The Practice of Sustainability

Projects That Thrill Us!

This is a place that provides a community for over 7,000 people and respects the natural systems that these people — and all of us —rely on. It is built in the metropolitan region of Hanover, Germany.

The residential district is within walking distance to an organic farm, an employment center, a grocery store, a town center and a metro stop that connects it to the city center 20 minutes away. The adjacent countryside is part of the farm and functions as a recreation area for residents. Viewing hills created by re-using the fill removed from the building sites are attractions. The built areas naturally infiltrate water off of paved surfaces and rooftops into swales and water gardens. Sidewalks, parks, gardens all absorb water and provide places for plants and people to thrive.

The buildings are designed with integrated photovoltaic panels, share a co-generation power plant and use energy generated by a modern 300’ turbine with blades that rotate hypnotically in the distance. The homes are optimizing for daylight during the different seasons and include solar shading to control heat gains for natural comfort. Some buildings have interior courtyards that reduce energy use even more by moderating temperatures within the structure and providing balconies and shared space for occupants. This place provides abundance for a diversity of cultures and groups and includes many delightful and joyous spaces to share with others.

When most people think about sustainability they dream of projects like this. Thoughtful, beautiful, inventive, cooperative, elegant, working with natural cycles. These projects thrill our hearts, our minds and our eyes!

A Location That Challenges Us!

But we live in the northeastern part of the United States! It gets cold here, it rains here, we a have different social and political landscape, and like it or not, the consumption of energy is intimately linked to our identity. The consumption of energy provides us with physical comfort, allows us to be highly productive, gives us access to goods and services, encourages diversity, promotes intellectual activity and makes us bigger and stronger than our own bodies.

Why We Come Together

NESEA has been engaged in the project of reconciling these issues in our culture for over three decades. We develop, test and use tools that provide us with the benefits of consuming energy while sustaining the systems on our planet that nurture life. NESEA strives to inspire and build projects and places that people can deeply love, cherish, and value while working with the bounty and within the budget that nature provides. We have chosen this as a place to intervene in our culture and we know that we can work in profound and intelligent ways to test and develop real sustainability solutions, unlock business opportunities while making a better world, and fostering proven and profitable ventures by bringing a community of experts together.

At the Building Energy 2006 conference we will give people from many fields the context, the tools and the inspiration they need to make informed decisions that will positively influence our lives and their businesses. Some people will be attracted to the high-performance projects, some to local clean energy from diverse sources, some to the synthesis. NESEA creates a forum where cross pollination will occur.