Debriefing Conversations With A "Genius"

In my last post I mentioned that KSTF brought in MacArthur Genius Amir Abo-shaeer, who, among other accomplishments, started an Engineering Academy at his school in California. I will admit, I was skeptical at first. That doesn’t sound all that amazing, right? I mean, I have known KSTF fellows who have started engineering programs at their schools. But after I herad him speak to the whole crowd after lunch, I realized this guy really has a fresh approach and something to say. There was an opportunity to attend a Q&A session later on, after which I stuck around to ask him more questions. He and I stood outside the ballroom chatting it up, while we both missed the subsequent speaker, whom we were all slated to attend. Here are a smattering of things I understood from those conversations:

Project-oriented not Unit/Standard-oriented. His curriculum is fundamentally different from any curriculum I've heard of (though I will admit this thought has occurred to me and I dismissed it as impossible), in that he teaches big projects that require an understanding of a variety of physics principles. So each project might have elements from what would otherwise be more than one "unit", but over the course of the year, all the projects will have required any understanding of all the physics principles normally covered in a physics class.

Depth not Breadth. To be fair, he doesn't cover a ton of principles, but he does go into the ones he does cover in detailed depth.

**New thought: I need to create an Alumni survey for those students who come back to visit, to assess what pieces students remember, found useful, did they remember the concepts they learned when they needed them in class? Did they end up referencing my notes at all? What was the most memorable thing from their physics class experience?

No Throw-Away Projects. He only has students do projects that for which the end result is something of an extremely high quality. For example, he has students create a baby mobile, that's so cool looking that they can be sold in a toy store, or auctioned and the money given to a local charity. People want these things. He also has them create a water feature. These items can go for up to $500, but the pieces to create them cost as little as $35. These are items that students, again, could sell they are of such high quality. One of his students reflected to him that after this kind of project he said, "After experiencing this course, I realize that the rest of my education up until this point has been worthless." That's a great endorsement for his course, but not necessarily what we're going for. Amir came to education from mechanical engineering, and he reflected that if we have these students for 13 years and professionals have come to expect that by the end of those years they essentially know NOTHING. That is unacceptable. He thought about it in terms of "man-hours" and if he was an employer with access to this kind of resource he would certainly be using it to do something productive in the world.

Tutoring Model: Some of his students needed funds to travel for a physics competition, but they couldn't afford the trip. They could've just set up a car wash, but instead he set up a tutoring program. So donor's dollar does 3 things: it helps he kid go to the competition; it helps a student who needed the tutoring, it pushes the tutoring student to know the material better and be an educational leader. Why let your dollar only do one thing? 3 birds. 1 dollar.

Follow Up: If donors support a project at the end of the project he spends like $35 on a nice frame and put together a digital collage of pictures of the project and types up a nice letter thanking the donor to go with the pictures. Of course the business ends up hanging it up somewhere in their office, and people see that. He sees this as an investment in future projects.

PR: Every single project he does he gets PR for. A team of students writes press releases and they make t-shirts. Students also meet with donors. But of course he was trying to raise 3 million dollars for his new institute. I'm not sure I need to do that. But I would like to have students write press releases. What a great natural authentic assessment.

Non-Profits Should Have Some Overhead. The backstory here is that he started a non-profit specifically to fund his classes. But I'm applying it to the non-profit I work with, the Vermont Sustainable Heating Initiative. Getting to the point: large-scale donors want to see that you have low overhead, but not NO overhead. The Vermont Sustainable Heating Initiative currently donates ALL of the funds it receives to helping low-income families. He confirmed something I have suspected for a while. We need to stop doing our own books and actually PAY someone else to do that for us.

I'm sure there are probably other things that soaked in, but those are the things I can think of for now. Clearly I have a lot of work to do before school starts! :)

For a little more info on Amir Abo-Shaeer check out these youtube interviews or check out the book written about him and his classes: The New Cool

VSHI in Montpelier

Since the Governor's Institute for Engineering I've found at least two other students who were interested in joining me in VSHI work in Montpelier. This is exciting since it's only been one other student and I representing our capitol so far.

This original student and I worked with the head of LIHEAP, Richard Moffi, to send out an interest survey to Montpelier LIHEAP clients, and have since received back several surveys for strong candidates to receive a pellet stove from the Vermont Sustainable Heating Initiative.

