Dogs are allowed on some Outdoorsy adventures but may require an additional fee. Check before you go. Photo: Lynne Brubaker
If the open road is calling you—or if you’d like to spend a few nights communing with nature without, you know, getting eaten by any part of it—Outdoorsy’s here to help. The online service matches owners willing to rent out their pop-ups, Casitas, trailers, and RVs with road-warrior vacationers. Launched in 2015, the company has received more than $81 million in investment funding, and appears to be riding a trend in DIY adventure travel. Here’s why this new vacation option has piqued our interest.
1.A wide range of prices and vehicles. Though Outdoorsy’s still filling out its roster in the Charlottesville area, your choices hereabouts already range from a $50-a-night mini-trailer to a massive, fully loaded RV for $240 a night.
2. Easy travel for renters. You’ll see a rental’s list of amenities upfront, with all associated charges listed, so you know exactly what you’re getting. Got a question? Ask the owner via Outdoorsy’s messaging system before you rent. Outdoorsy offers add-on trip insurance in case a cancellation-worthy event arises. And you can throw in comprehensive 24/7 roadside assistance, technical support, and concierge service for $15 per day.
3. No alarms or surprises. Renters and owners walk through the RV before it’s picked up and after it’s returned, jointly signing off on its condition. Both parties can also leave reviews for each other, which helps to steer great renters and owners toward each other and keep everyone honest in the process.
4. Abundant add-on options. Depending on the model and the owner, renters can chip in a little extra for linens, accessories packages for camping, tailgating, or beach trips, or having someone else clean the vehicle for you at the end of your trip. Some rentals even include satellite TV and/or video-game consoles, in case the great outdoors get a little too outdoorsy for you.
If you go:
• Learn the ropes with membership services like Good Sam Club (goodsam.com) and RV Trip Wizard (rvtripwizard.com). Whatever you pay to join, you’re likely to get it back by making your travel more efficient.
• When you calculate the travel time to your destination, account for a 20 percent slower pace than if you were going by car.
• Invest in paper maps. Getting outside cell-service range is part of the point, isn’t it?
• Dogs are allowed on some Outdoorsy adventures but may require an additional fee. Check before you go.
Furniture designer and fabricator Tate Pray in his studio off Harris Street. Photo: Amy Jackson Smith
The fundamental nature of art,” says Tate Pray, “is that it has no use.”
But the Charlottesville-based designer seems bent on proving that maxim wrong, crafting wooden furniture that’s both functional and reflective of his playful sense of humor.
Pray uses traditional woodworking techniques to give his stylish Modernist designs a rustic touch. Photo: Courtesy of Tate Pray
Pray seems to thrive on contradictions. He uses traditional woodworking techniques to give his stylish Modernist designs a rustic touch. And he balances his pieces’ clean, stark lines with witty accents. He’s built boxy dressers and side tables that hunch on insect-like legs, crate furniture “fastened” with cartoonish painted-on nails, and a trestle table with surface planks that follow the contours of the tree from which the boards were cut.
“I love humor and whimsy,” Pray says. “I think they are two of the great treats of life. So they have, and will, find their way into my work so long as I feel the expression is worthwhile and original.”
From his woodshop off Harris Street, Pray collaborates on projects with local interior designers and creates his own furniture and accessories. Furniture has to work like it’s supposed to, he says, but it also needs to look good. Pray says he tries to strike a balance between form and function that will best meet his customers’ needs.
Pray’s currently renovating a 500-square-foot showroom space next to his workshop, planned to open in late spring. There, he aims to “develop a cohesive collection of furniture, art, and home accessories that I hope will be a resource for designers as well as my local community,” he says. “I’m going for a New York loft-like, home-decor gallery vibe.”
The showroom is key to Pray’s goal of building his own brand here. “Charlottesville is wildly supportive of the arts and design,” he says. “If I can add something unique and honest to that, I know this town will support me.”
Wine in a can may seem déclassé, but it’s “practical on the golf course!" says winemaker Matthieu Finot. Photo: Max March
Sommeliers may take offense, but canned wine is a booming business. In January, Crozet’s King Family Vineyards popped the top on this trend by rolling out its first cases of canned Crosé, its popular rosé wine.
As winemaker Matthieu Finot explains, King’s been making a dry, fruit-forward rosé since 2003, and now harvests Merlot grapes specifically for the Crosé. After the crush, the juice rests briefly on the red grapes’ skins, resulting in a pale-pink wine with “less alcohol and more freshness,” Finot says. The King Family website describes “notes of grapefruit, lime, watermelon, and a light grassiness on the nose…and flavors of bitter cherry, peach, and rose petal” on the palate.
“We went from producing 100 cases [of bottles] in the first year to over 4,000 cases in 2018,” Finot says. “The demand for [Crosé] keeps increasing, along with the rosé consumption in the United States.” So it made sense to King and Finot to capitalize on the rising popularity of canned wine, especially among younger drinkers.
After all, wine and portability generally don’t mix. If you want to savor a glass of grape on the go, you’ll need to lug around a heavy glass bottle, a corkscrew, and glasses (unless you want to swig straight from the bottle). And once you’ve opened a bottle, you’ll need to finish it promptly to keep the wine from losing its freshness—a strategy more advisable at home than while you’re out and about. Each can of Crosé, in contrast, is roughly the size of a generous glass of wine, and a four-pack has the same volume as a bottle at the same price.
