Aaron Nichols, Research and Policy Specialist at Exact Solar, is one of our Energy Gamechangers for 2025. His background as an educator before entering the renewable energy sector gives him a powerful perspective: facts don’t move people—stories do. Aaron blends education, emotion, and strategy to connect communities to clean energy in ways that feel real, relatable, and human.
Below, he shares how emotional intelligence, authenticity, and storytelling can reshape how the public understands renewable energy and why the industry must evolve its communication approach to win hearts and minds.
1) You describe yourself as “an educator first and a marketer second.” How has that perspective shaped your storytelling approach in solar energy?
I’m very lucky that I trained as an educator before I went into marketing. When you study education, you learn to break things down into smaller and smaller units of meaning. One of our greatest strengths and weaknesses in the clean energy world is that we are so technical. The founders in this space (who do such amazing work) have such a technical understanding of their products. That becomes a weakness when they are trying to explain what their product does to someone who doesn’t know anything about energy. In the residential market, I see sales people talking about net metering and cutting capacity charges to homeowners who don’t even know how they are billed for electricity (they just know their bill is going up and they want it to go down). Great educators meet people at their level of knowledge. So when I’m telling clean energy stories, I leave the technical info out and focus on the emotional aspects. I explain what the benefits are, not the features.
2) Your work on the ASPIRA School solar project gained major attention for its emotional impact. What did that experience teach you about connecting communities to renewable energy?
Everyone has a reason to care about clean energy, but not everyone has the same reason to care about clean energy. The school built that solar-powered greenhouse to teach students about Urban agriculture and fight food insecurity and lack of nutritious food in their area. It’s a lovely story, but we knew that we had to spin it different ways to different groups to get them to show up. We invited as many local non-profits as we could, because we knew that they had a vested interest in promoting renewable energy and that they knew legislators and press. We leaned on their networks to invite legislators. We offered legislators a chance to stand in front of the array and speak because we knew legislators want opportunities to stand in front of people, talk, and be photographed. Then we invited press because we knew that press likes to photograph legislators and write about the things they said when they were standing in front of people and talking. To summarize, to get people interested in renewable energy, you must make sure that everyone gets what they want. And what they want may not be what you want.
3) You’ve said “facts are for the in-group, stories are for the out-group.” Can you unpack that idea and how it’s changed the way you communicate?
This is a huge problem I see in our online discourse about clean energy. We throw graphs at people with no context to try to prove them wrong, and think that this is going to change their minds. The joke I like to use when I’m speaking is “how many of you have ever gotten in an emotional argument with your spouse and immediately showed them a graph to prove you were right?” Most people agree that this is a ridiculous idea. But that’s what we do to strangers online, thinking that we’re going to change their perspective. No one cares about facts in isolation. We make decisions emotionally, and we justify them logically. People only look up facts when they’re already interested in something they have an emotional connection to. No one is sitting around, hoping that someone shows them a graph that proves them wrong. We need to make emotional connections to the work we do rather than technical ones. But again, renewable energy is full of technically minded people.
Thankfully, there’s an easy solution to this. We need to zoom closer in on single stories and stop saying large numbers with no context. This is why our greenhouse project was so powerful and got so much attention. It’s a single, emotion-led story about kids who grow their own food in a renewable-powered greenhouse. Who wouldn’t agree with that? It’s easily photographable, and easy to summarize the benefits of. But if I say “we built 10,000 solar greenhouses across the US in 2025” we immediately lose that emotional connection. So if we want people to care about the work we do, we need to get better about zooming in on the emotion of singular stories. Facts and graphs are great for the echo chamber we are already in, but they aren’t what make people interested in renewable energy if they don’t already care.
4) What role do you think emotion and authenticity should play in shaping the broader public’s understanding of the energy transition?
Tying this back to the idea that stories are the only thing that make people look facts up in the first place, It’s critically important that we lean on emotion as we are talking to the public going forward. We are facing a giant, decades-old PR machine that relies only on emotion to promote fossil fuel. We got our butts handed to us leading up to the one big beautiful Bill because we did not lean on emotion in our public outreach. We leaned on facts. But when we are this outgunned, against a PR machine that is spending 30 times more than we are on public outreach, it’s critical that we get more bang for our buck. Stories are how you do that, especially when you’re talking about reaching smaller towns and other Middle American communities. Emotion carries information farther. People remember things they’re emotionally connected to (and forget facts almost immediately). I noticed you used the word “should” In your question. Emotion and authenticity are not a should have, they are the only thing that will make the broader public care about what we do. We have to tie what we do to things the public already cares about.
5) What does being an Energy Gamechanger mean to you personally?
It means not always agreeing with established wisdom in my peer group. What got us here as an industry is not going to take us to the next level. We are in uncharted territory, and we are facing a coordinated campaign to slow down renewable energy that we have not faced on this level before. The gloves are off, and we can’t play nice and hope the fossil fuel industry gives us a seat at the table for the next few years. We can’t just rely on the facts and hope that they win out by themselves, because they won’t.
Aaron Nichols reminds us that clean energy transformation isn’t just a technical mission—it’s an emotional one. His philosophy centers on meeting people where they are, making renewable energy personal, and telling stories that connect before they convince. This belief in empathy, humanity, and courage is what makes him a standout Energy Gamechanger for 2025 and a powerful voice shaping the future of renewable energy communication.