BeeP Blog

All of us at Blue Practice love field trips. We have some of our best, most inspiring days when we get out of the office and meet people face-to-face to learn about them, their work and the way they view the world. On Friday, we had the wonderful opportunity to take a group of 12 visiting journalism, architecture and environmental studies students from the University of Kansas in Lawrence and their professor Simran Sethi, an award-winning environmental journalist and author, on a field trip to visit four of our clients — a “Green Business Crawl,” as one of the students, Meg Ruggieri, aptly called it. We went, by Bauer’s biodiesel bus, to see William McDonough + Partners, PACT at the offices of their design collaborators, fuseproject, Lemnis Lighting and Mission Motors.

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This morning, Blue Practice had the pleasure of taking part in Clean Edge’s Clean Energy Trends 2010 media teleconference. We’ve been working with the team at Clean Edge, Co-Founder and Managing Director, Ron Pernick, and Senior Editor, Clint Wilder, to prepare for today’s release of this annual report, which is now available for download here. It was a great call, and we’ve already seen some coverage by The Green Skeptic, Scott Edward Anderson; Spiegel Online’s Stefan Schultz; John Addison at Clean Fleet Report; and Grist’s David Roberts. Thanks to all of the reporters who took time out of their mornings to participate in the teleconference. read more

The old flywheel analog utility meters that have been quietly and, for the most part, anonymously spinning their dials in our garages or sheds will soon be swapped out for solid-state, digital meters. Those shiny and somewhat elegant metal dials, wheels and machine parts that are rooted in our technology past will be replaced by, let’s face it, rather boring and colorless digital number readouts. Aesthetics, I realize, are not really the point here. What’s more important is inside the box: the ability to turn energy data into actionable information, that will soon bring about smart appliances, energy dashboards and consumer tech gadgets that will give us amusing ways to relate to our energy use and the integration of clean, renewable power sources onto the grid.  With the Smart Grid, for the first time, we will be able to understand exactly how we use energy and know how to make little tweaks to the way we use power to bring our bills down and minimize our carbon footprints. (Consumers have been shown to reduce their energy consumption by as much as 15 percent just by becoming aware of how they’re using energy.)

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