MARET program director steps down at Crowder

Solar has been a long-time focus for MARET Program Director Dan Eberle.

While his focus will remain the same, the location will change as Eberle heads to the Kansas City area to take a job at Johnson County Community College. As a solar instructor, he will build their new solar program from the ground up. It will be the second time he’s been in on the ground floor of a renewable energy program.

“If you’re forming a menu it seems appropriate to make solar the baseline,” Eberle said.  

Accessing wind or hydropower can be more difficult, but solar, Eberle said, holds appeal because do-it-yourselfers can set up a system.

“For me solar is like the foundation in energy recipes,” he said. “Almost everybody, everywhere, everyday has access to solar.”

The Southwest Missouri area, Eberle said, is full of independently minded people who are willing to do things themselves – that, he said, widens the appeal of solar. He took up an interest in it because he wanted to be more independent.

In high school, he completed projects about the problems of landfills and solid waste. The hippie aura of the era influenced him, but growing up in a poor Missouri family that squeezed every last drop out of what they had access to was the stronger pull to energy stewardship.

Eberle graduated from Crowder in 1973, but in the late 1970s he was back to take a class in solar energy from Art Boyt that jump-started his passion. In 1980-1983, Eberle was an adjunct at the college and from 1989-1992 he did hundreds of energy assemblies and took the solar car to schools around the area as part of a National Science Foundation Grant. By the time they reach the college arena, Eberle said, most people have their mindset formed. He wants to see a strong focus in bringing alternative energy education to young people, in part because of his background in elementary education.

He joined the faculty in 2006 and has been faculty adviser for solar house projects and solar cars. When Boyt retired in 2008 he became program director.

The alternative energy programs at Crowder has grown in the past couple of years, Eberle attributes part of that to the political environment.

“I’ve been around here at a very opportune time to help guide those programs to the point that we have national status,” he said.

He came to Crowder with the idea of building the program and the MARET center. Detailed plans exist for the center and money has been appropriated. Red tape has held up construction, but he is hopeful it will be built soon.

“The MARET center here, the ideas that go into it have been something that we’ve been working on for 20 years,” Eberle said. “To move on before the building is actually started – it’s bittersweet for sure.”

He hopes to see a national push for energy efficiency. The first step is conservation, renewable energy sources come second and conventional power sources are OK, but not in excess.

“If we put our national interests toward solving energy issues we can,” Eberle said.
Developed nations are, in a way, victims of comfort – the comfort of carpooling, perfect temperature control.

“If you look around the world the degree of comfort – at least by our definition of comfort – does not seem to impact the degree of happiness,” he said. “We consume so much that at some point there has to be either that we do without or that we find another energy source.”

It starts, he says, with people living it. Eberle lives in an off-the-grid solar house, where he installed the solar system. He is seeing some people coming around and energy downsizing. Not that they are giving up comfort, but getting rid of excess.

“We don’t want to be inconvenienced, myself included,” he said.

Although he is moving, Eberle said he will still visit the area. The college has already talked with him about the possibility of partner programs as the MARET program Eberle invested so much of his life in moves closer to fruition.

“We’re going to miss him,” college president Alan Marble said, “We wish him well.”

The move will put him closer to his parents and his children, who live in the area.

“My roots have always been here and I think that this is where I’ll end up,” Eberle said of Neosho. “I’ve been a lot of other places and there’s not another place I’d rather live.”