• Janice, Steve, and Pat did a very successful two-hour presentation and discussion at the Petersham Unitarian Church on April 27. We were paid an honorarium for doing this, and a great result of the visit was that an energy committee for Petersham emerged from the gathering, chaired by Linda Paquette!
• The film "Everything's Cool" will be shown at the Listening Center in Barre on Friday, May 2 at 7 p.m.
The group Hands Across North Quabbin will be holding an all-day Action Forum this coming Saturday, May 3, at which they'll be brainstorming to choose a community-wide topic to focus on in a very broad way. There is the possibility that this could be energy-related. Pat and Jane will be attending.
• A new car-pooling program, RideBuzz, has been started in the Pioneer Valley.
• Richard Heinberg, nationally-known speaker on peak oil and other issues, spoke last week in the area; some people from NQE attended. Heinberg talked about various "peaks" - oil, coal, uranium, and other resources that currently support our economy and way of life.
• Copies of the film "Kilowatt Ours" have been making the rounds, via local libraries and people in our group.
• Don Audet announced that he will be "retiring" from active membership in North Quabbin Energy, but hopes to continue to be involved in the group in some way. We expressed our thanks and admiration for his presence and his example over the past few years.

Energy Expo Debriefing

• We were thrilled to co-organize the expo with the Chamber, and really appreciated everything that they did to make the overall event happen. There was a real sense that the energy component was an important and valued piece of the Home Show.
• We're definitely interested in doing the expo again next year. People liked the idea of possibly having the outdoor expo on one day of the Home Show and the energy expo on the other day. There's no doubt that most energy vendors are more likely to come out for a single day rather than the whole weekend.
• While the set-up for the talks in the cafeteria was okay this year, there was general agreement that a quieter spot would be much better. It was hard to hear and concentrate on some of the speakers when things got noisy in the cafeteria. We talked about revisiting our original plan of having these in the auditorium - possibly with the kind of semi-enclosed area that we made in the cafeteria, so there wouldn't be a feeling of having just a few people rattling around in the much bigger space. Perhaps we could do this on or near the stage.
• The 45-minute time slots for the talks seemed to work very well. We would try to stick with these in future, rather than going with longer or shorter slots.
• We should stick with the pre-holiday preliminary PR going out to potential vendors, to make sure that the dates are out there for people to pencil in their calendars, and then follow up with people after the holidays.
• There was certainly space to have included more "green" vendors in the hallway, so we could recruit more widely next year. The location for this was excellent!
• We had a very hard time getting any of the newspapers to run our press release with the speaker schedule. Next year we should buy some advertising with the speakers, times, and topics listed. Our posters were distributed fairly widely and we had good distribution via email.
• The children's area was fun but we didn't have very many kids, probably because the Home Show overall isn't something that people tend to bring kids to. We might just scale this down and have some children's activities available at our own table, which we could use as needed.
• 172 people signed up for light bulbs at the North Quabbin Energy table. We were busy all day and had many good conversations with attendees. The Chamber reported about 1,500 people attending on Saturday.
• Carol Lauriat is doing a feature on the expo and energy-related projects for Quabbin Valley Voices in the Greenfield Recorder. [This is in the May QVV supplement.]
• Cathy will check to see whether we will be able, as originally discussed, to get at least a small amount of the gate revenue.

Next Projects
We discussed various ideas for what we might work on next. These were:

• A possible presentation on wind power, perhaps using presenters from CET who are doing events on solar and wind power around the area. We talked about possible ways to connect this with Franklin County CDC (who have apparently been looking for loan recipients for wind projects), the North Quabbin Chamber of Commerce, the Rotary Club, and perhaps Peter Gerry.
• Continued support for town energy committees in the North Quabbin. The Athol committee has just officially convened; John Jackson is the chair, Brian Nugent is a member, and they have already done some National Grid electricity audits on town buildings. Orange and Warwick now have active committees which meet once a month. We are not sure about New Salem--Bruce Spencer will follow up on this. A brand new committee has just formed in Petersham, with Linda Paquette as chair. Linda asked about guidelines for the committee's work, and people already involved in other committees reported on some of the resources that are available. These include various kinds of audits, town projects undertaken by ESCOs (Energy Service Companies which will do work that can be paid for through the energy savings achieved), educational projects in area schools (eg. turning off computers when they're not being used), having conversations with town employees interested in energy issues, linking energy projects with issues relating to other town building/maintenance issues, raising awareness of easy things that people can do (eg. turning off lights when not in use, switching to compact fluorescent bulbs), and incorporating information about amounts of CO2 offset into all reports, as well as info on money saved. Janice mentioned ideas that were available through the Vermont Sustainable Energy Resource Group.
• There is a possible grant opportunity which we will discuss more at our next meeting.
• Janice and Steve are organizing speakers on energy topics for the Garlic Festival again this year. The Festival is Sept. 20 and 21. We may try to include a kids' corner there, using the same kinds of ideas that Jane Manring and Cathy Szal did at the Home Show. Cathy and Cara offered to help Janice with filling out the rest of the Garlic Festival speakers' roster. The festival is looking for a keynote speaker as well.
• We will try to hold a window-making workshop, perhaps during the summer, so that NQE members and others who are interested can learn to make interior thermal window inserts using Brian's plans. We were approached by a commercial thermal shade maker about hosting an event for them, but this seems out of keeping with our more educational focus. Brian will also do demonstrations of his windows at the Garlic Festival, with help from other NQE members.
• We will work on putting together a resource list that we can share with people who are in search of information about various energy-related topics. We could include businesses on that list, without necessarily endorsing any specific business.

Next meeting
Wednesday, June 18, 7 p.m. at the Millers River Environmental Center.

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