Point Oh!

I just read David Pogue’s blog on this year’s Solar Decathlon, which is a competition put on by the US Department of Energy that gets colleges to compete against each other to build the perfect solar home. While the submissions themselves are great (you can see the pictures here), what really hit me was to learn how Germany is incentivizing the adoption of solar and how wildly successful it’s been.

Germany has come up with a plan to have every home completely powered by clean energy in less than 40 years. In a nutshell, the plan requires public utility company to buy back any excess power from individuals that is in excess for what they need to power their homes. Some families are supposedly getting $100-150 a month from the utility companies after setting up a solar energy system and reducing their usage.

The lesson here is that sometimes a great idea alone is not enough to provide that initial spark. People need to be incentivized to do just about anything. Telecom companies are masters of this with their introductory incentives that hook people in for six months of cheap service before the price ramps on them (let’s not even get into sub-prime mortgages).

Fortunately, you don’t need to be deceptive for this to work. As David Meerman Scott often talks about in his rationale for giving away e-books for free, sometimes you have to seed your idea for it to really catch on and this often goes against traditional economics. If you have something great and the market is resisting, circumvent the obstacles and create a market for your idea.

Politics tend to get in the way of these sorts of programs in the US. However, the residual benefits of this program includes the creation of new jobs for more than 20,000 people in Germany and 15,000 in Denmark. It seems like a deft politician in a state that could benefit from that kind of job growth could really use something like this to distinguish themselves. I’ll keep my fingers crossed.