“We’ve got three feet of storm-surge water over a hundred city blocks. We’ve got a half-dozen really angry high-level people with conflicting priorities in the same room trying to fix things. What happens when the arguing and finger-pointing stops and they get to work on solutions?”
Sound like a news report from Hurricane Sandy-battered New York City of December 2012? Actually, it’s a session description from the BuildingEnergy 13 planning process earlier that year, after Conference Chair Paul Eldrenkamp announced that resilience would be the theme of the 2013 BuildingEnergy conference and trade show. Resilience has long been on the minds of BuildingEnergy conference planners.
With a focus on renewable energy and sustainability in the built environment, BuildingEnergy is the perfect place to be having serious discussions on resilience. Says Eldrenkamp “Events have made it clear that we’re not ahead of the curve, that climate change is catching up with us. The discussions between stakeholders at BuildingEnergy will give individuals, businesses and communities a definite advantage from a strategic point of view as well as a climate point of view.”
Indeed, the conference is well equipped to do so, with a full-day workshop and six 90-minute sessions dedicated to urban resilience – sessions with titles like “Efficiency, Durability, or History: Pick 2?” and “Planning for Resilience and Building in an Era of Climate Change: The NYC Response” – as well as 76 additional accredited sessions and workshops on related sustainable building, energy efficiency and renewable energy topics.
Resiliency implies learning from mistakes as well as successes, and that’s the kind of frank, honest conversation you’ll find at BuildingEnergy. Says Eldrenkamp, “Ask a politician what mistakes they’ve made and you’ll get nothing; ask a NESEA practitioner and you can’t shut them up…you’ll get a whole seminar over lunch if you ask a NESEA practitioner what mistakes they’ve made – and you’ll learn a thing or two.”
Not only can you learn about sustainability and resilience, but BuildingEnergy is the place to meet, learn from, and potentially partner with like-minded professionals from every segment of the market. It’s this multidisciplinary aspect of the conference, and the honest conversations that occur amongst practitioners, that sets BuildingEnergy apart. Says Conference speaker and co-owner of New Frameworks Natural Building, Jacob Deva Racusin: “At BuildingEnergy, you can expect to have a conversation, a generation of new ideas, an identification of potentials and directions to pursue, as well as case studies and real-world examples to prime the pump of the examination of resiliency in action, not just in design.”
BuildingEnergy is a member driven, multidisciplinary conference and trade show for renewable energy and green building practitioners. Organized by the Northeast Sustainable Energy Association (NESEA), this annually occurring conference will take place March 5-7 2013 at the Seaport World Trade Center in Boston, MA. Typically it attracts 160 exhibitors and more than 3,500 practitioners for three days of networking and cross-disciplinary learning. Learn more and register at www.nesea.org/buildingenergy.