So far I've been on three site visits in Montpelier, some were stronger candidates than others, but man, we've got a bunch more to follow up with before we can make any decisions. After having met some of these families I can see that it's going to be ridiculously hard to turn people down. Oh my gosh - I think I may have caught the bug. All I want to do is help these people.

What if VSHI went National?

When we met with Peter Welch we asked him if we could go National with this program, if we could come to Washington DC to do some lobbying. And he jokingly said, "No", and added that we didn't need his permission to lobby in Washington. The only thing is, we don't know how to lobby in Washington. :(

I was talking with Bart my bus buddy today about this and he recommended getting someone with that kind of experience on the board of VSHI since we are, finally, a non-profit. Hm.

I guess we have a board. Sort of. It's Tom, the students, and myself. But we don't have bi-laws or regular monthly meetings. Anyway, talking with Bart made it seem possible to lobby in Washington, which brings up the question, what specific things are we looking for?

1) $100,000,000 for research grants regarding sustainable heating and cooling systems available to university students to do research.

2) 1% of each state's current LIHEAP funding to go towards helping low income families transition to sustainable heating/cooling systems.


This is what we've got so far - there are a few more details, but maybe they'll change. Now we just need to figure out how to get this in a bill or ... something. (?)

Caring for the Earth Conference and Shelburne Farms Harvest Festival

I haven't posted about VSHI in a little while - I suppose that's because we've been working out bugs on the VSHI donation website (carbon offsets) as well as the Addison County LIHEAP Pilot Project. We're hoping to do a massive media-oriented installation next month, and that will hopefully be good for donations as well.

Meanwhile, there are a few conferences coming up worth mentioning.

Caring for the Earth Conference at the Bishop Booth Conference Center in Burlington
October 26-28th, Registration: $40
It's all about faith communities coming together to address global climate change. We'll be looking into the future and see how we can move towards sustainability and help facilitate that transition, so I'm pretty stoked about it. Also VSHI is the very first presentation of the conference and everyone will be there: Gah! Exciting!

30th Annual Shelburne Farms Harvest Festival and Energy Fair
September 20th, Adults: $6, Children $4
There will be music and hayrides and fresh foods, like any good harvest festival should. But I'm sure among other valuable energy information, I'm told there will be a demonstration of grass-tablet making (grass tablets are less energy-intensive to produce), as well as a home-made gasification burner by Ethan Dressigacker (sp?), a teenage heating entrepreneur.

Project Porchlight at St. Andrew's Christian Church

The other day I ran into Heidi of Project Porchlight, and I mentioned to her that my church would be game for helping pass out compact fluorescent light bulbs (that’s their mission – in order to reduce the demand on the grid and lower our carbon footprint). She suggested that instead of holding a special training for us and giving us a route to go canvas/give away bulbs, she recommended that I just take a bag of bulbs and give them away at my church. Ha! Ok! :)

So this past Sunday, St. Andrew’s Christian Church of Burlington had a collaborative outdoor worship service with Colchester Baptist and First Baptist Church of Burlington (whose basement we currently use) and I gave away compact fluorescent light bulbs. People loved it. (Of course they loved it! They were free, and they’ll save people money, and they’ll help the environment).

I’ve been impressed lately with two things (one of which I'll blog about later): I believe consumers would more easily drive the market towards sustainable choices if sustainable choices were available. For example, if I could choose to have my laptop shipped in sustainable packaging instead of Styrofoam packing peanuts (even if it was like $2 more) I’d choose that. If I could choose biodegradable shopping bags over conventional shopping bags, I’d choose that too. If I could go to a restaurant and have the choice of locally produced or organic food options I would hands-down no question choose that. But I feel that many times those choices just don’t exist. I see it as my job as a consumer to demand better options. This is also effectively what the Vermont Sustainable Heating Initiative has been doing: creating opportunity for sustainable living where it previously was not an option. Everyone deserves the opportunity to live without polluting. And if polluting is, well, sin, then I believe it is the role of the church to help facilitate these kinds of opportunities. We should be helping people out of their environmental transgressions.

Starting a Farmer's Biomass Cooperative?

