipe dream. But he put it on his house and was enthralled by it. And he was like, “Hey man, we should try to put this on City Hall. We need to have governments take the lead.”

Through that beer and subsequent napkin diagramming, we came up with the idea of a revenue bond to put solar and energy efficiency on public buildings in San Francisco and then use the avoided energy costs, the energy payments, to pay down the bonds, so you have long-term, low-interest capital. It all penciled out. That turned into first a campaign to get it on the ballot as a ballot initiative, and then a citywide campaign to pass this ballot initiative. That was Prop B. This is back in 2001.

That experience was really galvanizing, transformative for me in a couple of different ways. One: this idea of solar as an emission-free technology. I’d been spending all this time trying to control smokestacks; how about if we just didn't have any at all? That really dropped for me.

Secondly, we had this campaign where you could actually do solar — then, again, really expensive — but we could do it cost effectively, the way that we'd had this scoped out. That just gripped the imagination. We had legions of volunteers throughout the city; people were really excited to be a part of something larger than themselves. That ballot initiative passed by 73 percent of the vote, which was really high in those days.

Then we started getting calls from around the country — how can we do this in our city? — which was when we decided to quit our jobs and take this grassroots campaign to a much larger campaign. We had this theory, we had analyses that showed that the way to get cheap solar was through economies of scale: you needed to buy a lot of expensive solar, you needed to show a long-term market for this technology, in order to induce the manufacturers and would-be manufacturers to invest their capital into scaling up factories and the whole supply chain.

David Roberts:

Solar has changed so fast: the technology, the prices, the social mores around it, how it's viewed. So take us back to 2002: Was anybody even thinking about solar? Was it viewed as just a hippie affectation? How much did it cost? What was the world of solar like in 2002?

Adam Browning:

So back then, solar was about $9 a watt.

David Roberts:

We're closing in on $1 a watt now, is that right?

Adam Browning:

For the actual panels themselves, you're looking at 25 cents a watt. Utility-scale installations are well under $1. So essentially, nearly an order of magnitude less expensive right now.

There was 163 megawatts total installed in the US. So, yeah, back in them old days, people knew of solar; I think it was understood as something that had some degree of promise, but again, the cost put it out of reach for being taken seriously as a long-term, significant portion of our energy resource.

David Roberts:

So were people planning for it? Like DOE, when they did their projections at the time — were people saying it was going to grow into something big? Or was it viewed as a niche thing for the century?

Adam Browning:

I would compare it to the algae that you see Exxon always advertising. It was ARCO and Mobil that had these investments in solar; Shell did as well. There were many really wonderful, well-meaning people involved in that, so I don't mean to diminish the seriousness of their efforts. There were a lot of oil majors that wer