About Us

Let’s make it simple. 20% of all U. S. fossil-fueled energy is used in American homes. You can do something personal but real about changing that. Consider this:

  • There are well-known ways to reduce your home energy costs.
  • You can get reimbursed for some of your improvements
  • The right improvements can improve the quality of life for your family.
  • You will be contributing to the global campaign to deal with climate change.

GreenMadeSimple.com is the one-stop way to find all these energy and money saving opportunities:

  • Video Guides show you how to save money on the big items that make up 60% of home energy costs.
  • Rebates/TaxCredits database makes it easy to find all the $$ savings offered by goverment, utilities, manufacturers and retailers by zip code.
  • Latest News highlights what people are doing to make their homes more energy efficient. And you can join the conversation with your own comments.

There’s a big surge coming in managing home energy use. The Obama Administration together with many state and local governments and private companies are gearing up to improve the incentives and reduce the barriers to home efficiency and conservation.

The truth is we don’t know that much about how Americans will respond to these new opportunities. Some think that just providing more and better information to consumers will change their energy using habits. Others look to peer pressure from neighbors and other status motives as drivers.
The only current, detailed U. S study we know * cited these two key findings:

“Overall, “I can’t afford it”, or the expense, was the most frequently given reason for not taking each of the energy-efficiency actions.”

Cost, however, is not the only barrier. Many Americans say they simply don’t know how to take some actions or don’t have the time to research the options or do the work.”

That’s what we’re focused on at GreenMadeSimple.com– helping you figure out how to get going on the important improvements and making it as cost-effective as possible.

We try to be practical, not preachy about it–with detailed video and text guides, materials lists, checklists, and cost info.

The math on home energy efficiency is compelling:

Electric power cost for households in the U.S. average 6 to 15 cents per kilowatt hour. Saving a kilowatt hour through home energy efficiency costs about 3 cents in rebates and other incentives.. Building new coal-fired power plants, the major source of CO2 and pollutants, costs at least 7 cents.
So while you are keeping more of the dollars you used to spend on your energy bills, your community is getting the benefit of better water and air quality.

If enough of us do this—recall the campaigns against smoking and for recycling–and we invest in foreseeable improvements in renewable energy, we have a chance of heading off the worst of the really scary stuff of climate change— economic disruptions, floods, wildfires, blackouts, respiratory problems, ocean depletion, loss of biodiversity.

Seems worth doing, doesn’t it? In fact, kind of crazy if we don’t.

* Saving Energy at Home and on the Road
A survey of Americans’ energy saving behaviors, intentions, motivations, and barriers–a nationally representative survey of 2,164 American adults conducted in September and October of 2008 by researchers at Yale and George Mason Universities.

http://research.yale.edu/environment/uploads/SavingEnergy.pdf

Sources

Our first goal was to create the most comprehensive, up-to-date database of incentives on the internet. We’ve spent months scouring the websites of hundreds of private and public utilities, government agencies (the Department of Energy, FHA, IRS, VA), state and local programs, manufacturers and retailers, and non-profits that administer energy efficiency programs to bring you reliable information in an easy-to-use format, so that you can take full advantage of these incentives and rebate programs.

WHO WE ARE

Bob Ellis, co-founder
Bob has started several publishing and internet companies. He got his environmental consciousness raised when he helped develop www.enature.com, where he served as president until it was sold to the National Wildlife Federation in 2002. For xoom.com he served as publisher, board member and investor through its 1999 IPO. He is on the board of directors of www.salon.com and www.verticalresponse.com In 1996, he founded Bonjour Paris, a travel destination site in France featured on America Online. He founded and owned Compact Publishing, developer of the TIME Almanac which was sold to the Learning Co. in 1995. Many years ago he was a Vice President of Business Development for Time-Life Inc. and a correspondent for Time Magazine.

Bob enjoys the outdoor life, gardens, grows grapes, makes a little wine and loves opera. He lives in San Francisco and Sonoma, CA.

Chris Ewald, co-founder
Chris began his personal green journey during the 1980s in Rochester, NY, as a member of the Genesee Co-op, a pioneering combination of natural foods store, restaurant, education center and credit union that focused on community development. His professional digital journey has included a number of stops: Managing Editor of the TIME Almanac, Vice President of Triad Interactive, CTO of Balduccis.com and working as a consultant for a wide variety of news, marketing, e-commerce and non-profit companies.

Chris lives, and recycles, in Berkeley, CA.

Sandy Olkowski, Video Guide Producer and Content Manager
Sandy joined GreenMadeSimple after 8 years in the entertainment and new media industries. Her production credits in film, television, print and web publishing are highlighted by her work as assistant editor on the 2004 Academy Award nominated documentary “Twist of Faith.”

Having grown up in rural Northern California in the ’70s, Sandy remembers when only crazy hippies talked about solar power.

Michael Morcillas, Lead Developer
Michael joined the GreenMadeSimple team in 2008 and has been developing application systems for over a decade; regardless of the application, the cornerstone of his approach is improving efficiency. He is fluent in a variety of development environments and has worked for many of San Francisco’s financial services companies, including Charles Schwab, Franklin Templeton, Bank of America and Wells Fargo.

Michael is a native of the San Francisco Bay Area and has lived in the city’s Mission District for the past ten years, where he enjoys the local food, wine and music. His favorite activity is spending quality time with his wife and two children.

Wendy Reed, Video Guides Host and Home Energy Efficiency Consultant
Wendy is a behavior change communications consultant and energy efficiency spokesperson who formerly served as the Campaign Director for the US Environmental Protection Agency’s ENERGY STAR Change a Light, Change the World Campaign. Wendy founded the national campaign in 2000 as a traditional marketing and media campaign and evolved it to become a powerful grassroots effort comprised of more than 1,000 participating national, regional and local organizations and 2 million individual Americans who pledged to ‘change a light.’ The campaign to date is projected to prevent more than 4 billion pounds of greenhouse gas emissions and save Americans nearly $300 million in energy costs.

Wendy now works to inspire positive and practical energy-minded behavior change among businesses and individuals.

Tom Bair, Videographer
Tom has been producing video for 20 years. He has been a digital video consultant for companies including Crackle/Sony Pictures, BitTorrent, AOL, Charles Schwab, Kontiki/VeriSign, Liberate Technologies, Excite@Home, Apple Computer, and others. His dual backgrounds in television production and software/web development allows him to work seamlessly across the spectrum of tasks in streaming media.