April 25, 2008

As my term as ASHRAE president comes to a close, it seems as if my schedule is picking up. So far this month, I’ve visited with members in Houston, Shanghai, Arizona and Doha, Qatar.  I’d like to share a few highlights of ASHRAE’s outreach since we last chatted.

I was able to attend and speak at the Gulf Coast Green Conference in Houston at the beginning of the month.  This event is put on by the local ASHRAE, AIA and USGBC chapters to promote more sustainable building practice in that region.  Houston Mayor Bill White outlined his plans for transitioning Houston into one of the greener cities in the United States.

In China, I, along with a few other members, attended the China Refrigeration Expo and gave ASHRAE technical presentations related to refrigeration and improving energy efficiency in buildings. We now have two ASHRAE member groups in China that we started this year in cooperation with the Chinese Association of Refrigeration.  One is based in Shanghai with the other in Beijing.  We met with approximately 100 students from Tongji University who asked some excellent questions about ASHRAE and our work, as well as pinning me down on my personal responsibility toward protecting the environment. You can bet I’ll double my efforts to make sure lights are turned off in empty rooms in my house and to practice other environmentally and energy savings measures.  I just purchased my first Prius this week!

In Doha, I had the pleasure of chartering the first chapter in Qatar. The chapter becomes the 18th in our Region-at-Large and our third new chapter chartered this year. We’ve come a long way since chartering our first chapters in Singapore and Hong Kong in 1984.

Earlier this month, ASHRAE hosted another successful satellite broadcast. This one focused on integrated building design. More than 20,000 folks tuned in via Webcast and satellite downlink to hear the guidance from our presenters. Thanks very much to the presenters and the other volunteers and staff who were involved. It’s a tremendous amount of work to pull these off.

If you were in New York over Earth Day, I hope you saw ASHRAE on the Reuters billboard in Times Square. As part of the Earth Day celebration, ASHRAE used the nation’s largest electronic billboard to raise awareness of our energy-savings guidance.  If you didn’t catch the billboard, you can read about it in the May issue of Insights.

We also launched a dues for developing countries program, designed to encourage membership outside North America. The program provides a decreased dues structure option for individuals residing in countries categorized as lower or lower-middle income countries by the World Bank List of Economies statistics. By offering more affordable dues to members in developing countries, we are expanding our reach into countries that can contribute to and benefit from the technology and information sharing in the Society. This will help in creating a worldwide best practices databank of innovative and successful technologies that can serve the HVAC&R community. I’m optimistic that this program will bring many new members into ASHRAE, helping us grow as a Society in numbers and in expanding the technical guidance we produce.

Today I’m headed to the Region VIII Chapters Regional Conference, which is sure to be a lot of fun.  The Shreveport Chapter is hosting the event, with a theme of Louisiana Lagniappe.  Lagniappe means “a little something extra” and I’m sure the chapter will deliver on that promise!

Next week, I’m off to the CIBSE/ASHRAE conference with its focus on sustainability. I’ll check in from there.