I wanted to share with you all an email exchange that took place earlier this week that I believe goes to the heart of NESEA’s role as a membership organization.
Earlier this week we sent the following invitation out to all of our Green Buildings Open House hosts and prior years’ entrants to the NESEA Zero Net Energy Building Award:
Tweet Well, this was certainly inspiring. Friday’s Greenfield Recorder had a great article on a great local business, Real Pickles (they’re delicious) and their steps to cut their business’s carbon foot print. What’s even better? They used a local company to do it. Pioneer Valley Photovoltaics was contracted to install a 17kw array for real [...]
Tweet Curious about zero net energy and high performance buildings? Ever wonder how zero net energy is possible? Interested in net zero/high performance building design and mechanical systems? Join us November 10th at the Mitsubishi Training Center in Southborough, MA to find out! RSVP HERE. Our hosts and sponsors Mitsubishi Electric have helped us pull [...]
In the short term the military is offering significant opportunities for the sustainable energy industry, and members of the NESEA community should be aware of how to benefit from them. The term “military industrial complex” could get a real makeover should the sustainable energy industry muscle its way in, but first it must become a real economic powerhouse, and what more lucrative way to do so than by obtaining military contracts?
Things have been quiet on the NESEA blog lately. That’s not an indication that we haven’t been busy (yes, mom, I know that’s a double negative!) To the contrary, I have felt so swamped that it’s been hard to catch my breath and update the community. I’m going to try my best to do so with a series of short blog posts over the next few weeks about what the staff and I have been up to.
At the top of my list is to introduce you to two new members of our staff, Rayna Heldt, our membership services coordinator, and Travis Niles, our communications and development coordinator.
Earlier this month, in consultation with NESEA’s Board of Directors, I decided to eliminate NESEA’s K-12 education programs. Although this was a difficult decision, I am confident that it will ultimately make NESEA stronger.
So what does this mean? This will be the last year that NESEA will host the Northeast Regional Championship of the Junior Solar Sprint, which will take place on June 12th in Springfield. We hope you’ll join us for our last hurrah, and make this year’s event our best ever. In addition, Arianna Grindrod and Susan Reyes will be working to deliver the last of our Wind Wisdom and Solar Sense educator workshops, and to report back to our key funders and supporters by June 30, 2011, the end of our fiscal year.
We all know that the local contracting business is built on word-of-mouth, relationships and trust. Renewable energy is no different. People LOVE talking about their new solar or geothermal system, so figuring out of to leverage that word-of-mouth is the most powerful marketing effort you can undertake.
This is the second article in a series of columns on marketing for renewable energy companies. The first article described how to generate customer leads by holding a geothermal or solar workshop. These are four suggestions for what to do next. Keep in mind you can use all of these ideas with solar photovoltaic, geothermal or solar thermal systems. For the sake of this post, we will use geothermal for consistency.
Dear BE11 attendees and NESEA community,
Re-entry after BuildingEnergy is always hard, and this year was no exception. The energy level at this gathering is so high! It was especially bittersweet to leave the Seaport last week knowing that I may have to wait an entire year to get my “hit” of the passion, the energy, the community that is BE. BE left me wanting more.
That leads to big questions, and I’d like to ask for your input. How do we bottle this stuff?
Tom Hartman, Chris Benedict, Andy Shapiro, and I are in the midst of a 2-week tour of high performance buildings in Saxony and Upper Austria. We’ll be presenting our findings during three sessions at Building Energy. Here’s a very quick taste of some of the things we’ve seen.
The Crash Course is soon to be published, but in advance of that event the author is presenting much of this material in a full day workshop at the upcoming NESEA Building Energy conference in Boston on March 8 (www.nesea.org/be11). The next day, he and the conference keynote speaker David Orr have agreed to engage in a discussion in the opening of the Whole Systems in Action “track” of sessions, immediately following Orr’s speech to the conference on Wednesday morning March 9.
Let me say up front that I recommend you read this book as soon as you can get your hands on it. The book’s subtitle The Unsustainable Future of Our Economy, Energy, and Environment seems to signal that this might be yet another “gloom and doom” book intended to scare and intimidate. But this time it’s different: Chris Martenson is clearly a whole systems thinker. He gets at the root causes of the predicaments we face with our energy, environmental and economic endeavors, and offers a positive vision for how we might become more balanced and resilient as the future emerges.
