One might think that basic tenets of military science would dictate that access to the cheapest, most abundant energy sources should be unlimited for military objectives. “We can’t tie the hands of our fighting men and women,” many a congressman has blustered in stump speeches and committee hearings. The U.S. military is the world’s largest consumer of fossil fuels, so it’s only natural to think that military leaders would agree with such timeless political declarations. The Pentagon, however, thinks otherwise. In fact, it wants its hands tied on carbon emissions, much to the dismay of the petroleum industry.

During recent hearings before the House Subcommittee on Energy and Power on the possible repeal of section 526 of the Energy Independence and Security Act, which would prohibit government agencies from buying oil produced from processes that create more greenhouse gas emissions than would conventional petroleum (Canadian tar sands being the latest example), Tom Hicks, deputy assistant secretary of the Navy for energy policy, said:

“We are comfortable with 526. It is an effective policy tool. It is having an effect on the market that I think is one that is the right direction in the sense that it is providing not only clean fuels, but fuels that ultimately will be competitive….”

In addition, Elizabeth King, the Pentagon’s assistant secretary of defense for legislative affairs, has written:

“The existing law has not prevented the Department (of Defense) from meeting our current mission needs….Further, repeal or exemption could hamper the Department’s efforts to provide better energy options to our warfighters and further increase America’s reliance on non-renewable fuels. Our dependence on those types of fuels degrades our national security, negatively impacts our economy, and harms the environment.”

So the Pentagon believes that dependence on non-renewable fuels actually degrades national security, and that policies regulating emissions are having a positive effect on the market. Why then would any congressman want to repeal section 526 if national security experts are testifying to the contrary? It’s simple: the American Petroleum Institute (API) is leading the charge for repeal, and, as we all know, they wield enormous political influence.

In my research for a documentary film I am producing on climate change as a national security threat, representatives from companies who design weapons systems and other materiel for the military, a.k.a. the military-industrial complex, have told me that they, too, are comfortable with section 526 (though they are apparently unwilling to fight for it like the API is doing). They are confident in their abilities to meet the military’s needs without further exacerbating environmental problems. The military is already deploying some units with sustainable energy technologies as well as retrofitting many of its installations both at home and abroad, much of which is designed, produced and installed by its private sector contractors.

And that’s where NESEA comes in. The military has often inspired the growth of private industry such as radar, aerospace, internet, GPS and robotics, much of which eventually become mainstream products for average consumers. It’s time for the domestic sustainable energy industry to take its place as the newest engine for economic growth, and start garnering the political influence its non-renewable counterparts have amassed over many years.

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? Our political leaders would then certainly think twice about repealing legislation that would otherwise drive the success of this industry. Right now, unfortunately, it’s the petroleum industry that has the ear of Congress.

(This Friday I will be conducting on-camera interviews with top officials at the Pentagon including the assistant secretary of defense for operational energy. Please feel free to email me any questions you might have about their procurement process and how you might receive upcoming RFPs so that I may ask them on your behalf. I would like for NESEA members to be on the Pentagon’s radar screen and eventually benefit from military contracts they will be issuing in the coming months and years to, perhaps, conduct energy audits and retrofits for all of the military installations in the northeast — that sure would be a nice gig! I am committed to helping this industry in any way possible, so please let me know what I can do.)

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.

Background and Rationale for the Decision

As many of you know, NESEA’s mission is to advance the adoption of sustainable energy practices in the built environment. We do this by connecting professionals to each other, to ideas, and to consumers.

For many years there has been confusion about exactly how NESEA’s K-12 programs fit within this mission. Certainly, through these energy efficiency and renewable energy programs we educate professionals – teachers – and connect them to each other and to new ideas. Yet, despite our best efforts, we have never effectively integrated these programs, or their attendees, into the rest of what NESEA does. We have never been very successful in getting educators to join NESEA or in persuading educators and the rest of our community of practitioners – architects, builders, engineers, contractors, policymakers, investors, and others – to network with each other, to share ideas and information, in order to advance sustainability in the built environment.

In addition, over the past year, although we have diligently sought continued funding for our K-12 education programs, we have been unsuccessful in securing it. We have been able to secure funding for only one of our three programs – the Junior Solar Sprint – and that funding has been reduced dramatically over the past year due to a restructuring of the grant. So the bottom line is that with our current funding streams, we would be forced to operate these programs at a significant loss.

Finally, much of the type of work our K-12 department does is also being done elsewhere (although perhaps not as capably as our wonderful staff does it). Most of the states within NESEA’s territory have followed our early lead in the teacher training arena, and have launched statewide energy efficiency education programs. So we believe that, increasingly, this landscape will be adequately covered.

None of this is to say that our K-12 programs are anything but excellent. Classroom teachers and non-formal educators have long given our curricular units and our educator workshops rave reviews, and have shared with us how they have incorporated what they have learned into their own lesson plans. We can be proud of the curricula we have developed, and of the excellent manner in which our staff and partners have delivered it over the years.

