Bluestone Energy’s President Peter Fairbanks was recently interviewed in the Boston Business Journal for their CEO Profile Segment. In the profile, Peter talks about Bluestone’s expansion and the energy conservation market. From the article:
In 1990, Peter Fairbanks didn’t want to move to Connecticut for his job at an engineering company. So he started his own with his wife, Roberta, at the dining room table. At that time building-efficiency service companies were relatively rare, and there were few if any incentives for companies to green up their facilities.
Twenty years later, that has all changed, and Norwell-based Bluestone Energy Services Ltd. is as busy as ever replacing lights, heating and air conditioning units and other power-guzzling devices with electricity-sipping models. Thanks to incentives and rebates from utilities, it’s also reducing energy costs while often delivering returns on investment of two years or less. More recently the company has focused on project work for data centers, which are one of the largest consumers of electricity among corporate buildings. In addition to replacing aging systems, it works to circulate air in data centers to save on cooling costs.
Fairbanks recently sat down with reporter Jackie Noblett to talk about the evolution of energy efficiency.
What has been the biggest change in energy-efficiency in the past 20 years?
When we started there weren’t utility programs, and then there were utility programs and those projects paid 100 percent of the costs. So the utility programs and their incentive programs have changed a lot over the years.
What are the challenges to making buildings more efficient?
Energy conservation has been performed for over 15 years now, and in some ways the easy stuff has been taken care of. So when we go into the facility we have to go deeper. Now we’re going back into buildings we retrofitted in the 1990s and retrofitting it again with new lighting and other things.