“Also, canning is better for the environment,” says Finot—lighter, more recyclable, and with less waste. King canned its first 500 cases of 2018 Crosé the same week it bottled the rest of the vintage, with help from a mobile canning company that came to the vineyard.
Cans are sold exclusively at the vineyard, and Finot says they’re planning on more cases of cans for the 2019 vintage to meet the rising demand. “Most of the customers like the convenience of it,” Finot says.
And what would Finot say to wine snobs who can’t bear the thought of aluminum-clad vino? “They can still buy Crosé in bottles,” he says, “but it is less practical on the golf course!”
King Family Vineyards, 6550 Roseland Farm, Crozet; 823-7800; kingfamilyvineyards.com
After closing his beloved restaurant in the city, L’étoile chef Mark Gresge turned to something simpler (in addition to his catering business): soup. Photo: John Robinson
Chef Mark Gresge missed making soup.
From 1992 to 2014, Gresge ran the beloved local French restaurant L’étoile. “To me,” Gresge says, “French country cooking was the perfect cuisine. Depth of flavor, locally sourced product, a true sense of region in the cooking.”
L’étoile had always run catering alongside its restaurant operations, but the growth of both that catering business and his own family drove Gresge to reluctantly close the restaurant and focus only on catering. Through word of mouth, he found a cozy cottage kitchen just outside downtown Crozet and set up shop there. “I still miss the restaurant,” he says, “and try and capture the feeling through the pop-ups that I hold at the kitchen when time allows.”
But pop-ups and catering still weren’t enough. Making soup was one of the ways Gresge began each day at the restaurant, and far from considering it a lowly haven for leftovers, he took its preparation as seriously as the rest of his courses. “I missed that process, making it every day, and decided that I would make a small batch and see if anyone was interested in taking some home,” he says. So Gresge put a simple sign out front and an honor box and cooler on the porch, and he marketed his soups via social media.
Photo: John Robinson
He says he can’t count the number of different flavors he’s cooked up since he began in 2015; he tries to avoid a routine and offer new combinations of flavors each week. Gresge especially loves taking requests from patrons for particular favorite recipes. “People seem to love anything with shrimp, gumbo, chowder and so on,” he says, listing New England clam chowder and chicken and rice as other popular offerings. (Kale-related soups? Not so much.)
In the chilly months ahead, he’s planning to offer cassoulet, a hearty French dish of white beans and assorted meats, and bigos, a Polish “hunter’s stew” traditionally made with meat, cabbage, and sauerkraut. “Bigos is so wonderful,” says Gresge, “I would love to share it with Crozet.”
When Gresge first opened L’étoile, “I imagined a grandmother cooking for her family,” he says. “I wanted to do that.” Serving soup to hungry, happy customers seems to keep him connected to that ideal.
“Honestly,” he says, “if I could make only one dish, and it was only soup, I would be a very happy person.”
Getcha some
Drive past L’étoile’s Crozet headquarters (or drop by its Facebook page) at 5857 Jarmans Gap Rd., and you’ll see a hand-lettered sign announcing the two weekly flavors on offer. Drop $10 in the lockbox on the front porch, and help yourself to a quart from the cooler. New offerings roll out every Wednesday. “If the sign is not out,” says Gresge, “the soup is gone.”—NA
Two days into training camp with the Chicago Bears, Maurice Covington’s hamstring tore—and took his future plans with it. “Being focused about football and wanting to make it to the NFL and then having that taken from me,” says the former UVA wide receiver, “that transition was terrible.”
A decade later, Covington has turned that painful setback into a flourishing career. At Charlottesville- based Rede Wealth, he’s helping pro athletes make smart money decisions to prepare for a life after sports.
The Durham, North Carolina, native spent 2005 to 2008 with the Virginia Cavaliers. After his injury, he pursued a degree in sports management at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, where he worked as a graduate assistant and academic advisor for student athletes.
“I would constantly see the same thing,” Covington recalls. “These athletes—some of them were my friends, some of them were kids I mentored, some of my teammates—I would constantly see them go off and play three, four, five, six, seven years in the NFL or NBA, and then always revert back to their college for help.”
A 2009 Sports Illustrated study found that 78 percent of ex-NFL and NBA players were broke or struggling two years after retiring. “The biggest mistake they make,” Covington says, “is thinking that the money they’re earning at that level is going to come in forever.”
Athletes often spend beyond their means, fail to shop around for the best deals on big-ticket purchases, or offer their families financial help in ways they just can’t sustain long-term, he says. And they often fail to identify passions beyond sports, or seize the opportunities to network and work toward those interests.
After completing his degree at LSU, in 2012 Covington moved to UVA’s athletic program. He helped build a series of workshops that teach students to identify career goals and cultivate business skills—resume-building, elevator pitches, even dressing for success.
But Covington wanted to do even more to help, and a 2016 job offer from Rede CEO and co-founder Stephen McNaughton gave him that opportunity. At Rede, Covington manages money for around a dozen pro athletes—confidentiality forbids him from naming them—plus other local and national entrepreneurs.
