We caught up with Anna Jursik, Program Assistant at Center for Energy and Environment (CEE) about their new Innovation Exchange to learn more about the endeavor and how Minnesotans can get involved.
Dan Thiede: Can you tell us a little bit more about the Innovation Exchange?
Anna Jursik: The Innovation Exchange is CEE’s hub for researching, synthesizing and pioneering energy efficiency solutions. It is a resource for practitioners to share best practices, evaluate novel ideas and discover the next generation of energy solutions. CEE has thirty years of experience running energy efficiency programs, conducting field research, and designing data-driven tools. The Innovation Exchange is designed to connect our experiences with those of other energy professionals. We believe that building these connections will help Minnesota and the region create a more energy efficient future.
Dan: How are you building awareness of this new initiative?
Anna Jursik: We’ve created an engaging Innovation Exchange online resource center and encourage you to check it out. You can browse through CEE’s current and past projects to get an idea of our experience field testing energy efficient technologies and designing energy programs.
Our resource collection includes three decades of reports and technical documents. We also provide tools and calculators, such as our SkyView Data Mapping, and curate Energy Libraries of external resources for energy reference and research.
And we’re experimenting with new media to share CEE’s organizational knowledge. For example, the video below is from an animated series showing how interior air driving forces affect the migration of secondhand smoke within a multifamily apartment building.
You can also watch recordings of past webinars.
Dan: How long have you been hosting webinars?
Anna Jursik: They’re a recent addition to our activities. We’ve found that webinars are an effective tool for knowledge dissemination.
Later this fall, CEE’s Director of IT and Residential Program Coordinator will co-host a webinar to showcase CEE’s mobile app development and explain how we’ve incorporated tablets into our residential energy program. It should be a good balance of field and programming perspectives. You can register here, and read this interview at our blog for some background information.
Dan: You even have a blog! Please tell us about a couple of recent posts and how people can access them.
Anna Jursik: A lot of organizations (including our own Minnesota Energy Challenge) manage excellent blogs targeted at residential energy consumers. We started our i.e. blog to reach out to other energy professionals, share our experience and ideas, and hear what they were working on. This fall, we’ve covered topics ranging from how urban development impacts energy efficiency programs, to how different CEE programs use data visualization to identify trends in complex data sets, to a series that reviews and clarifies power and energy basics.
You can read new content twice a week here. If you would like to see a specific topic or suggest a guest blog author, let me (Anna) know at ajursik@mncee.org.
Dan: How can energy professionals stay connected to the Innovation Exchange?
Anna Jursik: The best way is to sign up for our Innovation Exchange News & Events mailing list. You’ll find out about upcoming forums, webinars, and the new online resources that we are creating each month.