We would like to extend our heartfelt thanks to Education Director, Arianna Grindrod and Science Educator, Susan Reyes, for their dedication and hard work. You have done a wonderful job over the past several years raising NESEA’s profile within the K-12 community. We will miss you, and hope to have the opportunity to collaborate with you again.

p.s. – For those of you who are interested in joining us, we will be planning a special send-off for Arianna and Susan in mid-to-late June. We’ll keep you posted so that you can help us celebrate their accomplishments at NESEA, and wish them well on the next leg of their journey.

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.

1)  Document the whole installation process from A to Z. Loves Geothermal, in Maryland, is a great example of this. Burn the pictures and videos you have from working on the project onto a CD and give it to the customer when you’ve completed the project. Make sure to have a branded introduction at the beginning of the video, but make it short. Just include your company name and contact information. What will this do? If friends of your customer ask about the system, they will have an awesome video to show, and they will pass your name around. Also, any questions that the customer isn’t able to answer for his or her friends can be redirected to your business.

You can use the CD on future sales calls. Aside from cash, people just want to make sure that the technology works and that you can complete the job. Showing a video of your team doing the work for a customer who loves you will decrease their fear.

Lastly, if you have a website, you can easily use the video and/or pictures on it. Most potential customers will check your website before making a decision.

2)  Create a customer video. Similar to documenting the whole process, shoot a short video of the client and have them describe why they went with geothermal, how they felt as the process went along, and if they’ve been happy with the finished system. Just as you can use the installation video to secure future sales, this is proof of customer satisfaction.

3)  Offer tours of existing installations. This depends on the type of relationship you have with the client, but one of the best ways to convince someone who’s on the fence is for them to see a happy customer and a system that is operating. Also, if you schedule a regular tour, you can bring many potential clients on a visit at once, which makes your sales process much more efficient. This is also a good way to keep in touch with old customers to make sure they’re satisfied and to find out if they’d like any more work done in the future.

4)  Write a newspaper article. Green gets press. If your installation is one of the first in town, call the local newspaper to see if they have anyone who covers environmental issues. Pitch a story about how a local homeowner is taking advantage of government grants to decrease their heating bills and make sure to follow up, providing any information they may need. If it’s not one of the first projects in town, pitch it as a trend and suggest they interview a few different system owners.

The Crash Course
The Unsustainable Future of Our Economy, Energy, and Environment
Chris Martenson, PhD; John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 2011

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.

One definition of crash course is “a rapid and intense course of training or research (usually undertaken in an emergency) – like cramming for a test. And that’s part of Martenson’s intended meaning here. The other part is that our complex and intertwined economic, energy, and environmental systems are set on a course to fail, and we must devise strategies to deal with this huge predicament. Martenson asserts that it is clear that we can’t expect technology, “experts”, or political leaders to set things right again.

It is a cinematic cliché for “action” moviemakers to celebrate the violence of multiple car crashes in slow motion, probably so we viewers won’t miss any exciting, schadenfreudlich detail of the death and destruction unfolding before us. Students of pop culture tell me that the 2003 movie Final Destination 2 has such a scene that ranks at the top of their lists for such things.

By analogy we intuitively sense that our systems have been on a seemingly slow motion collision course for quite some time. Early warning signs that the earth’s natural resources were becoming scarce and/or spoiled began to appear in the 1950s. “Peak coal” happened around 1960. “Peak oil” is happening today. With the first Earth Day in 1970, widespread environmental awareness began to seep into the mainstream. NASA’s photographs of our planet as viewed from the moon wordlessly drove the point home. And in our corner of the world, NESEA was begun in 1974.

NESEA members are a unique bunch of practicing professionals, concerned with the workable and measurable aspects of renewable resources and improving the quality of the built environment. But rather than being only a collection of experts and specialists, NESEA people are uniquely interdisciplinary, thereby synthesizing innovative ideas. It’s not enough to know how to install the best ground-source heat pumps available; one needs to understand how GSHPs and their limitations fit into the larger picture of climate control, energy efficiency, climate change, etc. Some NESEA members are collaborating to better understand how aesthetics is deeply connected to what we do. It is appropriate then for NESEA people to be part-time generalists; mindful of and understanding of the world outside one’s everyday circle. The Crash Course is appropriate reading for this reason alone.

Martenson’s forte is his deep understanding of the true economic factors that impact our wealth and standard of living. What I find treated lightly in the book is a discussion of how our collective social structures will need to adapt for the future. Restoring communities, local economies, and enhancing our connectedness to nature are all part of his book. However there is little mention of how the labor force will need to be reconstituted. My observation is that a much larger presence for worker-owned cooperatives is needed to restore the dignity, resilience, and value we place on human labor.

The Crash Course is a significant book. In articulating the need to (and a strategy to) deal with the present and face the future, it deserves to stand alongside The Limits to Growth (Donella and Dennis Meadows et alia, 1972) and Natural Capitalism (Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, and L. Hunter Lovins, 1999). The Crash Course is to be published in April. We have the chance now to connect with Chris Martenson directly at his workshop, a feature of the Building Energy 2011 conference. Try to take advantage of this opportunity.

——-William L. Stillinger February 8, 2011