Green America: What does your business do?

Chuck Lewin: New Generation Energy is a nonprofit organization founded in 2006 that has a mission to make communities healthier and more effective through the development of green energy projects such as solar, wind, and efficiency upgrades.

NGE focuses on providing funding for nonprofit organizations and small businesses by providing loans and grants to support green energy projects. Our funds come from individual and corporate donors, and from investors who purchase NGE Renewable Energy Investment Notes.

We offer the notes in denominations from $1,000 on up, and at interest rates from 1.25 to 2.5 percent.  Investors can earn a reasonable return, while knowing that their investment dollars are helping schools, churches, community organizations, nonprofits, small businesss, and others switch to affordable solar and wind energy and energy efficiency.

What makes your company green?

A 3.8kW NGE-financed solar system installed in Boston in 2009.

Chuck: What makes us green is our mission. NGE exists to make it easy for individuals and corporations to support a greener, cleaner, and healthier America through the creation of renewable energy projects.

In addition to our groundbreaking REINs (Renewable Energy Investment Note) investments, we operate an innovative Green Energy Micro-donation Web site that lets users support specific projects at nonprofit organizations or small businesses in their neighborhood. The site shows the energy cost savings and GHG savings for each project, and lets users list projects by energy economics, location, as well as a number of other characteristics.

What did you do before you were a green business owner?

Chuck: I seem to have been driven toward starting companies from an early age, although more lately it has been nonprofit organizations. In 1979, while in high school, and well before the IBM PC or the Apple iMac, with a friend I started a company that made personal computer games. An example game from that period that I am particularly proud of had the tongue-in-cheek name "Space Discrepancy".

This was our effort to poke a bit of fun at the too-serious game titles of the time, and I suppose it also showed that for us, having fun was as important as making a profit. Back then, we had plenty of the former, and relatively little of the later - mostly because we both went off to college before we could start selling the games.

In later years I started an art gallery, and beginning in 2005 I started getting seriously interested in green energy. Why? because it was exciting, and because it felt inevitable. I was meeting the same kind of starry-eyed people as I was meeting back in the microcomputer days of the late 1970s, only this time everyone was talking about green energy.

 

What have been some of your challenges in maintaining high standards of social and environmental responsibility?

Chuck: NGE launched Renewable Energy Investment Notes (REIN), a whole new type of green investment, in 2008. And 2008 was of course the beginning of the Great Recession. So if timing is everything, our timing was terrible! Since then, the market has gotten better, but as it turns out, we have had even more interest in green donations and sponsorships for our projects than in investments.

Without realizing it, our mini-crisis let us stumble on a whole new category of supporters: consumer-oriented companies like hotels, restaurants, and architecture firms, that wanted a way to get involved with green energy projects, particularly those with local impact. So what started as a roadblock actually ended up being an important new avenue for us.

 

What has been your proudest moment as a green business owner?

NGE helps non-profit organizations save money on energy, which means less overhead, and more resources to spend on core mission activities, like transitional housing for those in need.

Chuck: I gave a speech last month at the kickoff for a major fundraising campaign to make Transition House, a Cambridge-based family shelter, more energy efficient, and more livable. I was invited because NGE had done some successful fundraising for Transition House using its Green Energy Micro-donation site, and was planning on doing a lot more as part of the campaign.

I was honored to be invited to speak, and talked about things that are central to what NGE does like funding green energy projects that lower energy costs. But I was simply awestruck by the other speakers at this event. Some of these folks had lived at Transition House and benefited from what it provides - a safe place for them and their children, away from abusive partners.

Being at this event, which represented such a compelling connection between our work and the people who benefit from it, was a proud moment, and one that we are working every day to repeat more and more often.

 

What's the next green step that you're working on now?

Chuck: We are going to launch a national version of our Green Energy Microdonation site, which was originally launched late last year for just Boston and Cambridge. Any nonprofit organization that identifies a green project at their facility, such as weatherization, solar PV, solar hot water, and needs funding, can list their project and have people donate to it directly at the site. This website is "Crowd-sourcing meets Al Gore", and we can't wait to finish the launch, hopefully by late August.

What advice would you give to other green entrepreneurs just starting out?

Chuck: Wisdom is like looking in the rear view mirror; while you're doing it, you don't want to be driving the car.

On the one hand, you really want to trust your instincts. You need to feel it in the gut. On the other hand, it's easy to get caught up in your own reality-spin. So while you are developing your idea, you want to keep as accurate as possible a copy of what I call the 'user model' in your mind.

I don't know anyone who can predict with certainty how a user (read that as "your customer") is going to react to something new. So you have to talk to them, understand them, and keep as accurate a 'user model' in your mind as possible. This often requires painful adjustments, but it's worth it. And I have never found any other way to make a venture successful.

What green products (besides your own) could you not live without?

Chuck: 1) The Kill-a-watt

2) My Hybrid vehicle soon to become an all electric vehicle

3) Remote power switches for killing phantom power use