Lately I've been dreaming of starting a farmer-owned coop of pellet production, so that even Vermont's micro farmers with just a few acres can ultimately commit to the commercial scale demands for biomass heat and get some share of the profits.

This is of course way beyond the scope of anything I think I've done so far. But then... so is everything else VSHI has accomplished.

I've started dialoging with a few people about the idea and so far the feedback is positive. I've spoken with my CSA farmer (Joe at Screamin' Ridge Farm in Montpelier), pellet guru Andy Boutin, and my roommate the law school student. From all I've gathered from them, it sounds like the next steps are to
1) contact the Sustainable Jobs Fund
2) contact Casella the Garbage and Recycling collectors
and
3) go visit Andy Boutin's set up.

Meanwhile, I should probably track down David Zuckerman and run the idea by him and Jessie's mom from the Extension service.

... sometimes I wonder if I'll ever be done with this project ... :P :)

An Update on VSHI

Things in the world of the Vermont Sustainable Heating Initiative have been cruising for some time now. So here's where we're at:

The director of the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program sent out a survey to its petroleum consuming recipients, soliciting interest in our pilot program. So far we've received more than 40 surveys back indicating interest (yay!). Now all we need is money to buy them stoves.

How do we get money to buy them stoves? That's where the Carbon Offset Program comes in. Since we're specifically targeting fossil-fuel users and converting them to biomass heat, this warrants a carbon offset since the biomass is a short-carbon-cycle fuel and the fossil fuels are long-carbon-cycle.

At the moment we're selling offsets for $25/ton, but that may be lowered. We've done the calculation like four times, and it comes out slightly differently each time depending on our assumptions. So it will probably end up somewhere in the range of $9-25/ton. The page is about 90% done, and we're hoping to get some big name corporations and legislators to participate. Until everything is up and running I don't expect it to generate a lot of money.

Just a piece on the logistics: Families who receive a stove will be asked to pay us a down payment + whatever they can afford per month until they've paid off the stove. Thus it's not so much a grant as it is a no-interest loan.

Meanwhile I'm meeting today with Garth of CVCLT to discuss how to engage landlords in this transition as well as brainstorming how to convert my condo complex, the apartment complex next door and across the street. Actually I should probably go so I'm not late :) Wish me luck!

Energy Town Meeting Day in Montpelier

This morning I saw the upcoming environmental engineer, Andrew Laing, on the bus to Montpelier, and it reminded me that I haven't blogged in a little bit, so here we are: 

Recently there was an article in the Bridge about me, my teaching, and the working I'm doing with the Vermont Sustainable Heating Initiative. So that was very encouraging. Since then I've had lots of people come up to me saying, "You've got me convinced. I've got a couple acres of land we could grow grasses on!" Ha! Most excellent. 

And as long as we're talking VSHI, the last Thursday in Montpelier was the Energy Town Meeting Day with Ken Jones and the Montpelier Energy Team. We were hoping to start a pellet-purchasing coop that night (ideally 100-150 homes participating). Unfortunately, we only had six families sign up. I mean, it's a start, but more work needs to be done. 

Some of my students presented their work to the community, which was ... a little comical since many of the students thought they were sharing new information, when really the audience was abnormally well-educated. This was most poigniant when a student who had built a wind turbine had a diagram of the insides of an industrial turbine in his PowerPoint presentation. Someone from the crowd asked, "I normally see fins on these turbines to make sure they face into the wind, but there's not fin on this one, how does it turn?" The student didn't know, he had merely tapped the picture to make the point that his was much simpler, but to everyone's surprise a guy in the back corner piped up, "Well, I happen to be a windmill designer, and you can see there on the back, there's a little anemometer and a sensor there, which sends information to a computer inside the turbine, which tells it how to turn." hA! Wow. This was not your typical audience. 

