What Green Hydrogen Taught Me About Marketing the Energy Transition

In August 2022, the Inflation Reduction Act passed with a production tax credit for clean hydrogen that would have been inconceivable three years earlier. Overnight, a sector that had been fighting for relevance became a sector that everyone wanted to talk about. And then, just as quickly, the shape of the market changed again — projects were delayed, demand cooled, and the companies that survived were the ones that had built something more durable than hype.

I spent the last chapter of my career marketing in that environment. What I learned is that hydrogen isn’t unique. Every growing clean energy sector — battery storage, next-gen geothermal, emerging cleantech — shares the same go-to-market DNA.

The technology is different. The go-to-market challenge is the same. Deep tech, policy-shaped markets, long B2B sales cycles, and buyers who need to be educated before they’ll buy.

Educate the buyer before you try to sell them

The single biggest mistake clean energy companies make is assuming their buyer already understands the technology. Utility procurement teams, corporate sustainability officers, and hyperscaler energy buyers are sophisticated — but they’re not specialists in your sector. They’re weighing your technology against five alternatives they don’t fully understand either.

In hydrogen, we learned quickly that the first pitch couldn’t be about our specific electrolyzer. It had to be about the broader case for hydrogen in the buyer’s application — and the specific decision framework they should use to evaluate any supplier. Only after we had earned that level of engagement could we talk about what made us different.

If your marketing assumes your buyer knows what they want, your marketing is talking to a buyer who doesn’t exist yet.

For BESS, this means building content that frames the LDES versus lithium decision, not just promoting your chemistry. For geothermal, it means educating data center energy managers on why 24/7 baseload deserves a premium. For emerging cleantech, it means mapping the specific market entry barriers your buyer faces before you ask them to consider your solution.

Treat policy as a strategic input, not background noise

Clean energy markets don’t move on technology alone. They move on the intersection of technology, policy, and capital. A great marketing strategy in this space has to treat policy as a first-class input — not something the government affairs team handles while marketing does “real” work.

When I was marketing hydrogen, the IRA’s 45V production tax credit wasn’t a press release topic — it was the entire market. The companies that won were the ones that had already built the educational content, financial modeling tools, and buyer narratives that helped their customers understand how to take advantage of the credit.

Build narratives for multiple audiences — simultaneously

Clean energy companies don’t sell to one buyer. They sell to a web of stakeholders whose interests don’t always align: investors, regulators, utility offtakers, corporate customers, communities, talent, and media. The most dangerous temptation is to pick one audience — usually the one closest to revenue — and let the others hear the same message secondhand.

This never works. Regulators listening to your investor pitch hear a company overpromising. Communities listening to your regulatory filing hear a company being evasive. The message has to flex across audiences while preserving a consistent core narrative.

Protect technical credibility at all costs

The final lesson — and the one I think matters most for Technical Founders reading this — is that marketing polish and technical credibility are not in tension. They amplify each other, when done right. Done wrong, they collapse into cringe.

The rule I’ve learned: the people writing your marketing copy should be able to have a substantive conversation with your engineering team. Not the other way around. If your marketing department doesn’t know what a PPA is, or can’t explain the difference between EGS and closed-loop geothermal, they will produce content that sounds right but reads as shallow to the buyers you most want to reach.

What this means for the next wave

Hydrogen isn’t dead. But the heat of the market has moved on — to BESS, geothermal, industrial decarbonization, and a wave of emerging cleantech sectors that are now scaling rapidly. The companies that win in those sectors over the next five years will be the ones that apply these lessons — not the ones that have to relearn them the hard way.

If you’re a founder or commercial leader in one of those sectors, and you’re watching your technology prove itself while your marketing lags behind, that’s the conversation I’m here for.