It takes about 20 gallons of water a week to keep our thirsty Fresh Energy employees hydrated. Where did all that water come from? From nine, five-gallon plastic jugs that were driven here every other week by a very nice delivery man. These jugs happily came and went without a thought every week for years until one day our executive director asked me why we were contributing to the privatization of water. I didn't have an answer for him.

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April showers bring May flowers, turning all young lovers' minds to thoughts of energy. No? Water and energy are more closely connected than you might think...in fact, conserving one saves the other.

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Last week, I blogged about New Zealand's birds. I had visited an island sanctuary where several near-extinct birds had been introduced. Today, I went to a museum in Auckland, and saw stuffed birds in glass cases--one I saw in the wild yesterday that seems to have made it and escaped extinction, one that hovers at the precipice, and one that is gone.

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Today we went to Tiritiri Matangi with our group of Midwest college students studying sustainability and policy in New Zealand. We hiked the trails (or tramped the tracks as Kiwis say) with a volunteer for the Supporters of Tiritiri Matangi, an island sanctuary that is an exemplar of a conservation and restoration project. Olga, a opthamology nurse in Auckland, was our guide. She spoke with great demonstrative gestures and a joie de vivre revealing a true excitement for the conservation efforts on the island. We saw New Zealand birds that were once well on their way to extinction and now were faring well. Tiritiri Matangi is small dot of land in the ocean, situated off the eastern coast of Auckland, NZ. It is one of the world's pioneering habitat restoration projects, with over 300,000 trees planted and several species of endangered birds re-introduced by hundreds of volunteers in partnership with the New Zealand Department of Conservation.

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Every four years, the Minnesota Department of Commerce's Office of Energy Security is required to issue the State Energy Policy and Conservation Report, or "Quad Report." The Quad Report describes the state's energy system, its structure, costs, and environmental impacts. The 2008 report, released September 15, identifies energy reliability as the administration's energy policy going forward, which is defined as focusing on utility operations, investment in electric transmission, power quality and service standards, and economics. It makes a general nod toward community renewable energy development as well. While it's certainly a good background explanation of the energy system in the state, as are earlier quad reports, it spends only three pages on energy conservation, which belies its name and primary reason for being.

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