Covington creates budgets for clients to follow, advises them on big-ticket purchases, helps them cultivate their credit, and creates custom portfolios to sock away a healthy share of their earnings. “They’re not putting too much of their assets in them, but enough to create them a nice pot of money,” he says. “Always, the goal is long-term wealth.”
Looking forward, Covington hopes he can help even more athletes avoid the pain he once felt. “There’s so many athletes out there mismanaging money or doing the wrong things, and some of them even being advised by the wrong people,” he says. “I really just want to be able to touch more people, and help them learn proper money management skills and save wisely for the future.”
Antwon Brinson never thought he'd be a chef, but “I had a teacher that believed in me,” he says. “He’d seen something in me that I didn’t see in myself.” Now, he wants to do the same for others through his culinary training program. Photo: Robinson Imagery
A teacher changed the course of chef Antwon Brinson’s life. Now, as he trains Charlottesville residents for kitchen careers, he’s trying to do the same for his own students.
Brinson says he never thought he’d become a chef. He enjoyed cooking growing up, but didn’t consider it a career until high school. “I had a teacher that believed in me,” Brinson says. “He’d seen something in me that I didn’t see in myself.” With his encouragement, Brinson joined the school’s cooking team, made it to state competition on his first try, and eventually started cooking for a living.
By early 2017, Brinson’s culinary career had led him from West Virginia’s exclusive Greenbrier resort to high-end restaurants in Hawaii and California, but he wanted more for himself and his family. “I started to look for something in a location that would allow me to plant my feet, and a position that had the potential for growth,” he says.
He spent the next year running the kitchen at Charlottesville’s Common House social club, where an initial hiring snag ended up inspiring his next step. “I couldn’t find staff to save my life,” he says. In this saturated restaurant market, a shortage of qualified employees left “everybody robbing Peter to pay Paul just to get one person to staff a restaurant who didn’t leave.”
Brinson decided to create a program that would help people make a decent living in the kitchen. “I’ve spent my entire career building teams, training people, and I’m passionate about it,” he says. He found partners in the city’s economic development office; local restaurants willing to take on the program’s graduates; and CATEC, which provided classrooms and kitchens.
Brinson’s class, free of charge to successful applicants, launched last May with six students. “It’s called Culinary Boot Camp for a reason,” he says. “It’s five weeks, five days per week, five hours per day.” He doesn’t accept casual or half-hearted students. “You’ve gotta be passionate. You don’t have to have any experience, you’ve just gotta want it.”
An initial classroom discussion about each week’s theme—life skills such as integrity, focus, and communication—gets fleshed out with kitchen drills in what Brinson calls “a controlled environment of failures.” Brinson challenges his students to make mistakes, learn from them, and then help each other avoid them. “By the fifth week, to be honest with you, they’re teaching each other.”
After a sixth week of real-world tryouts in Charlottesville restaurants, Brinson’s first class passed with flying colors. “We finished the program with 100 percent retention, 100 percent of all students passed the tests, and 100 percent job placement,” he says. His second cohort of 10 students launched October 15 at the Charlottesville Cooking School on Barracks Road, with four more students on a waiting list for a third class.
Down the road, Brinson says, he’d like to launch his own restaurant to develop students and help them impress future employers. He proudly keeps in touch with previous pupils as they pursue their new goals—passing on the same support that helped him get his start. “Having someone that had the foresight to say, ‘Hey, this kid has potential,’ and just taking the time to invest in you,” he says, “that’s what made all the difference for me.”
Cooking up a more satisfying future
Chef Antwon Brinson’s Culinary Boot Camp is helping locals with culinary talents sharpen their skills and their goals. One graduate of his first class credits Brinson with helping her realize her ambitions, while another followed Brinson’s advice out of the kitchen—and into a slightly different and unexpected career.
Shamia Hopkins has worked in the culinary and hospitality industries since her early teens. She signed up in part to obtain ServSafe food safety certification and further her career, but says she ended up learning a lot more than that. “You’re never too old to ask questions,” she says. “No question is a dumb question, [and] it’s okay to not know everything.” Hopkins says this insight changed her whole outlook on cooking: “I saw myself having the ability to create more than I thought I could. I felt like I regained my imagination and passion.”
The confidence she gained in the program has helped Hopkins expand her new catering business, including a successful “soulful farm to table” food booth at a recent Tom Tom Festival event. “Chef Brinson is one of my biggest hype men,” she says. “He encourages me to just go for the gold.” Long term, Hopkins says she wants to open “an awesome farm to table bed and breakfast.”
When Daniel Chen applied for Brinson’s Culinary Boot Camp, he’d just left a UVA graduate program in sociology. And while he says he’s loved cooking at home for years, his professional food-service experience began and ended with a former gig working front-of-house at a Chinese restaurant. Chen most remembers the classes’ emphasis on “the crucial balance between proactive preparation and on-the-spot flexibility,” which he said “paradoxically…helped me realize that I didn’t actually want to be a chef after all, but instead that baking was more my forte.”
