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BRATTLEBORO REFORMER

October 23, 2007
Andy Shapiro’s Unconventional Path to Energy Balance
by
Daniel Hecht

What prepares you to be a pioneer? In fields where innovation is key, an unusual career path is often a prerequisite.

Talking with Andy Shapiro recently, I learned a lot about what leads to a career in innovation. A resident of East Montpelier, Andy is among Vermont’s foremost experts in architectural energy efficiency and total environmental design. Yet he holds none of the degrees typically required in those fields, and he’s never worked for a major firm. He’s just marched to a different drummer long enough that the world has fallen into step with him.

He’s been a gypsy drawn by learning opportunities in Ohio, Texas, Massachusetts, California, Montana, and Rhode Island. His early interest in structures led to architecture studies at Antioch University in Ohio, where he met one of the founding members of the Ant Farm, a group of radical architectural designers. He dropped out and moved to Houston to work with them.

The Ant Farm was an infamously wild-eyed, outside-the-box bunch, experimenting with radical materials and forms like geodesic domes, houses made entirely out of Styrofoam, and inflatable buildings.

Energy efficiency wasn’t yet a major focus. But – after moving again, to Warwick, Mass. -- Andy discovered first-hand the power of the sun. He and his wife Carolyn were living in a wood-heated geodesic dome which, in winter, cooled to freezing every night. But when the sun rose and hit the clear wall panels, the space warmed rapidly to a comfortable temperature.

So Andy took a workshop with Norman Saunders, a pioneer in passive solar architecture, and began studying heat transfer and thermal modeling. Another move, to California, was intended to procure some formal engineering study, but then Andy encountered Blair Hamilton, who would later co-found Vermont Energy Investment Corp., AKA Efficiency Vermont. Blair invited him to work in Montana at the National Center for Appropriate Technology, an offer too good to refuse.

After Montana, Andy and Carolyn moved to Rhode Island, where Andy worked with a firm that, among other things, developed an energy-monitoring system based on something unheard of at the time – a computer that would fit into a suitcase! Taken to a site with a sensor array, it could comprehensively analyze a building’s thermal energy profile.

While there, Andy started taking courses at Brown University. But the traditional way of teaching engineering didn’t sit well with him: “Their approach was, ‘go three trees in, then two trees to the right, then four trees over.’ But I was up above the forest, seeing the whole thing.” From that perspective, he could envision the route to the as-yet unnamed fields we now call “energy efficiency” and “green building.”

Ultimately, lacking a better award for Andy’s cross-disciplinary expertise, Brown granted him a most unusual degree – a bachelor of arts in Engineering.

Such an unconventional educational and professional path might outwardly look like the zigs and zags of indecision. But, altogether, these experiences strike me as a good model for a curriculum in innovative thinking.
Student-determined study: Follow – and trust -- your own nose. Flexibility: Seize unexpected opportunities and go where they lead you. Imagination, independence: Defy conventions. Hands-on, problem-based work: Pursue practical as well as theoretical learning, know your subject from the ground up. Life-long learning: Never quit. Multi-disciplinary study: Gather pieces of information from diverse places, assemble them into a novel whole – integrate them into a new domain of knowledge.

Andy founded his firm Energy Balance in 1988. Now he’s in high demand as a consultant on high-performance buildings, from residences to commercial and industrial buildings. His favorite projects are the ambitious ones, those that push the current limits of design and technology.

Often, his clients have high goals but don’t know exactly what ”environmentally-friendly” means. “A lot of variables go into a truly green building,” he says. “It’s not just about energy efficiency; it’s also the materials used, impact on local habitats, water impacts, a healthy interior environment.”

So Andy helps clients identify their personal priorities and then designs metrics, hard measures of performance, to assure those goals are met. He also conducts economic analysis of the costs of construction and operation. Creating a new building is a complex interaction between architects, engineers, and contractors, so total environmental values can “get lost in the dance,” Andy says; he makes sure they don’t.

Recent Energy Balance projects include NRG Systems’ LEED Gold-certified building in Hinesburg, the new state office building in Bennington (not the sick one), and net-zero houses in Charlotte, East Montpelier, and Hinesburg.

Given his propensity for seeing around the next bend, I asked Andy how he envisions a future in which we’ll have to come to grips, seriously, with global warming and fossil fuel depletion.

“It’ll take nothing less than a major national effort, something on the order of the Civilian Conservation Corps,” he says. The old CCC employed millions during the Great Depression, building many of the parks, trails, and highways that we still enjoy today; the new program would retrofit buildings of every kind and construct renewable energy systems. Andy thinks CCC would be a fine acronym for the new one, but suggests it should stand for “Citizen Carbon-reduction Corps."

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Daniel Hecht is a novelist and executive director of Vermont Environmental Consortium. For more information on any Green Grapevine topic, contact vec@norwich.edu.

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