Last week our team was proud to see Groom Energy’s name again included on the Inc. 5000 Fastest Growing Companies list, this for our third year in a row.

Last week our annual Red Sox outing came close to being washed out.  The first pitch was thrown with threatening clouds over Fenway, while our iPhones lit up with tornado warnings for Greater Boston.  But we lucked out and the game played on uninterrupted, although the last place Sox did avoid the win.

Steam has long been an efficient way for manufacturing plants to deliver predictable, even heating to their production lines.  Typically our customers use medium pressure steam in food processing, as an input for metal or rubber manufacturing or to purify vapor streams in the production of chemicals.

Last week’s annual LightFair conference was the fifth since the show turned into LEDFair back in 2010. At that event, for the first time, more than half of the show’s 450 vendors were displaying LED products. This year virtually all 500+ vendors in the Javitz Center were LED-centric.

Both Juno and Deflategate hit Greater Boston hard this past week.  Fortunately we’ve dug ourselves out of Juno – but we’re still buried in the Patriots’ mess.

This year we flew the whole Groom Energy field engineering team to Las Vegas for LightFair, the 25th annual lighting industry show.  While Vegas is a fun location for our team meeting, our real plan was to conduct an LED scavenger hunt, sending our engineers onto LightFair’s 500+ vendor filled exhibit hall in search of the latest, coolest LED lighting technologies.

On a recent plant visit our engineers followed a rumbling noise from a backroom to discover a large air compressor running flat out.  The 300 horsepower (HP) system was pushing 100psi air to a set of production lines located at the other end of the facility.  Serious industrial production stuff.

Last week I attended EDF/Citibank’s 3rd Energy Efficiency Financeconference in NYC.  Since their inaugural event a few years ago this conference has always provided a good gauge on the market’s rate of progress.

During World War II energy security meant access to oil for our fighting troops.  Years later the 1970′s oil crisis highlighted our supply risk with the Middle East.

Like for many businesses, end of year is a busy time at Groom Energy.   Our engineering team is scrambling to satisfy utilities’ requirements, our back office is beginning year-end closing and our customers are pushing us to complete projects with budgets that disappear if unused.