A few days ago, a tanker truck worked its way up my driveway and plugged into my propane tank. About a thousand dollars later, it pulled away and slipped off to make its next delivery.

Nothing newsworthy there. That’s typically how most fuels are delivered either to a home or a gas station. But Steve Cowell and Conservation Services Group, the firm he runs in Massachusetts, have long had a different vision for fuel delivery. CSG focuses on energy efficiency and, as Ashok Gupta, Director of NRDC’s Energy Program says, “CSG is one of the best at delivering energy efficiency, especially in the affordable housing sector."

“Delivering energy efficiency” is a new term for most of us and it can be a mind twister. The idea is that by making our homes more efficient, we can, in effect, give ourselves fuel. At very low cost. Instead of megawatts, some describe fuel efficiency as delivering negawatts or creating fuel from nothing.

I recently spoke with Steve, who is a member of Environmental Entrepreneurs, a national community of individual business leaders who, working closely with NRDC, advocate for good environmental policy while building economic prosperity. Like many of us, he's focused on the current recession and what it will take to revive the economy.

Steve traces much of the current economic turmoil to the energy prices that soared last year. “The housing crisis,” he said, “was begat by the energy crisis.”

“Energy prices pushed homeowners over the edge,” Steve explained, adding that he fears what could come next after the Obama Administration and Congress begin to pump money into the economy. “As we get out of a recession, energy prices are going to go up again,” he said. “We need to lop off the next spike. We can’t allow our economy to lurch from recession to an over-heated state.”

One way to get stability, Steve said, is through better energy policies. And one way to get to better energy policy is through energy efficiency.

Steve says that delivering efficiency – taking steps to weatherproof homes offices, install better insulation, smart thermostats and energy-sipping appliances – is equivalent to putting an oil rig in every front yard. “Compare efficiency to drilling,” he wrote in a recent Huffington Post blog, “and it's clear that we can save more oil by insulating and weatherizing homes in the Northeast than we could ever produce by drilling in the entire outer Continental shelf.”

And at a fraction of the cost. With the economic benefits accruing here in the United States as opposed to the Middle East or Venezuela. One of the most interesting things about CSG and others like it is that they are hiring. “Our workforce has increased 30 percent this year,” Steve said. “Fifty jobs in the last two months. And many of them are refugees from the construction trades.”

After talking with Steve – and getting that propane bill -- we went on a bit of an efficiency tear in our house. We covered some of our draftier windows, bought gaskets for our electrical outlets and unplugged a VCR that hasn’t been used in years. I put my home office on power strips so that when I’m done working, I hit one switch and everything powers down, including my new and adored printer/scanner/fax.

Sitting at my desk talking with Steve, I realized how idiotic and wasteful we’ve been about energy. I’m optimistic that increasing numbers of us – from regular folks like me to our new President, state and business leaders across the country -- are coming to that same realization. In fact, I’m pretty sure that smart energy will be the story of the early part of this century. The technology is there, the political will is increasing and as a people, we’re ready. Very ready.