Anyway - back to VSHI - the VSHI kids ran a session called "How can we move in the direction of locally produced pellets", which was sorely under-attended. Or at least it felt that way at first, there were only 3 people in attendance, but they were the right three people: Jeff Beyer, the Tree Warden and head of the Parks and Rec Department, and Rick Barstow an East Montpelier farmer who recently bought a small pelletizer so that he can pelletize grass from his farm. Jeff was saying, "We have hundreds of yards of woody biomass that's just getting buried right now because we don't have anything to do with it, but it's got to be worth something. We've got to use it!" And Rick was saying that he'd like to go into production very soon - by the fall he hopes. And ideally, the right blend of materials in a pellet would be mostly grass and a little bit of wood for lignan, which acts as a binder. Getting these two guys together was just fabulous. There was a lot of potential there. 

Thus far VSHI has been mainly focused on Bristol and Addison County, and I think I need to start dreaming about the Montpelier community and its potential heating future. 

 

Vermont Sustainable Heating Initiative in Bristol

Last Tuesday morning we had one of the most exciting events in the short history of the Vermont Sustainable Heating Initiative. As one of our student members put it, it was "one of the most important things we've done."


Basically we gathered all the players in the Bristol biomass heating community to discuss a potential LIHEAP pilot program in that area. There were people from LIHEAP, the Vermont Sustainable Jobs Fund, ACORN, Norwich University, Pellet Vendors, Farmers, the Extension Service, the Bristol Selectboard, and two Addison County Legislators, among others.

It was (needless to say) very productive. We discussed the basic idea, and then broke up into sub-groups to address different aspects of the pilot project: the Human Side, the Burning Technology/Production & Farming side, aaaaaand Funding.

These committees will continue to meet, and hopefully make further headway. I was on the Human Side, which I'm particularly interested in as I would like to be certified to do Home Energy Audits in the future.

This will be followed by a meeting this Thursday in Montpelier about the heating situation in that area. We'll discuss a bulk purchase of pellets (or pellet purchasing co-op), and how we can make this transition. More on that to follow.

Saint Michael's College loves VSHI

As usual I'm behind on blogging about the cool stuff that's been going on (perhaps because of the cool stuff!?)

I was invited to speak at Saint Michael's College by their "Green Up" group about the Vermont Sustainable Heating Initiative's work, which was pretty sweet. Here's the poster Dan (my contact) made up for it:

Green Up SMC would like to thank everyone that made it out to see Jim Merkel yesterday.

Today, Wednesday, April 16, we are presenting:

Anne Watson

Montpelier High School physics teacher

speaking about her project:

Grasses for the Masses: switchgrass and Vermont’s energy future

Farrell Room (St. Edmund’s Hall), 4:30-5:30 p.m.

Anne will be speaking about the work that she and some of her students are doing to reduce Vermont's reliance on fossil fuels through the growth of switchgrass on unused farm land for use as a renewable biofuel.

http://biofuelsresearch.freehostia.com/biomassvt/

Check out our full schedule of events for Earth Week at our new website:

http://personalweb.smcvt.edu/greenup/

It was probably our best-received presentation yet. They were so enthusiastic. Dan was like, "listen, we're in. Whatever you guys need we'll help with: funding, volunteers, whatever". Woe. Sweet. Sometimes I forget that this stuff is pretty cool. So now we've just got to figure out how to involve them.

Here are some possibilities:

• Man a Farmer's Market booth helping spread the word/advertize/collect email addresses of interested homeowners
• Help fund the Farmer's Market booth
• Help us set up a carbon offset program (I know: evil. but nonetheless useful for facilitating a transition)
• Get trained on how to weatherize people's houses, and then... go do that :)

We'll see. The whole thing was VERY encouraging.

Legislative Action This Session? Wow. Dang. :)

The exciting news of the day comes to us through Rep. Dave Sharpe from Addison County. I'm sorry Dave that I did not ask your permission ahead of time to publish this, but it's just so exciting:

Hi Gang,

Well it's crunch time. The Senate finance committee is looking at S.350 with an idea that they could do something to help the VESI project. Senator Ayer has asked me what in particular you would like and I have indicated three possibilities. 1) subsidize or otherwise create incentives for a pellet manufacturing facility 2) use LIHEAP funds to install some pellet stoves. 3) Use LIHEAP funds to purchase pellets. She suggested that possibly a grant to UVM to study the issues and plan a course of action.

What do you think? and what suggestions would you make?

Regards,
Rep. Dave Sharpe


It's SO great to know that in this small state our representatives are so willing to listen and move on our behalf. I'm feeling pretty good about democracy right now.