In the final phase of boot camp, Chen sought out a trial run at MarieBette bakery, because “the more controlled atmosphere of production baking suited my personality better than more variable à la carte kitchen environments.” That tryout landed him a full-time job on MarieBette’s 4 a.m. shift. Chen now spends his early mornings baking dough from the night before, readying tarts and treats for the following day, and pursuing a new artistic interest in bread stenciling. “I’m enjoying my time at MarieBette and hope to continue learning as I work,” he says. “Whatever the future holds, I’m sure it will be some mix of bread and books.”—NA
In 2017, renewable energy generated 18 percent of U.S. electricity, doubling its share from 2008. Here in Charlottesville, a growing cluster of companies is developing and building projects that draw power from the wind, sun, waves and more. And the bulk of those booming businesses, according to many in the industry, owe their existence today to a single key company that began just 18 years ago.
Starting with a greenlight
When the Berlin Wall fell, Sandy Reisky sensed opportunity. From Munich, where he worked in finance, “he rented a jackhammer, drove to Berlin, and took as many pieces as he could,” recounts Jonathan Baker, Reisky’s longtime friend and fellow UVA alum. “He fashioned them with a little stand and sold them to whomever he could. This was before eBay and before the web, so this took hustle!”
Apex Clean Energy’s Sandy Reisky started thinking green in 1989, when he sold parts of the Berlin Wall and donated the profits to clean up East German pollution. Photo: Jackson Smith
Even in 1989, Reisky was thinking green. He donated half his profits from selling parts of the wall to clean up East German pollution. In 2000, he followed up by starting his own company to develop wind energy projects.
When he decided to found Greenlight Energy, Reisky says, “Charlottesville seemed like the most logical place.” It was Reisky’s home, and here he found a supportive network of investors and a vibrant community of entrepreneurs and creative workers.
“To my knowledge, Greenlight Energy was the first renewable energy company in Charlottesville,” says Matthew Hanztmon, who served as its managing director. “Greenlight [showed] that a nationally competitive energy company could successfully grow and compete with a base in Charlottesville.”
Let a hundred powers bloom
BP bought Greenlight in 2006, but its core talent stayed here and kept starting businesses.
“Out of the Greenlight headwaters flowed Element Power, Apex [Clean Energy], HelioSage, Columbia Power, Axio Solar, Greenlight Biofuels, Hexagon Energy, and Lumin,” says Baker, who invested in Greenlight and served on its board of advisors.
After Greenlight, Reisky founded or co- founded Axio, for utility-scale solar, which he sold to SunEdison in 2011; Columbia, which develops technology to generate power from ocean waves; Greenlight Biofuels, acquired in 2015 by Valley Proteins; and Apex Clean Energy, founded in 2009.
Reisky is chairman and chief strategist at Apex, which builds wind and now solar projects nationwide, then sells them to utility companies, sells those projects’ generated power or operates the plants under contract to organizations such as the U.S. Army and IKEA.
Firefly and ReThreads owner Melissa Meece participates in C3’s Better Business Challenge, a year-long program that presents energy-smart ideas to local businesses in a friendly competition. Photo: Eze Amos
Power to the people
C3 sparks business opps through climate consciousness
As Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote, “A goal without a plan is just a wish.”
Back in 2012, the city of Charlottesville committed to a 10 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2035. It’s a commendable goal, but its success hinges on daily decisions by residents and businesses. To that end, in October 2017, Grey McLean founded Charlottesville Climate Collaborative. C3 seeks to educate and empower individuals, businesses, schools and other communities in Charlottesville and Albemarle County to make environment-protecting changes.
McLean envisioned Cville Renewable Energy Alliance, the trade association trying to put Charlottesville on the map as a hub of the renewable energy industry. But C3, he says, is a broader effort to meet local goals. That begins with giving people practical steps to take.
“When it comes to this issue, people say, ‘I know I should do it, I agree with it,’ but people are busy, and it takes time to research this and understand the economics,” McLean says. “We are trying to make it as easy as possible; to tell people, ‘Here are the top five things you can do. If you want to take action, here’s a resource for you to take action.’”
C3’s largest initiative is the Better Business Challenge, a year-long program that presents energy-smart ideas to local businesses and creates a good-natured competition among them as they implement money- and environment-saving actions. The Better Business Challenge was last held in 2014 by Teri Kent (founder of Better World Betty and now C3’s director of programs and communication). Local businesses switched to LED light bulbs, changed thermostat settings, evaluated water fixtures for leaks and took dozens of other practical steps. Seventy-eight businesses participated in 2014, and Kent hopes to see that number double in 2018. The competition is open to schools, nonprofits and congregations as well as businesses, and registration is ongoing. Participants compete for awards and enjoy connecting with one another socially; they also stand to see substantial savings.
“So often in the business community, where the conversation starts isn’t with the climate but with, ‘How can we help you improve the financial operations of your business?’” McLean says. “These changes make sense on their own. That’s where we meet businesses. Solar, LEDs and energy efficiency make sense in their own right. We provide help in these areas so that it becomes a no-brainer.”
C3 seeks to connect with individuals and families as well as organizations. Later this summer, it will launch its pilot model for the Home Energy Challenge, an initiative that connects neighbors, through house parties and an online platform, around the goal of reducing energy costs and environmental impact.
As C3 deepens its roots and extends its influence, it holds to an often-unsung priority: learning. C3 has met with environmental leaders, small business owners and faith leaders.
