Friday, February 16, 2007

Sustainable Silicon Valley

A couple of days ago Phil Yurkonis turned me on to the Sustainable Silicon Valley mailing list. I signed up, and found out that their monthly members meeting is today. So I drove over to the newly developed area of East Palo Alto near the Four Seasons Hotel for their meeting.

There were only about 20 people there, and we each got to introduce ourselves. Several people had already heard of the MV Solar Buyers Co-op and seemed very impressed with it. I gave out some flyers about the upcoming meeting on Feb. 27.

There were two speakers, and the one I really liked was Alan Pong. His specialty is to diagnose and tune the HVAC systems in commercial buildings. He's been doing this for quite a few years for Ferreira Service, Inc. Just like George Denise's talk on Tuesday, Alan told about how he was able to find enormous savings. He described one project where the heating system AND the air conditioning system were both running most of the day, fighting each other. Until he installed data loggers and analyzed their outputs the building owners had been unaware of the situation. After all, the employees were all comfortable because the battling systems DID keep the air the right temperature. He was a really interesting guy and a very good presenter, and I hope to attend more Sustainable Silicon Valley meetings in the future.

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