Summary: “Where I first kind of noticed that was In tenth grade biology and we did a yeast culture. I remember distinctly. A little petri dish and you put these little yeast cells in there and then you looked at ‘em through a microscope and you counted them in a little grid system and I learned how to do that and then you let them sit for a while and we just charted the growth of the population and it was pretty cool….<br> <br> It started going up and then it really started going up and then it kind of flattened off and then it dropped off and that’s when I started thinking about, well if you consume all the food and you pollute the environment that you live in it’s unsustainable.” ~ David Panich, chairman, American Solar Energy Society.<br> Passive Solar and the Wisdom of Yeast<br> My guest today is David Panich, chairman of the board of the American Solar Energy Society.<br> David is an architect who has worked with passive solar building design and energy efficiency since the 1970s. Now he’s the chairman of the board of the American Solar Energy Society. Here is a transcript of our interview.<br> DP: My name is David Panich. I’m an architect. I worked for a variety of architectural firms around the country, upstate New York, Oregon, Ohio, and then in 1981 I formed my own firm that I ran until 2009. And then I moved away from Ohio and kind of semi-retired and I became way more involved in ASES when I left my practice and somehow ended up being the chairman of the board of ASES this last year and a half and for the remainder of this year.<br> DB: So you’ve had a lot of different jobs over the years with ASES. Can you talk about a couple of those?<br> DP: Yeah, I’ve been chair of the sustainability division. ASES has 9 divisions and I’ve been chair of two of them. One is sustainability. The other is solar buildings. And after a year or two of solar buildings I was nominated for a board position representing the division and in ASES we have representatives of chapters and divisions and then the general membership on the board and after a couple of years on the board as a representative of the buildings divisions I became the chair. So that’s kind of the genesis of how I got here.<br> DB: A lot of people when they think of solar they think of blue photovoltaic panels on a roof. ASES has a long history of reaching across all different types of solar and even other forms of renewable energy I think.<br> DP: That’s true and the forms are all represented in our technical divisions. We’ve got nine divisions and it ranges from clean water energy to solar resource assessment to sustainability which is kind of a catchall division. We have a solar electric, we have solar thermal, we have concentrating solar power. So most of the technologies that one would consider to be a solar technology. Wind actually is a division also because it’s uneven heating of the earth that causes the wind. And pretty much all of those things are a solar technology and in fact you know when you think about it coal is kind of one too since those were plants that decompose but that’s kind of a much longer story. But yeah we have the divisions and those are the areas. And one tough one is how do we fit efficiency in here because really energy efficiency is as important as generating energy. The watt you don’t use is just as valuable as those you create. So we also have an emphasis, I believe in our mission statement, actually about efficiency also.<br> DB: What is the mission of the technical divisions or how do they benefit the move toward clean energy?<br> DP: ASES is a fairly all-encompassing organization. The divisions give people who have a specialty interest a place to land I think, some identity, and hopefully the ability to communicate with their peers. The other function of the divisions really is this conference. We have a call for papers that goes out. And in that call for papers people respond and we generally try to steer the ...