Meanwhile, I am also shocked that we may actually get some movement during this legislative session. We had mentally put the legislature on the backburner since there wasn't much time left, and usually bills like this take at least two sessions anyway. But here we are with a legislator proposing our ideas THIS FREAKING SESSION! :D Probably that's because we acted early. Now we've just got to get it passed ~ and hopefully without a veto :P We'll see!

New England Grassroots Environment Fund and VSHI

Today on the bus I got to talk with my bus buddy Bart from Holland. I was telling him all about the latest news with the Vermont Sustainable Heating Initiative. When I got to the part about an outreach to middle to upper income folks, he asked, "How do you plan to reach them?" To which I said, "Ummmmmm... no clue." Well, I did have some ideas, mainly posters and flyers, but I don't really think those are that effective.

He said, "Why not have a table at a farmer's market? Then you could have a sign up sheet, which could then be considered your 'market'. And you could email them when you want to have an informational meeting".

"Yes, but doesn't it cost money to have a table at a farmer's market?"

"It does, but NEGEF would be able to help with outreach". (Bart from Holland works for the New England Grassroots Environment Fund aka NEGEF)

Dude. I'm pumped right now. The deadline is May 1st, and then we could have farmer's market space in the summer ... possibly. We've got to act fast, but VSHI is a fast-acting kind of group!

Homeowner Education and Non-Profit Collaboration

Today the Vermont Sustainable Heating Initiative met in Richmond and my (utterly exhausted) two cents were that I am tired of publicity and I'm hungry for action. We've got these "demo projects" we'd like to make into a reality, but we're so far from a solid plan that it's hard to know where to go next. Specifically the demo project ideas are to
1) start farmers growing pelletizable crops on underutilized agricultural land (so as not to reduce the food supply)
2) pelletize said crops (ideally one industrial size universal pelletizer per county) and
3) work with LIHEAP to get pellet lots of 500 stoves per county into low income houses.


We'd need a business plan, and funding and a collegiate consortium-run research facility to answer questions like "what specific blend of prairie grasses is best?" "How do pellet stoves work in a mobile home?"


But this was (in my mind) too big. We needed something easier to chew on. LIHEAP is good, but it's middle to upper class folks with capital who need to know that this technology is reliable, financially viable, and eco-friendly. Homeowners would seriously jump for this if they only knew!

So that's where I proposed we start. We hold educational meetings in Bristol, Montpelier, and Burlington (in that order) directly aimed at middle-upper class homeowners. If we can get a critical mass of homeowners in one town to agree to purchase pellet stoves, then we can hook them up with cheaper bulk purchases of pellets from local suppliers. That would be the main focus of the meeting.

Meanwhile we're planning to talk to Hal Colston of Good News Garage and NeighborKeepers about cooperating with his newest project: Wood for the Common Good (maybe we can adapt that to Grasses for the Masses?). The rumor is that hasn't taken off quite as planned, but we've got a huge force and energy to put into it, but we'd want to adapt the program to include high-density perennial pellets, and possibly set up a carbon offset program (I may talk them out of that plan). My job is to talk to Hal Colston, and set up a meeting with him and the rest of the Vermont Sustainable Heating Initiative.

(Gosh, I can't believe I'm trying to do all this and get National Board Certification simultaneously!)

Recent Biomass Media

Wow. It's been some time, but dang a lot has happened since my last post. Mainly in the area of media.

Specifically the rally got coverage in the Essex Reporter, where I did in fact get quoted. The hearing spawned a Vermont Public Television session last night where my independent study student called in. HA! and Yesterday morning my student and I were on WGDR (Goddard College's radio station) on Carl Etnier's show Relocalizing Vermont (you can listen to the show here). And we were invited to be on his WDEV show (out of Waterbury) on March 19th. Sweet.

And our service learning coordinator invited our group to present at the March 2008 KIDS Consortium conference in Maine - the kids are really pumped about that.

All of this leads me to the question though, to what end?

Why are we doing all of this? I'm hungry for some action.
Some of our students met with the UVM board of directors to advocate for a biomass research facility, and they seemed into that. Norwich is I think a little more eager to jump in, so we're closer to some action on that front.