“Right now we are doing a lot of listening,” says Kent. “We are asking, ‘What issues are you already tackling? And if climate were to be a part of that, if you were to take action on climate, what would that look like? Where can climate fit into what you are already doing?’”—Joanna Breault
Meanwhile, Baker, along with Hantzmon and other Greenlight alumni, founded solar developer HelioSage in 2008. “Most of HelioSage’s early partners were from the Greenlight team,” he says. Panasonic-backed Coronal Energy bought HelioSage in 2015; today, Baker is Coronal’s chief talent officer.
Hantzmon, a Columbia co-founder and HelioSage COO, has now founded Hexagon Energy, which aims to develop green energy projects via multiple sustainable technologies.
Other local players include solar developer SunTribe; Lumin, whose “smart panel” helps homeowners and utilities monitor their energy use; and Fermata Energy, working to smooth out peaks in the electric grid with the power stored in parked electric cars.
In 2017, SunTribe Solar began installing more than 1,000 solar panels on three different buildings at St. Anne’s-Belfield School. Photo: Skycladap.com
Green shoots and gray clouds
“Energy-related businesses play a vital part in our economy,” says Jason Ness, the city’s business development manager. These companies offer well-paying jobs at multiple rungs of the economic and educational ladder, with career possibilities that help retain valuable employees, he says.
“We employ nearly 300 employees in the clean energy space,” says Charity Pennock, director of the Charlottesville Renewable Energy Alliance. “We’ve developed over $6.5 billion in clean energy projects. And those projects are providing power to the equivalent of 750,000 homes.”
But despite renewable energy’s growth in Charlottesville, the industry faces local and national obstacles.
Good credits
Four federal incentives make it easy to adopt solar power
Businesses that install solar power systems stand to see a substantial bump to their bottom lines over time. But the initial installation can be pricey. To mitigate this hurdle, both city and federal governments offer incentives.
The city of Charlottesville offers a credit on real estate tax bills for five years after installing solar. The credit is a portion of the total cost of certified solar energy equipment, facilities or devices that are attached to real estate within the city of Charlottesville. Claiming this credit involves arranging an inspection by the city’s building inspector and filing an application.
Thanks to a grant from the city of Charlottesville, LEAP (Local Energy Alliance Program) and the UVA Community Credit Union offer commercial property owners access to low-interest loans for energy efficiency or renewable energy projects. Rates are as low as 0 percent.
In addition, there are two federal programs that can benefit businesses considering environment-protecting measures. One is the Solar Investment Tax Credit, a 30 percent credit for solar systems on residential and commercial properties. This dollar-for-dollar reduction was extended in 2015, and the program is guaranteed to continue through 2021.
The other federal program that helps offset cost is the USDA Rural Energy for America Program. Charlottesville and Albemarle County businesses (as “rural small businesses”) may be eligible for a grant for up to 25 percent of the cost for purchasing, installing and constructing renewable energy systems.—Joanna Breault
Pennock says local businesses have to work hard to draw talent to a relatively smaller market than most energy hubs. Knowing that there are other companies here is a big plus in attracting employees, she says.
Beyond talent, Reisky notes tough competition for real estate. “Office space in downtown has run at over 95 percent occupancy and has only trended upward,” he says. Apex, currently spread across three buildings throughout the city, will soon consolidate in a newly built headquarters on Garrett Street.
“On the national level,” Reisky says, “wind and solar have been the dominant sources of new electricity for the past several years. A combination of low prices and extraordinary public demand for clean energy has driven this shift. While the trend lines are clear, we can’t be complacent.”
The Trump administration has slapped new tariffs on cheap foreign-made solar panels, and current federal wind and solar tax credits will likely expire in 2020. “The challenge over the next two to three years,” says Hantzmon, “is to navigate this change through a combination of innovative financing structures as well as increased efficiency in wind turbines and solar panels.”
Apex Clean Energy develops, constructs, and operates utility-scale renewable energy facilities, such as this wind farm. Photo: Courtesy Apex Clean Energy
Eyes on the future
Rich Allevi, SunTribe’s co-founder and director of operations, says these “artificial headwinds” pale compared to local obstacles.
Residents assume that the city’s progressive bent means it’s doing more to battle climate change than it actually is, Allevi says. “We know the desire is there, but our community needs to put pressure on the local government and challenge them to make a strong commitment towards carbon offset.”
The University of Virginia has set goals to cut emissions 25 percent from 2009 levels by 2025, says its sustainability director, Andrea Trimble. Photo: Eze Amos
In 2012, Charlottesville pledged to cut municipal carbon emissions 10 percent by 2020, and 10 percent community-wide by 2035, says Kristel Riddervold, the city’s environmental administrator. Despite sustainability initiatives such as solar installations on municipal buildings, the city won’t know its progress toward those goals until it completes a new greenhouse gas inventory in midsummer. By comparison, the University of Virginia set goals to cut emissions 25 percent from 2009 levels by 2025, says Andrea Trimble, UVA’s sustainability director. At the end of 2016, those cuts totaled 11.6 percent, despite a growing university. That same year, she says, “We launched UVA’s first sustainability plan, with 23 goals and specific actions.”
But last summer, the city joined the Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate and Energy, Riddervold says. “I know that there are a number of communities both within the commonwealth and across the country that have very recently set aggressive goals,” Riddervold says, “and that’s going to be a very good point of reference for us to use.”
