Sustainable Brewing: A Small, Solar-Powered Company in the Business of Beer Throwback Brewery: where great beer, solar and sustainable business practices collide. In 2010, co-Founders Annette Lee and Nicole Carrier opened their brewery in North Hampton, New Hampshire with the vision to create 100% locally-sourced beers, as well as to promote other aspects of… Continue reading “Sustainable Brewing: A Small, Solar-Powered Company in the Business of Beer”
FREE Lecture: High Performance Building Assemblies Take Peter Yost’s Free High Performance Building Assemblies Lecture today. Spend an hour learning about building assemblies with Peter Yost of BuildingGreen. Heat dries them out, so the more we manage energy flows through our building assemblies, the more we need… Continue reading “FREE Lecture: High Performance Building Assemblies”
Passive House Design: An Investment in the Future This is a guest post by Mike Duclos. He is a Certified Passive House Consultant and principal and founder of DEAP Energy Group, a consultancy providing a wide variety of deep energy retrofit, zero net energy, and Passive House related… Continue reading “Passive House Design: An Investment in the Future”
3+ Ways to Replace Spray Foam Insulation in Your Basement Here’s a discussion feed from one of our best-selling courses, Zero Net Energy Homes. In the discussion, one of our students asks Marc Rosenbaum for foam-free ways to retrofit her New England basement. Here are the alternatives to spray foam… Continue reading “3+ Ways to Replace Spray Foam Insulation in Your Basement”
Renewable Energy Lessons From Harvard Business School’s Study on U.S. Competitiveness On November 15th, Harvard Business School hosted a discussion on ways companies and other stakeholders can boost U.S. competitiveness. It took place at The Henry Ford in Detroit, and the case discussion was about the rise, fall, and rise of… Continue reading “Renewable Energy Lessons From Harvard Business School’s Study on U.S. Competitiveness”
The Future of Comfort. How the World Cup Might Help Your Help Your HVAC Business. How did Qatar win their bid to host the 2022 World Cup? In this video, Wolfgang Kessling explains how his team designed a comfort strategy that helped make it happen. Yes, comfort. Here’s why I wanted to share this video with… Continue reading “The Future of Comfort. How the World Cup Might Help Your Help Your HVAC Business.”
Finance 101 for Renewable Energy Professionals Understanding finance is required to sell renewable energy projects. It’s needed to communicate the value of both residential and commercial projects, and for all types of technologies: solar PV, solar hot water, and geothermal heat pumps. The reason financial metrics are… Continue reading “Finance 101 for Renewable Energy Professionals”
How to Select the Most Profitable Projects (and clients) for Your Business In the last post, we discussed “the sales equation” that every solar company should maximize. As a reminder, here is the equation (Note, for this article the questions are applicable to both solar and geothermal companies): “The Sales Equation” =… Continue reading “How to Select the Most Profitable Projects (and clients) for Your Business”
The Entrepreneur vs General Contractor. Who Will Win the Clean Energy Race? There’s an interesting split in the residential and light commercial clean energy space lately. As consumer demand is surging and some “old” solar pv players are moving to bigger projects (Nexamp no longer does residential and is installing 4.5 MW… Continue reading “The Entrepreneur vs General Contractor. Who Will Win the Clean Energy Race?”
How to Use Lean Startup Methods in Renewable Energy to Increase Profits In the last few posts I’ve written about the process of expanding an existing construction company into renewable energy business and the single thing our marketing planwill focus on. If you’re new to the solar industry, go to the Solar 101… Continue reading “How to Use Lean Startup Methods in Renewable Energy to Increase Profits”
How to Size a Heating and Cooling System – 101 Older space conditioning systems (more than 10 years old) are often unreliable and much less efficient than a modern system. When it’s time for a new replacement, choosing one of the correct size (heating and/or cooling output) is critical to… Continue reading “How to Size a Heating and Cooling System – 101”
11 Tips for Proper Manual J Calculations for Geothermal Contractors Many geothermal and general contractors pay a subcontractor to perform Manual J calculations when its required. Accurate heating and cooling loads are absolutely critical to properly designing a geothermal system (See 4 Steps to Designing a Geothermal System) and according… Continue reading “11 Tips for Proper Manual J Calculations for Geothermal Contractors”
How to Build a Renewable Energy Division in an Existing Building Company – PART 1 A lot of residential and light commercial renewable energy work is starting to be picked up by general contractors, like Jamie Leef of S+H Construction in Cambridge. Why? General contractors are in a unique position to pick up this work because they’re used… Continue reading “How to Build a Renewable Energy Division in an Existing Building Company – PART 1”
What the Heck is Home Performance? Seriously. One Contractor to Another. Paul Eldrenkamp has been a residential remodeling contractor for 26 years. Energy efficiency work has been the competitive advantage that has gotten his business through the current recession. He has a knack for breaking a very complex topic down into… Continue reading “What the Heck is Home Performance? Seriously. One Contractor to Another.”
Increasing Focus on Building Efficiency Will Have Consumers Talking “A house needs to breathe,” but how much does it need to breathe? Recently developed standards and increasingly affordable measurement tools have made it easier to answer that question with precision, and we’re now able to target one of the… Continue reading “Increasing Focus on Building Efficiency Will Have Consumers Talking”