Orion Magazine - March/April 2009

twenty-five dinners in the short span of four months, it seems this is not nearly enough to take advantage of the abundance coming from the fields. The end of the season leaves us aching and exhausted—and eager to add an enthusiastic team member in 2009—but we feel deeply grateful to the community of food growers and conscientious eaters that has come together around our table.

—Veronica Volny

ENERGY RAISERS

plymouth, new hampshire—A hundred people have come to watch twenty people install a solar water-heating system on a house on a Saturday afternoon. Apparently, the Plymouth Area Renewable Energy Initiative (PAREI) has tapped into something: a real need for and interest in community-based renewable energy solutions.

PAREI ( plymouthenergy.org), established in 2004, prepares local people for a low-energy future by encouraging energy conservation and e;ciency practices and promoting the use of renewable energy in homes and businesses. The programs they o=er—energy assessments and planning sessions, monthly energy exchanges to share information and accomplishments, installation of alternative systems, and a local food initiative to reduce transportation costs—are practical and produce real cost savings for homeowners, all the while building a network of people working together toward a sustainable community. But it’s the solar “energy raisers” that have attracted the most interest and a resurgence of neighbor helping neighbor, a key element of the program’s success.

“It all started with me feeling a sense of urgency about rising oil prices and energy consumption, and thinking about the future of my family,” said Peter Adams, owner of a digital media company and codirector of PAREI. “I needed to get my family organized and on the right

track.” As Adams worked on scaling back his family’s consumption and getting rid of things with hidden energy costs, he realized it didn’t matter how much he changed his family’s consumption if his community and state and country were not also going to change. Adams began talking with longtime friend Sandra Jones about how they could help each other work toward reducing their use of fossil fuels, beginning with their own homes.

They soon expanded the conversation to include local contractors, a plumber, an electrician, and others who knew how to insulate walls or put solar panels on a roof. Early meetings grew into an organic process of trial and error, taking good ideas and acting on them; if an idea fizzled they let it go and tried something new. The first good idea to take hold was to install a solar water-heating system on one group member’s house, “barn-raiser” style—with friends and neighbors pitching in. “The first energy raiser we did we had twenty-seven people at the house, and it was absolute mayhem,” said Adams.

It was also a success, in both cost and energy savings and as an exercise in community building. With the help of volunteers, rebates, and federal tax credits, the cost of installing a solar hot-water collector and linking it to the conventional tank as backup falls from about $8,000 to anywhere from $2,000 to $4,000. Families save about $400 to $800 a year in fuel costs, so the system pays for itself within a few years.

Homeowners interested in hosting an energy raiser are asked to volunteer, or “pay it forward,” at a minimum of three energy raisers before and one or two following the installation of a system at their home. People that had met only weeks before, or even that day, may find themselves on top of a roof following orders on how to insert tubes into a solar rack or in a basement soldering copper pipe to a circulator pump, gaining some technical

skills and making friends at the same time. “These people are getting very intimate with someone’s house. This takes a lot of trust, a getting to know each other, that helps build a network throughout the community,” says Adams.

Over thirty energy raisers later, PAREI sta= and volunteers have perfected the model and their services are in such demand they are creating an instructional CD-ROM to sell. Two nearby communities have begun their own renewable energy groups and have several energy raisers of their own now under their belts. And, with over three hundred members, the network of people developing skills and sharing information on how to plan for a low-energy future is growing.

“Why would we ever be surprised these things would catch on like fire?” says Adams. “We’re tapping into something a lot of people have been wanting to do for a long time.”