Riddervold says local green energy companies are working with her office to shape more ambitious targets. In Charlottesville, city buildings contribute less than 3 percent of carbon emissions, she says. “So if we’re really going to be serious about community emissions or energy reduction, it’s going to take all the sectors to see what that means on their side. Having a robust [renewable energy] industry in Charlottesville is a big deal in that regard.”
When local green energy companies push Richmond for friendlier regulation, everyone wins, Riddervold says. “What makes it easier for them to do business in Virginia is going to make it easier for businesses, residents and nonprofits to access solar [power], for example.”
Home sweet home
The city could eventually gain even more private- sector partners in pursuing its climate goals. “I expect to see additional startups begin to appear,” Matthew Hantzmon says. “The same ingredients that drove the growth of Greenlight and Hexagon are also attractive to a new generation of companies.”
“The university helps attract tremendously talented individuals, and many people who attended UVA or one of Virginia’s other great colleges or universities want to stay here after graduation,” says Sandy Reisky. “Apex’s roots in Charlottesville have been absolutely vital to our growth.”
The city’s appeal motivated Rich Allevi to start SunTribe here in 2015. “Charlottesville is on track to become the renewable energy hub of the Southeast,” he says. “With a vibrant culture, access to the outdoors, and the family-oriented community, the choice was obvious.”
To the source
Here’s who’s shaping the local renewable energy surge
Apex Clean Energy is headquartered on Fourth Street, but works in more than 20 states. The company started in 2009 as a developer, builder and operator of clean energy projects—big solar and wind farms—that it often sells to local and regional utility companies. To date it’s installed 2,226 megawatts of clean power: enough, it says, to light up both Maine and Vermont. And Apex says it has 13,000 more megawatts in development. Three of its current projects are right here in Virginia—one, a solar project south of Lynchburg, will power 15,000 homes when it’s completed next year.
SunTribe Solar serves enterprise and government customers, installing and maintaining solar arrays on the ground, on roofs and atop carports. It’s a local company, focused on Virginia and Washington, D.C., with 60 megawatts of energy in development. One big client is the University of Virginia, for which SunTribe designed, engineered and constructed 140 kW of roof-mounted solar power. A smaller local project: Blenheim Vineyards’ 17 kW array on the roof of its tasting room. Entering its third year, SunTribe says it’s Virginia’s fastest-growing large-scale solar provider—to the tune of 408 percent growth year-over-year.
Fermata is bringing V2G technology to market—that’s vehicle-to-grid, meaning that electric vehicle batteries can actually provide storage capacity to the energy grid when the vehicles aren’t in use. Fermata was founded to serve commercial and municipal-government clients that have electric vehicle fleets, like the city of Danville, which since 2016 has operated three Nissan Leafs under Fermata’s demonstration project. CEO David Slutzky, a former Albemarle County supervisor, heads the company.
Sigora Solar is the local go-to for residential solar systems: Since its founding in 2011, Sigora has installed solar on 740 homes in Virginia, D.C. and Maryland. And it has bigger clients, too: In 2016, the city of Charlottesville hired Sigora to install 121 solar panels on the roof of the Smith Aquatic and Fitness Center. Its workforce of around 50 is, the company says, constantly expanding, and it plans to open offices in other states by the end of the year. Meanwhile, company founder Andy Bindea is now running a sister company, Sigora Haiti, which is leapfrogging the traditional electricity infrastructure in a country that’s never had reliable power. Sigora Haiti currently provides power to 10,000 people.
Columbia Power, founded in 2008, is a patent-holder on a system that captures energy from ocean waves. Its projects are still in the pilot phase, but the company foresees selling its system to utilities and the Department of Defense. A “wave farm,” the company says, can be similar to a wind farm in capacity—between 25 and 250 megawatts—but the devices can be installed more densely, thus requiring a smaller area. Two Columbia employees in Charlottesville complement a nine-person R&D headquarters in Oregon.
A Coronal Energy project in Troy, Virginia. Photo: Courtesy Coronal Energy
Coronal Energy offers design, financing, engineering and management of solar projects for customers including businesses, universities, utilities and government. Its Charlottesville location is one of five North American offices, and it has an exclusive partnership with Japanese tech giant Panasonic, which has been in the solar energy business since the 1970s (yeah, we didn’t know that either). It’s big: Coronal’s portfolio includes 2.3 gigawatts of solar energy in 40 states, including a trio of North Florida projects developed with the U.S. military that together generate enough power for 18,000 homes.
Founded less than two years ago, Lumin is a startup with a bright idea: a “Smart Panel” that can be installed between a home’s circuit breaker and its appliances, then synced with the homeowner’s phone to give detailed information about when and how the house uses juice. The device also makes it possible to, say, turn lights off remotely or use appliances when power’s the cheapest. With six employees and just three panels installed to date, the company is definitely in its infancy—but says it plans to have installed 100 Smart Panels by the end of June.
