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February 2011

RFPs from the Edge

By Energy Efficiency, Energy Rant, Government, Stimulus One Comment
Last month, the one session I attended at the AESP national conference was how to write a better request for proposal (RFP).  It was sort of a forum led by our friends at Tetra Tech.  Essentially, it was full of people like me, for whom a major responsibility is business development and marketing – responding to RFPs.  For a while I sat there like a lump, thinking, eh, just deal with it and quit whining.  Toward the end of the session I started getting fired up. Here are some guidelines for writing RFPs: If you’ve already decided who you are…
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Dumb Bears

By Energy Efficiency, Energy Rant, Government, Sustainability One Comment
A senior sales director for MXEnergy, “the fastest growing natural gas and electricity retail provider” states, “As we observe the unrest in Egypt and other parts of the world, we recognize the volatility of the natural gas market.”  What?  He like many others “on both sides of the aisle” use the Middle East and our real dependence on foreign to twang the audience’s emotional strings. The goings on in Egypt will have nearly zero affect on natural gas prices here in the mainland, U.S.  Why?  Because nearly all of our natural gas is produced here and we import from hostile…
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EE: LOOK and THINK!

By Energy Efficiency, Energy Rant No Comments
An overarching theme of the Energy Rant is that much energy policy has a feel-good foundation of fluff.  Last week I ranted about the feel-good dream of having plentiful, inexpensive renewable energy.  This will take a miracle because conventional sources are still huge and growing.  We have enough coal, natural gas, tar sands, oil shale, and offshore energy to last beyond our kids’ great grandchildren.  Of course most readers of this are champions of energy efficiency, but energy efficiency also has too much feel-good fluff. Consider compact fluorescent lights, which despite my rant about it’s mandate a few weeks ago…
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Galactically Stupid

By Energy Efficiency, Energy Rant, Government, Renewable Energy, Sustainability 2 Comments
Some weeks I struggle a little to decide on a topic.  It isn’t for lack of topics for they are like natural gas reserves – at one time I wondered whether I’d be able to find a topic every week.  But like natural gas reserves, as I “worry” about running out of topics, the topic list is vastly outstripping demand.  This week it was easy. I watched the state of the union address last week, or I should say I started watching the state of the union.  It doesn’t matter who is president, from Reagan through Obama, I can only…
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