5 Ways to Become the International Energy Engineer of the Year

Last week, our Founder and CEO Steve Heinz was named the 2013 International Energy Engineer of the Year by the Association of Energy Engineers (AEE).

This is a big deal. Membership in AEE includes over 16,000 energy professionals worldwide in 90 countries, and they choose just one individual for this annual award.

So how did Steve become the International Energy Engineer of the Year?

We don’t know exactly, but we can speculate. Here are five reasons Steve might have won:

• 40-year fascination with energy management. As a cadet at the Air Force Academy, Steve was captivated with saving energy. Some of his projects were even implemented at the academy when he was a student. In Steve’s award acceptance speech, he tells the story of how he dreamed of conserving energy while his classmates dreamed of consuming it. This fascination turned into a successful career.

• Pioneer of publishing energy management software. In response to a growing demand for energy management software when PCs were in their infancy, Steve taught himself BASIC programming language and from the family’s extra bedroom, began developing FASER on his Radio Shack computer. When Steve began selling FASER to organizations, there was nothing like it on the market. Over time, competitive software products emerged, and eventually FASER was upgraded to the web-based EnergyCAP.

(If you want to get nostalgic, watch a 1990 promotional video for FASER.)

• 10,000 energy managers in 3,000 organizations have used the software. EnergyCAP and FASER have served as critical software tools for more than 10,000 users in 3,000 organizations like school districts; college and university campuses; national retail chains; city, county, state, and federal agencies; churches, health clubs, and hospitals. That’s a big number for niche software.

• Pioneer in Cost Avoidance/Measurement & Verification. Potato, potahto, whether you call it Cost Avoidance or M&V, it’s all about dollar savings. Steve pioneered cost avoidance calculations to assure all parties of the cost avoidance of thousands of performance-based energy management projects in over 25,000 buildings. FASER and EnergyCAP have documented over $4 billion in proven cost savings. Wow!

• $25 billion has been tracked by the software. For most organizations, energy is the number one most controllable operating expense. Together, EnergyCAP and FASER have tracked $25 billion of energy spending, enabling organizations to track their valuable resources so they can manage them. After all, you can’t manage what you don’t measure.

There you go, five reasons Steve might have won the award. One thing is certain–Steve found his passion (energy conservation) and he pursued it relentlessly.

What about you? You might not be the next International Energy Engineer of the Year,

But you could be the Next Big Something. Howard Thurman said,

“Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”

What makes you come alive?