February 1, 2012
Every year around this time, I write to implore folks to come to the Northeast Sustainable Energy Association (NESEA)
Building Energy (BE) Conference in Boston, March 6-8. Over the last 35+ years, the best minds in the Northeast have annually gotten together to help building owners, architects, engineers, planners, building scientists, facility managers, and plain old people understand what is happening in the industry of new construction and rehab/retrofit of buildings at BE. You’ll hear from the best people in concentrated tracks talk about the cutting edge in: single family homes; renewable energy; multifamily buildings; campus and community buildings; health care; mechanicals and renewable heating systems; green financing; game changers; an entire track dedicated to working within whole systems in action; and for you smarty pants in the group, a track for you, “What the Pros Wanna Know”.BE is the most established and most cross-disciplinary renewable energy and high perforÂmance building conference in the region. Organized by NESEA, it brings together more than 4000 renewable energy and green building professionals from across the US and Europe for three days of networking, 80 accredited educational sesÂsions and a high-level trade show.
You can go to a whole or half day seminar on Tuesday March 6 for in depth training on very
specific subjects, then spend two full days March 7th and 8th going to up to seven different sessions in
10 tracks, each 90 minutes long and packed with information.
I’ve been fixing buildings and making them more energy efficient for over 30 years. Last year, in a five minute conversation with one of the presenters after his session, I learned a trick about energy auditing that took one to two hours off of all of my energy modeling tasks, and taught me a lot about energy auditing that I never thought about, and I’ve done hundreds of audits. That’s what BE is about, that “A-HA!” moment that I get every year, as do hundreds of others.
Every year I come back from BE like my brain has been in a gym being worked relentlessly by gifted trainers — and it has! But after BE, my work outlook has changed, my batteries are charged, and I’ll survive the grind for another year and teach people some of the stuff I learned at NESEA.
For decades I’ve said that the only reason I’ve survived in this field is that I’ve tried to learn as much each year as I’ve known in the past about my field; try for 100% increase in industry knowledge each year. NESEA is that starting step for all of you.
Browse through the
conference online
NESEA Building Energy Conference, Seaport World Trade Center, Boston, MA March 6, 7, & 8
– Andy Padian
