Steve Schiller. Steve has always had interests in evaluating, measuring, and verifying. His first word was “counterfactual.” Abandoned by his birth family for answering every question with “as compared to what,” he was later raised by a family of economists, which caused him to choose a career in engineering and to then answer every question with “it depends.” Steve was also abandoned by his second family when he asked to verify their incremental value if they were going to be born anyway. He currently consults on a range of demand side energy management topics with public agencies and private entities.
Jane S. Peters, Ph.D. Unlike Steve, Jane had a normal childhood, though it was unusually liberal leaning for Phoenix Arizona and Orange County California in the 1950s and 60s. Thus, it’s not a surprise that after reading some articles in Co-Evolution Quarterly in the mid-1970s, Jane realized that renewables worked and that climate change was going to be a major problem in her lifetime. Then, after Ronald Reagan became President, she jumped on the energy efficiency bandwagon so that buildings would be efficient enough to have onsite renewables provide enough power should the political winds ever support renewables again… which they finally did in the 2000s. Attending grad school in the 1980s (while Reagan was in office) she studied environmental psychology and has focused her career on how to improve the design and implementation of energy programs to spur individuals and organizations to reduce their energy use to ultimately reduce emissions and address climate change.
Ralph Prahl. Ralph got into the energy efficiency evaluation business by accident in 1985, after he decided he didn’t really want to be a Sociology professor after all and thus needed to find some sort of policy analysis job. He promptly fell in love with the industry, though, and has never looked back. He spent 12 years at the Wisconsin Public Service Commission overseeing the evaluation efforts of the Wisconsin utilities, then struck out on his own. Since 1997 he has been an independent consultant specializing in public oversight of evaluation programs on behalf of states, public councils and collaboratives. He has written widely on the evaluation of market effects and market transformation initiatives and on a variety of state-level EM&V policy issues.
Mike Rufo. Mike moved from Philadelphia to the flats of Hollywood (near Melrose and Vine) in the early 1970s when he was eleven. One day, a few months after arriving, he looked up Vine Street and saw the Hollywood hills and the Hollywood sign. “That’s odd,” he thought to himself. “Where did that mountain come from?” and quickly realized what was meant by “smog.” Not having the word for “environmentalism” at that time, he concluded that something was terribly wrong in adult-land. A few years and two energy crises later, he discovered environmentalism was a thing you could study at college and maybe even get a job to help address. He thought he wanted to work in an advocacy organization but ended up in the sometimes maligned “meanie messenger and future potential” parts of the field trying to make sure things work the way that we want them to and that they can keep doing more good things as time goes on. Now he does music stuff too. Oh, and he is sometimes long-winded.