Sometime around 1982, the first millennial babies were born. They grew up at the cusp of modern-day technology – when IBM first launched its personal computer and futuristic cinema made anything, even hoverboards, seem possible.
Thirty years and 80 million babies later, the generation is a tech-savvy, socially-sensitive group of young people. Their outlook – identified recently in a Brookings Institution report – impacts a number of industries, especially energy.
Most importantly, as social gunslingers, millennials will lead the charge for more renewable, sustainable, cause-oriented energy production in the future.
After all, they’ll have to, since by 2025, they’ll make up about 75 percent of the American workforce, which means they’ll be the consumers, leaders and policymakers who bear the greatest influence on utility decisions. This shift commands big changes for this industry’s future – and it requires more than just catering to a young, hip, digitally-enthused crowd.
“This new generation is our future,” said Mike Guyton, chief customer officer at Oncor. “They’re super capable, and we need to be investing in them, especially considering our business.”
Here’s how millennials will change the energy industry:
Among its many findings, thBrookings report How Millennials Could Upend Wall Street andCorporate America called this generation the “socially responsible consumers.” Millennials trust companies whose values align with theirs, and they’re driven more by their ideals than by the bottom line.
It’s a notion that draws criticism from other generations, who say millennials have too much ambition and too few years of experience. While those perceptions are true, they’re not altogether negative: young grit can be a good thing, especially in the current energy climate.
“[Millennials] come from a different generation of nurture, with new ideas and [new approaches to caring] for ourselves and [for] others around us,” said Carrollton resident Enrique Carbajal, 30. “We no longer see others as complete strangers as older generations did, and we are extremely adept at quick-changing technology and processes.”
Ideals breed passion and change and, given their interest in people and in planet-conscious energy, millennials will involve both in their future energy decisions. This mentality, above all, means a flood of change for the better.
By now, the oldest of the millennials have reached their thirties. They’re heads of households, leaders at utility companies, Oncor included, and elected politicians, which means they’re making decisions about energy consumption, direction and legislation every day.
Although some question their activism, a majority (71 percent) of millennials consider alternative energy development a priority over fossil fuel exploration. That number’s not wildly different than Gen X (69 percent) or the Boomers (60 percent), but it’s a telling trend: interest in sustainability goes up as age goes down.
It doesn’t take much to be efficient. For millennials, who grew up in a world that encouraged it early on, it’s, as Carbajal said, a “no-brainer.” Committed to energy efficiency, the 30-year-old uses ENERGY STAR™ appliances and devices, and has powered his home with solar panels and wind energy.
About 82 percent of millennials think federal funding should be upped for wind, solar and hydrogen technologies, compared to 74 percent of their Boomer parents.
“Newer, cleaner, more renewable sources of energy are available and they’re slowly trickling to consumers, but until people realize that [our current] energy model is not sustainable or [until] we deplete our global oil reserves, little is likely to change,” said Alejandro Vera, a 27-year-old engineer from Dallas. “Need is the best catalyst to get things done, and when the time comes, I think that we’ll find ways to energize our future.”
Politics aside, there’s also the question of climate change – a hot topic that about 66 percent of millennials consider a real problem. Andrew Pritchard, a 25-year-old engineer from Cincinnati, who grew up in Abilene, is among them.
“The biggest energy challenge facing our future is developing a carbon neutral infrastructure,” Pritchard said. “With investments in future technology and [in] education to give our future scientists and engineers the skills they need, [however], nothing is out of our reach.”
Say what you want, but millennials are an emotional bunch. In its report, the Brookings Institution cited a finding from Spend Shift (2010) that said so. Millennials want to purchase from companies who are kind, empathetic, friendly and socially responsible.
And two out of every three millennial employees want to work for a company with similar traits. Money’s no longer the most powerful recruitment tool evidenced by the allure of places like Teach for America over Wall Street.
As a result, energy utilities have to adapt to meet those needs through corporate social responsibility, aka the social good, because their customers – and employees – won’t allow it any other way. From local sponsorships to community education programs, that means those companies must start showing that their causes align with all generations – from the Silent Generation to Generation Z.
In the old days, Guyton said, if a customer wanted to contact a company, they picked up the phone.
Now, the options have expanded to include channels such as social media, SMS messages and in-person events that put people in touch with service reps faster than ever before.
“We want to communicate with our customers in a way that they want to be communicated with,” Guyton said. Some customers prefer to communicate with us via Facebook or Twitter. I look at those comments every day because it’s important to understand what our customers are saying both to us and about us.”
Oncor monitors its Facebook and Twitter channels 24/7 so they can respond swiftly. The trend will continue, but it doesn’t mean that over-the-phone communication will stop.
In fact, Oncor recently finished a segmentation study to better understand their customers’ preferences and needs. One surprising insight from that study, Guyton said, was that younger customers didn’t want to use social media exclusively to contact the company. Rather, they wanted it as a customer service option, alongside phone and in-person conversations.
The future result of this hybrid digital/old fashioned model will be better communication, faster response and improved experience.
Nobody’s claiming that advanced technology is a millennial creation – Steve Jobs was a Boomer after all. What millennials can do is harness their own user data and improve it for a better energy experience.
“We have more than three million meters, and when we used to read those meters once a month, we had about 40 million pieces of data each year,” Guyton said. “Now, with advanced meters that read every 15 minutes, we have more than 100 billion pieces of that data.”
Among many other things, that data can help utilities anticipate problems and restore power faster than ever, meaning fewer interruptions to the customer. Also, new technologies such as online and text-based outage reporting give tech-enthused customers a chance to help scout, and fix, problems on their own.
In the past few years, energy leaders have admitted that it’s been a little tough to recruit young talent. Whatever stigma there is, or was, against the business, it’s turning around – and whether it’s oil and gas or renewable infrastructure, the industry has seen a refreshed interest from 1980s babies, especially in Texas. The Young Professionals in Energy Dallas Chapter’s membership grew 60 percent from 2009 to 2014, with most new members younger than 37.
Given the generation’s goals for good, the energy industry is a prime place for new, young blood because it gives them two things they want: a challenge and a chance to make things better.
The Next Horizon for the Millennial-Driven Energy Industry
As customers, employers and policymakers, millennials have the potential to steer the industry in a way that can bolster the economy and the environment while simultaneously doing good at every step along the way.
“You can’t think of energy just as a power bill – it’s more than that,” Carbajal said. “It’s what we do with it, how it shapes our lives and what we can accomplish with it.”
That youthful gusto isn’t without thanks to the foundation provided by the previous generations. Their teaching and legacy has primed this industry for remarkable change.
Bana Jobe is a writer from Austin whose passion for prose developed as a journalism major at The University of Texas at Austin. Currently, Jobe is a communications manager at Marketwave, a Dallas-based integrated marketing agency that has worked with Oncor for more than a decade.
*Except in areas where specific citations are linked and/or noted, statistics are from the May 2014 Brookings Institution report, How Millennials Could Upend Wall Street and Corporate America.