This week’s conversation is with Ella Nilsen, who recently left CNN as a climate reporter and is now a new vice president at energy and cleantech PR firm Echo Communications. Having worked on Capitol Hill alongside Nilsen, I knew her to be an exceptional reporter who asked hard questions of those in power on all sides. So when I found out she was taking her journalism hat off and putting the comms cap on, I wanted to do something you rarely get to do with one of your reporting peers: ask for her own opinion about where we stand in the fight over the energy transition.
Our chat was lightly edited for clarity.
What’s it like going from CNN and climate journalism to advising on communications in the energy sector, especially when it comes to clean tech in this fraught moment?
So before I covered climate and clean energy, I was a political reporter who covered campaign cycles and Capitol Hill for a while, and I was always interested in the nexus of politics and politics. I tried to make as much of my coverage about that. Politics is policy, and the other way around.
Being on the other side of it is, well, I know from my experience as a reporter what interests them. I’m trying to figure out ways to make sure when I’m bugging you all that the pitch lands, because hopefully it’ll be something people are interested in. Things are changing so fast. It’s a really fascinating time to be a reporter and be in the clean energy comms space.
Okay, but now that you’re in clean energy comms, how do you handicap the fight over developing these technologies? Who is winning, who is losing, and why?
I think it’s tough to call exact winners and losers right now because over the last few months, there have been so many new and interesting developments.
Look at the Invest in Tomorrow Coalition, which has been getting involved in Republican primaries for Freedom Caucus members. There’s been this perception for a long time that the clean energy industry didn’t fare well in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act fight. They had important wins while losing pretty key stuff. But there’s been this interesting reckoning within the industry, and even this last summer, where people are moving the ball forward in interesting ways. They’re trying to get involved in political fights with direct results.
What messages do these primaries send? On the one hand I can see there being political consequences but also, now, more solar energy money going into Republican politics has the anti-renewable folks saying they need to go harder at them. I’m curious how you see the energy fight landscape changing in light of these election results.
I think it shows the industry has some fight in it. What the Coalition would probably say is, they want to be lethal and this is political warfare. They’re trying to be taken seriously.
There is sort of this two-pronged strategy happening right now. Obviously Invest in Tomorrow has gotten a lot of press attention for their track record. There’s also within the industry an attempt to shape a public narrative around wind, solar, battery storage to combat misinformation, both through conventional media and social media. They’re happening in tandem and it's a reflection of the results.
How is the backlash over data center development affecting the work you’re now doing?
Well, I’m still early, but I think the data center question is a fascinating one. Conversations around policy and where we go from here really seem to me to be happening in the state realm. Not a lot of policy happening at the federal level. There’s New York State’s data center pause, which is leading to lawmakers trying to get more leverage.
It’s in the backdrop, where projects are being announced with massive power plants to supply new data center demand, and at the same time there’s a conversation around virtual power plants, DERs. Another phrase emerging for it is “community power.”
It’s starting to be a fascinating conversation around community benefits. There are tax benefits when a data center comes to town but when it comes to energy use, what can communities actually leverage out of this? I know former Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm has been arguing for strong community benefit agreements, getting big tech companies to pay for solar and EVs and then using all of that to create a virtual power plant. Getting that to be flexible for data centers. That’s only one part of the pie but it’s fascinating to have this conversation about what forms of energy we need for all this demand happening.
What do you foresee about the impact of the backlash, given that land use, visuals, air, and water – its all being swept up in the same conversation?
I don’t have a crystal ball and have the same questions.
It’s all happening so quickly and it’s all playing out in so many different states. There are really important questions here and there are people smarter than I am on this, talking about how we meet this demand in the short term and long term or whether this is an opportunity for getting clean energy onto the grid. But it’s a delicate dance.