My folks are considering a pellet furnace, which is cool. But dang. We're asking people to make a huge capital investment if they can afford it. How do you spread the word to people with capital about the payback benefits (not to mention the ecological benefits) of biomass fuels grown in state? That's where my energy is going now, so we'll see what comes of that.

Meanwhile the students are meeting tonight and Sunday with college students from Middlebury College to possibly collaborate on Powershift 2008, or maybe even an April 1st "Fossil Fools" Day celebration of some kind. We'll see - the future is an exciting place!

March on Montpelier: Renewable Energy Rally!

Last night's renewable energy rally and subsequent public hearing on the effect of fuel prices on the Vermont economy was a HUGE success. It was a cold early-evening, so no one was just hanging out on the lawn and the legislators were not in session, so what was our goal with the rally? Media attention - bring awareness to this issue. And we certainly succeeded at that!



These are shots of us on the state house steps. Jessie (one of the student ring-leaders) spoke to the crowd, and then... we had a big dance party. We grooved to Deft Punk and Jackson 5. It was awesome. Until it was time to eat, and then re-assemble for the hearing.

I was interviewed by the Essex Reporter, so there will probably be a report about it soon, and we made the front page of the Times Argus. The best part though, was a big story by the Channel 3 WCAX news crew! You can check it out here, but you have to have Windows Media Player to watch it. They interviewed my independent study student and she was very articulate :) yay!

Since each individual only had 2 minutes to speak we chunked up our proposal for pellet stoves and prairie grasses into 2 minute chunks that students presented in shifts. It was incredibly organized and the legislators were "impressed". This was a great way to start conversation. I talked with the chair of the meeting afterwards, Rachel Weston, and she said that just because the deadline for bill proposals was already past, one of the purposes of this hearing was to gather ideas for next year.

I think in the meantime we'll shift our focus to the pilot projects. If we can show that low-income housing folks can manage a pellet stove with proper education and attention, and we can set up a Vermont-based pelletizer system, then man, we'd be golden. :P That's what we'll put our energy into for now.


Ok ~ AND:
I just found out - our group made the Boston Globe and a publication called Cogito - not for this rally, but for our proposal in general.

For more pictures check out the facebook group!

Rally for Renewables

I can't believe I didn't mention this earlier!

The kids with Vermont Sustainable Heating Initiative are planning a "Rally for Renewables" on Wednesday of this week. We'll leave the High School at 5pm and march to the State House, where we'll hold a rally, with students signing up to give a little testimony about where they want their energy to come from in the future.

So far we've got 54 kids who've said they'd like to come to this rally from the facebook event page, and 189 kids who "might show up". Plus we've got students who've said "I'm bringing a car-full of kids", and other people saying that they're alerting their church groups, etc. It's going to be wild.

This is all leading up to a Public Hearing to be held at the State House that evening at 7pm regarding the effect of fossil fuel prices on the Vermont economy.

And Dude. I just got off the phone with a guy from Bernie Sanders office (Vermont Senator to the US legislature). He wants to come, cause he'll be in town that day! His schedule's tight, so he might now, but if he can he will. That's SO exciting. Gah!

I hope all the details work out. I'm a little nervous for that...

Addison County Legislators Talk to VSHI

This morning it was all bright and sunny at the Bakery and Cafe in Bristol where students from the Vermont Sustainable Heating Initiative gathered with four legislators David Sharpe, Claire Ayer, Michael Fisher, and Harold Giard from Addison County to discuss next steps.

In my view this was the best meeting yet, mainly because we're at the point of taking action steps instead of just talking. Dave Sharpe said that he was willing to work on some small amendment to the current energy bill to try to allocate 1 million dollars that could go for a pelletizer station.
He also said that we need to talk to LIHEAP people about an "emergency furnace" fund - cause I guess if you're on LIHEAP and your furnace gives out, you can tap into this fund to get a new one. BUT what if instead of a new oil furnace it was a new pellet stove or furnace - for which the fuel is cheaper anyway! This seems like a very straightforward simple step in the right direction.

Claire Ayer gave us names of high up Ag folks so that we can get some farmers on board.

