ABC's Next Phase: an Energetic Cover Letter

Welcome back to my ideafirehose blog. Thanks for taking the time to delve further than the generic sounding title of this post, and thanks for your support thus far. I assume that for some reason you forgive me for being a jerk recently, or I have yet to prove I am currently being a jerk. I appreciate the second chance to make good.

It's been a wild and wacky couple of months, but I wanted to continue honoring my commitments to folks who know me primarily through the VW and Audi world. Then I wanted to make sure I had done some serious discernment in terms of my evolving career path. Here, then, is a formal explanation of my dream of the Next Phase:

"Thanks again. I am going to hopefully be of service to you today by adding my voice to the din of suggestions and helping to sort out a few things from a single but slightly obsessed point of view. By "obsessed" I meant that I accept and embrace my deep energy nerd. That nerd has always been with me, but now I am going to open source my nerd and hope I can make a living at it by the grace of others and the Universe. (I'm also hoping to get paid to promote it, wink wink, so if you'd like to work with me, please visit my LinkedIn profile.).
Enough previews, on with the show!

Here is my obsessive thought:

"Energy Efficiency upgrades combined with Energy Production & Storage (particularly at the residential community scale) can bring measurable increases in security, freedom, and prosperity while massively promoting ecological stability on planet Earth."

I have been thinking this thought since I was an eight year old in Zintel Canyon, picking up aluminum cans to sell/ recycle. I have been helping people with the improvement of their resource management ever since. I am a fresh forty years old now and when I look around me, I see a steady stream of arrows pointing to my next career: offering my combined consulting skills and expertise in the the field of building science to promote massive adoption of the Energy Upgrade Culture. Here are the three main components of my expertise that make me the right person for the job of public energy advocate:

A. Mastery of Energy Efficiency analysis of residential and commercial buildings
B. Deep understanding of residential and district scale renwable energy production, transmission, and storage
C. Business and individual Consulting as a buyer's advocate

ABC BRINGS CHANGE

Its more than hope, it's change. It's science. The change I advocate is an adoption by enough of humanity of the basic tenets of the scientific method to create a simple but vocal collection of change agents in the fields of energy efficiency, renewable and regenerative energy production, energy storage, and energy distribution.

While I am not a trained scientist or engineer by degree, I am an outlier in terms of knowledge about the energy use of people in the built environment, and the built environment itself.

It's a multidisciplinary field, building science, and it is deeper than I can yet measure. That's my take on science, discovering what you want to measure and getting better measurements of reality to share with others in order to improve our collective human and ecological condition.

I posit that my dream of complete human energy independence is not just possible using current technology and current funding structures, but it can be done on the individual, residential, and community scale within 6 months staring the moment you opened this page to read it. It just takes passion, inspiration, innovation, and courage.

Since leaving my work as the founder of Campbell Energy and ZohmEnergy in 2010, I have been shocked by the lack of public support and absence of game changing cultural shift in adoption of residential and community scale energy upgrades. There's a hybrid turbocharged Volkswagen Jetta coming out in 2012-2013, but people still have limited clues about what Passive House means and how to retrofit your building for bottom line energy, money and planet saving.

I am here to work with others and solve this puzzle. Measurement is key, and I have an innovation fetish. I think the best practices surround the measuring the energy lost and then the quick upgrading of the built environment to stop that loss. Then, you get ultra-empirical about placement and installation of renewable power production & storage.

My primary body of skills and passions focus on that space where humans and their buikdings intersect optimally with the movement of heat, fuel, air movement, and electricity. Gadgets are not as important as their users, but I know we can engineer awesome technology to help people use less and make more of their own energy.

I am a group worker and a team player, with a penchant for collaboration.

I will work with you on any piece of the dream I outlined here, but I am particularly interested in increasing public adoption of particular energy saving memes and cultural action. I am eager to speak in public, and I am persauasive with a microphone and a crowd.

There are a number of proofs I can offer and a list of sources for my article here, but since I'm determined to get this essay posted, I will try to address that oversight later.

Folks who know me (and thankfully say they dig me) have described my customer advocacy and informative consulting support well in my LinkedIn profile. If you're at all interested in working with me on my pursuit of an enery independent community, I invite you to schedule an informational interview with me over coffee or beer this week or next.

Thanks again for your time and support.

Respectfully,

Aaron Campbell

Energy Independence Evangelist
Glowplug at gmail dot com

PS: I still help folks install their children's car safety seats so I can use the donations to buy seats for low-income families. I still love helping people with their car choices too, I just do it for free food and/drink.
Email me at my glowplug gmail address to get on the calendar!