Time for an adult conversation about engagement and growth in the clean energy sector. This time in the context of power-to-x.
At its root, #engagement is a mutual connection between two people, requiring #empathy from both sides. Some amount of empathy is essential. And at a corporate level, businesses can be characterized as either empathic or not. Some businesses really seem to care about you – they just get you. They take time to know not only your needs, but also your hopes, fears, and desires. And some companies don’t seem to care at all, and we certainly know how that feels.
So how can a company in the #energytransition – a small power-to-x business in particular – achieve this kind of 'corporate empathy'? It’s not a fuzzy ambition, it’s actually quite concrete. In my view, it all starts with hiring. It starts with #diversity. I would love for someone to formally study this, but anecdotally, the companies that are diverse (along racial, ethnic, gender, age dimensions) seem to have the most corporate empathy. Different opinions, varying backgrounds, diverse beliefs. It can be tough to blend it all together at times, but it can also unlock vast potential for understanding, creative problem-solving, and engagement.
I’m looking at the power-to-x sector here not only because of the trajectory of the ambition, but also because it’s an unsettled petri dish within the energy transition. There remains debate about if it’s going to fulfill its promise: will cost reduction come fast enough, will demand side incentives be stimulating enough, what color #hydrogen should we be focusing on? We know the vast potential for #greenammonia and #greenhydrogen but there remains plenty of disagreement on how best to reach the targets. This sector will need to scale so fast in the coming 10 years that companies should be thinking today about how they grow, what they want their future workplace to look like, and how to retain the best parts of their culture while being open to adding new cultural elements in the future.
As an example, I came across a business recently in the power-to-x space that is poised for growth and carries mind-blowing ambitions. Mitsubishi Power Americas and Magnum Development's ACES Delta project in the US is developing the world’s largest renewable energy hub to convert, store, and deliver green hydrogen to the Western United States. Located in Delta, Utah, the project looks to be the country’s largest hydrogen gas and storage hub, initially storing over 300GWh of clean energy in salt caverns with enormous capability for more. ACES Delta represents the kind of pioneering spirit we see in the power-to-x space these days – bold vision, clear target, and poised for growth. As an American, I can say that not everything coming out of the US the last six years has made me proud, but this project does. I will be watching their progress with great interest.
Whether you’re in Utah, Brussels, or New Delhi, scaling up with corporate empathy is worth pursuing. How you grow is as important as growing itself. It means you may have to hire outside your comfort zone. It means you may not have a lot in common with the expert candidate you’re interviewing. But if you and your HR team can re-imagine hiring with corporate empathy and diversity in mind, I’d wager you will begin to understand and meet customers’ needs better, you’ll be more humble and pragmatic in new markets, and you’ll be differentiated among your competitors if they don't give this serious attention.
The energy transition will require all of us to scale up, and the growth will be especially steep in power-to-x. It means we have an opportunity now to think about how we grow, who we hire, and how we want to be positioned in the marketplace. In the clean energy sector, a diverse workforce is essential not only for vital social reasons, but also because it carries with it the promise of enlightened perspectives, more corporate empathy, and therefore much better engagement with people you care about the most. It’s the right thing to do. And it will be good for business.
Shout out to some of those pioneering in this space: Susan Fernandez, Paul Browning, Philippe Kavafyan, Knut Nyborg, Alicia Eastman, Sebastian Koks Andreassen, Christopher Jackson.
