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Seeing Energy

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3 min read

We take energy for granted.  We know it’s there, someplace. Water is running, lights are on, food is cooking, and something somewhere is making it happen. But we can’t see it, like a new couch or a new car, we can’t  flop onto it, jump into it, speed it up. It’s one thing to try to sell people something tactile and visible, it’s another to sell them an idea for something that is invisible and seems intangible.

But in a new hit Broadway play, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime by Simon Stephens and based on Mark Haddon’s novel, you actually see energy. And when you see it, ( pardon the pun), you can’t help but get charged.  The play centers around an unusually intelligent 15-year old  English lad named Christopher who suffers from autism. The genius of the author’s work and director Marianne Elliot’s thrilling production is that you see the world through Christopher’s eyes. And from his point of view, everything is heightened and exaggerated, especially sound and light. His world is filled with noise and flashes and alarms. It’s exploding around him. And when he ventures down into the London Underground  the energy is so overwhelmingly present, you wonder if he can survive it.

As many of you know, National Housing & Rehabiliation Association, the home base of this publication, has devoted a portion of the past year to a Preservation Through Energy Efficiency (PTEE) Initiative financed in part by a grant from the MacArthur Foundation and as I watched Curious Incident…I realized, This is what PTEE is trying to do. Let people see energy. Make it as tangible as possible.  Because it’s only then that people are willing to take the needed time to consider it, preserve it, improve it, and in that process, cut its costs. If we could just plop it down in front of people, the advantages advocated by PTEE would be so obvious.

But we can’t. So what do we do instead?

This issue is primarily devoted to Energy Efficiency and the effort to spread knowledge about it. We catch up with the PTEE Road Show we last visited in Philadelphia in April, which since then has made stops in Denver, Minneapolis and Atlanta.

Matt Holden of Sparhawk lays out the team of experts it takes to do the most effective energy retrofitting by comparing it to the assembling of a football team.

And writer Joel Swerdlow sits down with Michael Bodaken, Executive Director of the National Housing Trust and originator of the Energy Efficiency for All program, to hear about the journey to this point to marry innovative energy solutions with multifamily housing.

And our guru, David A. Smith brings his own unique definition to “green” as he does to almost everything.

President Obama’s requests for the FY 2016 Federal budget contain a lot of good news for the housing tax credit business. But hold your excitement. They’re just requests. In “The Budget Brouhaha” (p. 40) we take you on a subway ride through the budget process and look at all the hoops we still need to jump through before any of the President’s suggestions are implemented.

So sit down in a comfortable chair under a good lamp and enjoy the information we share. But make sure you’re using an energy efficient spiral light bulb.