Coffee with Susan Meredith, Austin energy maven

Consultant tries crunching hard numbers as she pushes for efficiency

By Asher Price
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Wednesday, December 31, 2008

With a cold snap gripping Austin, energy efficiency maven Susan Meredith offered to meet me for a midafternoon cup of coffee at Cafe Caffeine , a cozy, with-it coffeehouse in the Bouldin neighborhood.

I asked her to coffee to talk about New Year's resolutions: With environment and energy in the public eye lately, it's not hard to imagine that our readers might want some guidance from a woman whose day job is running a business training and consulting company called HumanExcel .

The author of "Beyond Light Bulbs: Lighting the Way to Smarter Energy Management," pulled up, of course, in a Prius.

Meredith (pronounced Mer-EH-dith, in keeping with the Welsh roots of her husband) orders a "dry cappuccino," or one with little milk. The foam is so stiff, says our server proudly, "you can walk across it."

A no-frills cappuccino with a foam only slightly softer than a sidewalk could be a loose metaphor for Meredith's kind of environmentalism: Yes, it's the kind of luxury someone with a bit of money can afford, but it's frugal in its own way. Above all, it's functional. In short, her version of environmentalism isn't some loosey-goosey, all-over-the-place hot chocolate with whipped cream and marshmallows.

Some things you should know about the 50-year-old Susan Meredith: She grew up in suburban Chicago, and after nearly 30 years of living on and off in Austin, she still has some charmingly flat vowels. Those make her seem kind of tough, like a union boss crossed with an environmentalist. Her mother grew up on a small farm in Illinois, and she credits her mother's upbringing as the roots of her own frugality.

She studied engineering at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and moved to Austin to work for IBM in 1980. She became expert in meeting with businesses to drive up their data and operating efficiency. Then, in the late 1980s, she became burned out and headed to Australia with her husband, Robert, for about a half-decade before coming back to Austin.

They live in Travis Heights with their 8-year-old son, Ian, and you get the sense that he is, in a harmless way, a guinea pig for methods Meredith hopes to use to persuade Austinites to change their behavior.

Members of the family write one another's names down on strips of paper and put them in a jar whenever one of them leaves a room without switching off lights.

The lessons appear to be working.

"He tells me I can use the hair dryer for only two minutes," she laughs. "He's like the energy police!"

A devotee of the futurist Buckminster Fuller, she is both an optimist and enough of a hard-nosed empiricist to have a tendency to use words like "metrics." She sees an inherent relationship between natural law and human behavior, and suggests it's no coincidence that we use physics terms such as "inertia," "friction" and "momentum" to describe our willingness to change.

In her programmatic way, she's boiled down the changing of habits to three issues: You have to convince people that green is cool; you have to put mechanisms in place to keep track of energy consumption (like the name-in-the-jar game she plays with her family); and you need a little peer pressure to make everyone go along.

Sprinkling in a flavor of self-help or organizational literature, "energy management," she declares in "Beyond Light Bulbs," "means channeling our own energy in the right direction, along the most efficient paths, and distributing it at a rate that supplies the right amount of energy at the right time to meet the demand."

I ask her about her thoughts on New Year's resolutions.

"If you say, 'I'm going to lose some weight,' that isn't really a resolution," she told me. "You've got to say, 'I'll lose 10 pounds by this date.' The question has to be, 'Hey, is that measurable?' "

She tells me Austinites can aim to cut down their garbage and, of course, screw in energy-saving compact fluorescent light bulbs.

Her book is actually a little short on tips for individuals, though it does offer a standard list: Recycle, use public transportation, xeriscape, use a clothesline, etc., things all Austinites can do cheaply.

About "personal change," she writes: "Resisting wastes energy. Choose a direction. Sitting on the fence is the most uncomfortable place to be."

She and her husband are launching a new consulting company, called the Go Green Squad, to teach homeowners how to improve the efficiency of their homes. I ask Meredith whether she has influenced her own siblings or parents. Her father was proud of switching out light bulbs, she said.

Her brother, a home builder, told her he doesn't build green.

"He's such a turkey," she says. "I gotta work on him."

asherprice@statesman.com; 445-3643