Charlie Stephens of Oak Grove, Oregon cstephens@spiritone.comCharlie Stephens of Oak Grove, Oregon cstephens@spiritone.comPeak Oil – What Communities Can Do to Reinvent our Future
Charlie is a consultant and advisor to people who wish to create high performance, sustainable homes and small commercial buildings.
He recently completed 17 years of service at the Oregon Department of Energy as a senior policy analyst. His focus areas were residential energy efficiency and renewable energy applications, new technology development, sustainable building and community development, and energy policy for the State of Oregon.
In 1999 he created the State’s Sustainable Building Tax Credit Program, and was a design team member for a significant number of sustainable building projects. In 2001, he began the Department’s work on high performance homes, designed to generate as much energy annually as they use.
He is well versed in The Natural Step sustainability framework, and collaborated with other members of the Oregon sustainable building and development community to apply the Natural Step system conditions to the building process. The resulting white paper has been a guide for many projects completed or underway now in Oregon. He has consulted with a number of other states to help them implement sustainable building incentive programs similar to those that are so successful in Oregon today.
Other areas of current work involve sustainable community development, the regional, national and international energy future, the economic impacts of energy use, the relationship between energy and food, prospects for various alternatives to fossil fuels, and the relationship between energy and American foreign policy.