Board of Directors

Board of Directors

Charlotte Hanna

Charlotte Hanna has taught management courses at the college level for over 20 years. She currently teaches at Northern Vermont University at Lyndon and consults with nonprofit organizations on board and management topics.

Dr. Hanna is also a board member and former president of Audubon Vermont and a board member and former president of the Calais school board and the Washington Central Supervisory Union board.

She has a BA from Bennington College and a PhD from Stanford University.

Andrew Boutin, Chair

Andrew Boutin is the founder and General Manager of Pellergy, LLC, a company focusing on the manufacture and import of fully automated wood pellet boilers and bulk wood pellet storage systems.

Prior to founding Pellergy, Mr. Boutin had a 20-year career at General Dynamics, where he served as Chief Engineer, Manager, and Senior Project Lead for ground and shipboard weapon systems, managing a $980 million development and production budget.

Phillip Ennis

Phillip Ennis is a passionate photographer, cinematographer, and producer with a specialty in architecture, interiors, and locations. His life’s work since 1982 has taken him around the globe on assignments for many of the world’s most prestigious publishers; hotel and hospitality brands; interior designers; architects; and manufacturers of home furnishings and luxury brands.

In stark contrast to that work, Mr. Ennis has traveled extensively to remote locations in Nicaragua and Kenya to produce social documentaries that assist volunteer NGOs with their public awareness and fund-raising campaigns.

Mr. Ennis’s interest in sustainable heating tracks with his background in buildings, architecture, and volunteer service.

Heat Loss

The two variables of of heat loss are a) geographic location, and b) building performance. Together they will determine the quantity of heat needed to maintain comfort.

Geographic location drives the building's “design day." Your design day is the difference in temperature between the inside and outside of your house on the theoretical coldest day of the year; so in the northeast we calculate a day that is -10ºf outside and comfortable 68ºf inside. This is referred to as the “delta-T” value. A typical delta-T for the northeast is 78º.

Building performance is the big one because there’s nothing we can do about geographic location. Today we can build a really tight thermal envelope, but most of our heating pollution comes from the millions of homes built over the last 100-150 years. We are getting better at buttoning-up those old buildings with insulation and weather sealing but weatherization is still  never going to be enough to overcome the heat loss from a 78º delta-T. That means we need heating systems that can quickly put a whole lot of heat back into those old houses on the days that are really cold.