In 1978, Dennis Creech founded the Georgia Solar Coalition in Atlanta, Georgia. As its name suggested, the organization’s focus at that time was on solar energy, but as time passed, it expanded its scope to include a more broad focus based on building science and energy efficiency principles. Its name changed to the Southface Energy Institute to reflect the more broad energy awareness and focus, and today it is a robust organization, focusing on regional and national energy issues. Southface is also the official MSR partnership for the State of Georgia. "We do a great deal of teaching, research and commercial contracts," says Jeff Ross-Bain, Southface Senior Research Engineer and MSR partnership coordinator. "We are quite busy these days," said Ross-Bain. "I am involved in several LEED projects, we provide high-performance building consulting services and conduct trainings on energy code and building science and other interesting work, and MSR is an important piece of my day because I am able to include it in almost all that I do," he said. Despite his busy schedule, I caught Jeff between conference calls recently, and he was eager to talk about the partnership’s progress.

JR-B: The goals of the MSR Initiative are entirely consistent with the work we already do here at Southface. Southface addresses many of the very relevant and collateral issues necessary for solar to become effective and widely accepted. Much of what we do here at Southface is general outreach to stakeholders, the industry and the general publicsuch as teaching, research, energy audits, energy code analysis, design review for green building, LEED work-all of these efforts, while primarily efficiency-based, have a close relationship to solar

I want to mention our annual tradeshow and conference called Greenprints. It is here in Atlanta and this year will take place on March 18 and 19. We bring together a host of national speakers for two days of terrific workshops, manufacturer displays and networking opportunities. I encourage everyone to check out the events at the Greenprints web site.