As you have noticed, all week we are running a series called An Adventure in Renewable Energy written by a good friend of DTE's, Blair Stephens. We first met Blair through a story we wrote at the end of August. Blair got us in touch with Sascha Drei, the CEO of the Alternative Energy Store (Alt-E), a Hudson, Massachusetts based online retailer of renewable energy goods and technical service. As we are now reaching more people through DTE we thought it a good idea to re-publish our interview with Drei and give you all a better understanding of Blair's journey and empower you take your own adventure in alternative energy.
Maybe our conquering of such technological devices and ideas like iPods, Blackberry’s, RSS feeds and podcasts have given us false confidence, but in the year 2008 everyone is a techie. People who wouldn’t use the Wall Street Journal Business section for anything else than kindling on a camping trip are soaking up information on the latest gadgets and gizmos – who are we kidding – no one is reading the paper; is that an RSS alert?
It’s only fitting that we would want to test our technological prowess in a way that would make Edison proud – creating energy. For most of us that means borrowing ideas that have been around for ever but the actual creating of our own energy is exciting – who wouldn’t want to charge their gadgets and power their Mac Books off energy created by means “outside the box”?
Sascha Drei gets it, and he’s not just in the business of supplying you the means to an end, he’s in the business of making you more capable to achieve those ends. Drei is the CEO of the Alternative Energy Store (AltE), a Hudson, Massachusetts based online retailer of renewable energy goods and technical service.
AltE is a 9-year-old business venture of 3 engineers whose goal, as Drei explained in a recent telephone interview with DTE, “is to make it (alternative energy) more feasible to a larger bit of the population, not just to make it available but to allow more and more folks to take advantage of it.”
More than just a retailer of renewable energy products like solar panels, composting toilets, wind turbines, etc… AltE also serves as an educational arm for alternative energy development worldwide. Conceptualized as a “How To” section on the website where consumers could learn the basics of home installation and operation, AltE’s educational branch has grown to become a center for alternative energy leaning, from AltE 101 to a masters program. “We wanted to make the operation of our products more efficient,” Drei explained. “At first we just had the education up front, for free – now as the education has grown, our branch has changed, we have the sales people on the front lines teaching, they know how it works.” Utilizing innovative web tools, AltE University offers educational materials including a rich AltE library, informative and free AltE video tips as well as seminars at the AltE headquarters in Hudson and online Webinars, the later two at a cost. And according to Drei within the next six months seminars will start being held at the new AltE branch in Columbus, Ohio and eventually at the Puerto Rico branch.
“The interest was always there,” Drei said, “people always wanted to know more and more and more but then after ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ there was so much demand for cleaner energy and then there was a demand of people who wanted to know how to do it themselves and they were willing to pay so we started doing seminars at the headquarters.”
Seminars are held about every two weeks and cover a range of workshops, “from teaching the basics of renewable energy systems all the way to courses appropriate for professionals that want to become installers for these systems or current installers who would like to brush up on some of their knowledge.” They cost anywhere from $75 to $400. The webinars cover about the same topics but in an easier to use format for personal viewing or showing at work or school, with workplace showings popular according to Drei. Averaging about $15 and the capability to learn from the comfort of your own home, the webinars are the future of AltE University.
There will come a time when alternative energy is just energy and the sight of solar panels and wind turbines will be boring but there may not be an explosion of interest and knowledge seeking like now. “People really want to know how,” Drei said excitedly, “and we want to empower them to use our products, but empower them with knowledge to do so.”
The DTE blog is committed to reporting and sharing environmental news and sustainability information from across the Inland Northwest.
Maybe our conquering of such technological devices and ideas like iPods, Blackberry’s, RSS feeds and podcasts have given us false confidence, but in the year 2008 everyone is a techie. People who wouldn’t use the Wall Street Journal Business section for anything else than kindling on a camping trip are soaking up information on the latest gadgets and gizmos – who are we kidding – no one is reading the paper; is that an RSS alert?
It’s only fitting that we would want to test our technological prowess in a way that would make Edison proud – creating energy. For most of us that means borrowing ideas that have been around for ever but the actual creating of our own energy is exciting – who wouldn’t want to charge their gadgets and power their Mac Books off energy created by means “outside the box”?
Sascha Drei gets it, and he’s not just in the business of supplying you the means to an end, he’s in the business of making you more capable to achieve those ends. Drei is the CEO of the Alternative Energy Store (AltE), a Hudson, Massachusetts based online retailer of renewable energy goods and technical service.
AltE is a 9-year-old business venture of 3 engineers whose goal, as Drei explained in a recent telephone interview with DTE, “is to make it (alternative energy) more feasible to a larger bit of the population, not just to make it available but to allow more and more folks to take advantage of it.”
More than just a retailer of renewable energy products like solar panels, composting toilets, wind turbines, etc… AltE also serves as an educational arm for alternative energy development worldwide. Conceptualized as a “How To” section on the website where consumers could learn the basics of home installation and operation, AltE’s educational branch has grown to become a center for alternative energy leaning, from AltE 101 to a masters program. “We wanted to make the operation of our products more efficient,” Drei explained. “At first we just had the education up front, for free – now as the education has grown, our branch has changed, we have the sales people on the front lines teaching, they know how it works.” Utilizing innovative web tools, AltE University offers educational materials including a rich AltE library, informative and free AltE video tips as well as seminars at the AltE headquarters in Hudson and online Webinars, the later two at a cost. And according to Drei within the next six months seminars will start being held at the new AltE branch in Columbus, Ohio and eventually at the Puerto Rico branch.
“The interest was always there,” Drei said, “people always wanted to know more and more and more but then after ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ there was so much demand for cleaner energy and then there was a demand of people who wanted to know how to do it themselves and they were willing to pay so we started doing seminars at the headquarters.”
Seminars are held about every two weeks and cover a range of workshops, “from teaching the basics of renewable energy systems all the way to courses appropriate for professionals that want to become installers for these systems or current installers who would like to brush up on some of their knowledge.” They cost anywhere from $75 to $400. The webinars cover about the same topics but in an easier to use format for personal viewing or showing at work or school, with workplace showings popular according to Drei. Averaging about $15 and the capability to learn from the comfort of your own home, the webinars are the future of AltE University.
There will come a time when alternative energy is just energy and the sight of solar panels and wind turbines will be boring but there may not be an explosion of interest and knowledge seeking like now. “People really want to know how,” Drei said excitedly, “and we want to empower them to use our products, but empower them with knowledge to do so.”