Harold Giard highly recommended that we get a general business plan together. If we could get 100,000 dollars right now what would that go for? He also recommended getting VTC involved with research aspect. Yay, that sounds like a great plan. :)

So, it's been a very productive morning, and tomorrow we'll have to divide up jobs among the folks there. (This is really turning into another full time job for me!) It's a good thing my intern is still teaching, I'm not sure how I would cope with this AND teaching simultaneously!

Aiding the Switch to Biomass for Multiple Demographics

One of the comments we received from Rob Ide of the Clean Energy Development Fund is that our proposal would be stronger if we could address in it how to reach multiple economic demographics. Our proposed tax on fossil fuel would help aid low income folks make the switch, but then how do you encourage more wealthy people to switch? Up until today our ideas have been basically educate them. If they know they'll make their money back in 5 years or less, who wouldn't do it?

But another possible answer today came from my dad. Tax credits for those who switch to pellet stoves from fuel oil burners. That way those with the capital will want to switch. I hope the Governor will like this solution.

Coupling tax breaks for those who switch voluntarily with a tax on fossil heating fuels to aid the low-income switch (those without the up front capital) makes our proposal tasty to both parties.

Sweeeeeet.

Weatherization Team and Pellet Stove Non-Profit

Today at the weekly Vermont Sustainable Heating Initiative meeting, the idea came up for us to start a non-profit that people could donate to in order to help get pellet stoves in the hands of LIHEAP recipients.

This rolls in with my idea for a church-based volunteer weatherization team. After talking with my dad this idea seems to be taking shape a bit more. There are plenty of guys from North Avenue Alliance who are pretty handy, and we could get CVOEO to host a training, and then go to people's houses, do an evaluation, and then send a team of people to do the work (caulking, insulating, etc.). Why not?

It could be like it's own organization like Care Net, or the Burlington Emergency Shelter, which both get support from area churches. They're inter-ecclesiastical and really they have to be because the scope of their work.

One thing though - I should check with Hal Colston (Good News Garage, and Neighbor Keepers) cause I think he may be starting a new fuel-based non-profit, so maybe he's already doing this stuff! :)

And to tie in something Hal taught me, if we did this weatherization volunteer program, I don't think it's enough to say, "here you go! welcome to fuel savings! Bye." The recipient needs to commit to give back somehow. Hopefully by reducing their consumption in some way. And if it were church people, perhaps the recipient could host a potluck where they bring nothing, but then the people who worked there could get to know the home owners.

"Governor Douglas, may we tell you about biomass?"

After a small run around finding me a sub at the high school, I joined the team of students in a meeting with Rob Ide, who works with the Clean Energy Development Fund, so that we could talk about funding a demo project for a pellet burner-pelletizer micro supply-demand system. He asked us great questions, and though he doesn't have a lot of staff or time, he said he'd be willing to meet with us further about this idea, which was very exciting.

From there we went to the State House expecting to testify before the Senate Natural Resources and Energy committee, but they were not ready for us. But I should say we made an excellent use of our time while we waited (and eventually discovered that our slot to testify had been postponed). We found out that Addison County has received a $30,000 grant to do a feasibility study on putting in a pelletizer (thank you Will Stevens for that info!).

Meanwhile Greg Clarke from the House Education committee got us a meeting with Governor Jim Douglas and the Leuitenant Governor Brian Dube. So we talked with them for a short while. Governor Douglas mainly just took in what we were saying (we didn't bring up the tax part of it at all) and he seemed vaguely positive, though I'm sure that's him just being political. Afterwards he gave one of the students his card saying that he would like to meet with us further about this. Brian Dubie was very positive and wants to co-author some publications for his weekly newsletter about this - what legislator wouldn't want to claim this idea and working with kids?

Shortly after we went to the House Education committee to says hi mainly, and explain that what we're doing is good education.

The other piece that seems to be snapping into focus is a march/rally on Feb. 20th. That evening there is a public hearing on the effect of the rising price of fossil fuels on the Vermont economy. There will be a panel of experts, and then anyone can sign up for 2 minutes of speaking time, and you want to get there early to get a good time slot. So we're planning to meet at the high school and walk to the State House with signs, and we're hoping to call Bread and Puppet, and we're planning to alert the media. This is going to be fun :) hehehehe

If the students really do care, we've got to mobilize them around this issue.