Creating a Sustainable Transportation & Energy Vision for the 21st
Century JAMES P. DUNN AltWheels Regional Hero: Teaching consumers
and companies how to do more with less James P. Dunn
poses outside the under-construction
MIT Solar Decathlon
house in
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Home:
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Current and recent roles: President, Energy Technology Consulting; Co-Host, Energy Freedom Fighters; Technical Advisor,
MIT Solar Decathlon Project; Past Director, NASA Northeast Regional
Technology Transfer Center; and Past CEO, Center for Technology Commercialization
Inc. · Greening work:
50% time and energy on paid consulting work and 50% on volunteer
work, all of which involve renewable energy.
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Current project: MIT Solar Decathlon Project, http://solar7.mit.edu. MIT is one of 20 colleges and universities worldwide participating in the
US Department of Energy’s 2007 Solar Decathlon, to be held October 12
through 20 at the National Mall in
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Inspiration:
Paul MacCready, the father of human-powered flight who died recently.
His motto was, “Do more with less.” · Impact of work:
“The biggest impact I have is on the education and awareness side. I
hope that I have educated thousands of people. But the real impact is
not educating them; it is what they do after they have learned about
the alternatives. That is, how many of those people do something either
to reduce the amount of fuel or energy they use or to shift to a renewable-energy
source. It is very hard to measure that.” · Economics of
work: One of his newer Energy Technology Consulting clients is the
Connecticut Clean Energy Fund, for which he is reviewing new technologies
in the fuel-cell and solar-photovoltaic areas. He hopes to elevate the
awareness by large corporations of green energy and create more examples
such as Google and Wal-Mart, which are converting the rooftops of their
corporate headquarters to solar-electric power. In addition, he calls
on more large corporations to improve their energy efficiency by turning
off their lights when not needed – particularly overnight. For example,
he estimates it will cost large corporations such as EMC and National
Grid less than $1,000 to make their headquarters buildings more energy-efficient
because much of the lighting is already computer-controlled. He figures
they could save more than $10,000 a month by re-programming the computer
to turn off all unnecessary lights overnight while also reducing their
carbon footprint.
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Useful websites: Energy Freedom Fighters, www.energyfreedomfighters.com;
and MIT Solar Decathlon Project, http://solar7.mit.edu. · Recommended information
resources: Alliance to Save Energy, www.ase.org; Free
Energy News,www.freenergynews.com;
U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable
Energy, www.eere.energy.gov;
and U.S. Department of Energy’s Solar Decathlon, www.solardecathlon.org;. |
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