Altenergy has been creating solar solutions for both residential and commercial projects since 2005, when its founder, Paul Risberg, left his career at the New York Stock Exchange to apply his talents to solar energy. Now, 13 years later, Altenergy has offices in Virginia, Idaho, Washington, D.C., and Maryland, and boasts a list of awards in contracting and installing. One of its major initiatives, the Solarize Campaign, helps bundle costs for multiple families in a neighborhood looking to nab clean energy.—Erika Howsare
Social Hall, the anchor space of Common House located on the second floor, features an eclectic array of seating for mingling. Photo: Andrea Hubbell
Before they could build a place to bring people together, the founders of Common House had to keep it from falling apart.
Five years ago, longtime friends Josh Rogers, a creative director, and Derek Sieg, a filmmaker, returned to their hometown with a desire to help people in Charlottesville’s burgeoning creative community connect. “People are here,” Rogers says, “but they don’t have anywhere to belong.”
They found an ideal spot—the former Mentor Lodge, originally an African-American social club, at 206 W. Market St.—close to the Downtown Mall, but “just slightly off the beaten path,” Rogers says. Ben Pfinsgraff, former general manager at Clifton Inn, joined them as co-founder, and they enlisted architect Dave Ackerman of local architecture firm Wolf Ackerman to rebuild the space. By late January 2016, they were ready to start construction. Enter: Winter Storm Jonas.
Under thousands of pounds of melting snow, the building’s roof collapsed, “sagging like a water balloon,” Ackerman says. To keep that weight from pulling down the interior walls, his crews had to cut the roof’s remaining rubber membrane, soaking the interior.
The library offers Chesterfield sofas for relaxing and billiards for gaming. Photo: Andrea Hubbell
“We didn’t have a roof for months,” Pfinsgraff says. “Everything on the interior just got destroyed.” Insurance covered the damage, but “we lost a few years at the end of our lives.”
Rather than raze the building, the co-founders tore down half of it—then salvaged and cleaned every brick and usable plank of 100-year-old heart-pine wall sheathing. The former went back into the wall. The latter became herringbone flooring, tables and other features in the renovated space.
Reconstruction added 2,500 new square feet to Common House’s existing 5,000, making room for a rooftop terrace and a full kitchen serving breakfast, lunch and dinner.
Common House opened May 17 with roughly 300 of a planned 500 total members on board. Successful applicants can enjoy the club’s amenities, which include regular concerts, lectures and movie screenings, plus Saturday summertime swimming at the Blue Ridge Swim Club.
Outside Vinegar Hall on the ground floor—a members-only co-working space by day, event hall by night—cell phones and computers aren’t permitted, to encourage members to unplug and strike up conversations. The second floor includes a bright, airy tea room and a double-sided wood-burning hearth that provides a faint, pleasant whiff of smoke. The bar, clad in marble and charred wood, shares a clandestine hatch—for discreet food and drink service—with the adjoining Bridge Room. When it’s not a stage for in-house concerts, members can book this small, semi-private space for meetings, board games or LP listening sessions on a vintage hi-fi cabinet with all-new electronics inside. A billiards table, private library and diverse display of local and regional art round out the eclectic, earth-toned space. A central staircase connects all three floors and “borrows light for the center of the building” from the rooftop, Ackerman says.
The roof terrace includes its own bar, a cabana shaded with solar panels that will provide roughly 20 percent of the building’s annual energy needs and a clever oil-derrick sculpture to support and protect the chimney for the hearth below. Neither bar has stools, deliberately. “We don’t want you to post up here and close yourself off,” Pfinsgraff says. “We want you to open yourself up to the club, meet some new people.”
The co-founders hope that Common House will bring members into new social circles and help them make new friends. “We all have the powerful desire to belong, and to connect with other people,” Sieg says.
Now that the challenge of construction is over, Ackerman—a member himself—says he’s particularly looking forward to hanging out on the roof he helped rebuild. Common House “is a neat, kind of quirky collection of things,” he says, “and I think that’s what they hope their membership will be.”
1515, a new student center on the Corner, opened in March. Photo: Stephen Barling
Since its construction in 1896, 1515 University Ave. has been a drugstore, a bookstore, a boarding house, the Cavalier Diner and many more incarnations. The building, which opened in mid-March, now pieces together fragments of all its previous incarnations, giving UVA students a new place on the Corner to call their home away from home.
“From very early on, it’s been a student-centered project,” says James Zehmer, the project manager and one of UVA’s historic preservation managers. In summer 2015, a team of students, many from UVA’s Meriwether Lewis Institute for Citizen Leadership, assembled a plan to revive the former campus bookstore, vacant since 2014. Their idea: an alcohol-free student center that wouldn’t feel like just another building on or near Grounds.
The students “were hands-on with everything,” says lead architect and UVA alum Bob Nalls. He and architectural designer Amanda Mazid worked closely with students on everything from how the spaces would be used to the furniture, flatware and fixtures that fill them.
Photo: Stephen Barling
“It was the type of project where you couldn’t just sit there and design the whole thing and then start working,” Nalls says, “because there was too much that had to be figured out in the field.” UVA crews began to demolish, reinforce and rebuild the interior even as the students worked with Nalls and Mazid to plan out and populate its spaces. If they’d done it the conventional way, Nalls says, “we’d be looking at doing it for next summer.”
The ground floor’s high ceilings and numerous windows create a comfortable study and social space for students, with a stage for musical and other performances at night. Student artwork decorates the walls, and a boutique dessert café, Crumbs on the Corner, serves sweet treats from 5pm until the wee hours.
“I came up with the idea of the dessert bar while brainstorming, based on what I thought the Corner was lacking, but would still draw students in,” says third-year Brittany Hsieh, who drew inspiration from a similar restaurant in her hometown of Richmond.
A prominent open staircase leads to the second floor, once 1920s-era apartments, which now provides open and reservable spaces for students, plus a satellite office for UVA’s career center.
“Our hope as a group was to give the floor an eclectic feel and model each room after a different room in a residential home,” says design team member and fifth-year grad student Dakota Lipscombe. For instance, the studio has mirrored walls for dance and music rehearsals. The mindfulness room’s subtle soundproofing keeps outside noise at bay. In the sunroom, faux boxwood creates a green wall, while the dining room is built around a single long communal table. A garage room, designed as a maker space, offers a chalkboard wall for capturing ideas.
As for the building’s basement, “there was talk of a bowling alley,” Lipscombe says, “but I think the game room worked out much better instead.” Students can play pool, pinball, arcade games or air hockey, watch TV on several large flatscreens, rehearse music in the acoustically isolated back room or just read, sleep or study in a menagerie of couches and chairs. The walls are partly paneled with reclaimed joists sawed out of the floor to make room for the stairwell, lending the space a natural, intimate vibe.
Throughout the building, touches like these connect 1515 to its history. On the ground floor, two different pressed-tin ceilings recall the two stores that once occupied the space. On the top floor, UVA crews tore out interior walls, but filled in the resulting gaps in the floorboards perpendicular to the rest of the planking, to show students where those partitions had been.
The new 1515 proudly shows off its scars, turning those layers of oddities into advantages. “Our vision was that every three or four years, you’ve got a complete change in the student population, and hopefully this building won’t get stale,” Zehmer says. “Hopefully, each class will take it on and give it its own spin.”
“All of it is a little bit of an experiment,” Nalls adds, “and nobody is quite sure exactly how it’ll get used.”
1515, a new student center on the Corner, opened in March.
The new Environmental Studies Academy building accommodates students learning geology, earth science, biology, horticulture, water chemistry and more. Photo: Ansel Olson
It’s tough to squeeze the entire planet into one classroom. But Western Albemarle High School and architects VMDO have come as close as possible with the school’s new Environmental Studies Academy building, which blends indoors and outdoors, classroom and greenhouse.
On a 40-year-old Crozet campus last expanded in the ’90s, “there was just no way we could support and house an academy here without having additional space,” says Adam Mulcahy, the academy’s director since its creation four years ago. Even after refitting a classroom and an old prep room, and spilling out into the hallway between them, the ESA and its students still needed more space.
In 2015, Albemarle County enlisted VMDO’s principal architect, Ken Thacker, to give the ESA a new home. Thacker met with students multiple times to incorporate their feedback, and credits them as its “co-designers.” Mulcahy says students tackled that responsibility enthusiastically, laying out plans and 3-D printing models of their ideas.
“Ultimately,” Thacker says, “we chose a site farther from the high school that locates the greenhouse adjacent to an existing outdoor garden and places the building on the edge of the wooded campus, allowing the ESA to act as a gateway or a threshold to the natural world.”
After a few initial hurdles, the new building went up fast. Mathers Construction of Waynesboro broke ground in fall 2015. Students moved into the greenhouse in late March 2016, and the classroom in late spring.
The ESA building splits its 2,500 square feet evenly between a bright, open classroom and a state-of-the art greenhouse from Indiana-based Winandy. The building faces south to capture the winter sun, with a wall of windows and open-air deck connecting students to nature. “It makes the space feel so much bigger than it actually is,” Mulcahy says.
Photo: Ansel Olson
Clear lines of sight let a teacher at the front of the classroom simultaneously monitor students in the greenhouse, on the deck and in the garden below. Mulcahy says the space is built for collaboration: “It facilitates kids in small groups or pods working all over the place.”
With high-tech climate controls, the greenhouse can support nearly any project students choose—tilapia one season, tomatoes the next, for example. “We’re not a business that’s just pumping out green peppers,” Mulcahy says. “We’re changing from season to season and year to year.”
In its third year of instruction, the ESA comprises 105 students, with plans for a full cohort of 160-175 by year five. Freshmen study geology, geography and earth science. Sophomores learn biology and horticulture. Juniors delve into soil and water chemistry and environmental studies. Next year, Mulcahy will add law, policy and literature, teaching the ESA’s first senior class on environmental ethics and stewardship. “I want my kids to be a lot more aware, and to be more conscientious citizens,” he says.
The new Environmental Studies Academy building was made to keep growing. Its design can accommodate potential future expansions on its north and west sides. One day, Mulcahy hopes, even the parking lot between the school and the new building will become another garden for students to tend.
For now, each class adds new beds, fencing or infrastructure to the existing garden, planting seeds—literal and otherwise—for the students who’ll follow them. The more students participate in the process of building the ESA and shaping its future, Mulcahy says, the more they’re invested in it. Like the new building itself, “it wasn’t something that just showed up,” he says. “It was something that they’ve helped create.”
The new Environmental Studies Academy building accommodates students learning geology, earth science, biology, horticulture, water chemistry and more.
