Nine local innovations are sowing seeds for the future

Throughout Nashville's history, there have always been small operations that produced big ideas. Our peaceful, well-organized lunch-counter sit-ins during the Civil Rights movement were so effective that they were adapted all across the South. Our countrypolitan Nashville Sound helped pump commercial life back into country music, and gave pop some down-home soul in the bargain.

Still, Nashville's not typically one of the first cities that comes to mind when you hear the term "cutting edge." At times, we've been frustratingly slow to adopt more progressive approaches, whether to immigration issues, music-distribution models or downtown redevelopment.

Today, though, Middle Tennessee has a surprising number of unheralded innovators—forward-thinkers who are tweaking, leading and finessing the competition in their respective fields. With little fanfare, they have made the area home to several firsts on many fronts: health care, energy conservation, medicine, education, technology, science.

Sometimes they're just seminal accomplishments for Nashville, such as the city's first green-certified eatery. But others are nationwide achievements, like the Mercy Clinic in Franklin, the country's first medical home for chronically ill children.

Though it would have been easy to find nine innovations at Vanderbilt University alone—the university's doctors, researchers and scientists seem to generate groundbreaking ideas every five minutes—the Scene scoured the city for breakthroughs from both institutions and individuals capable of reaching past Tennessee's mountains to the coasts beyond.

These innovators embrace being the first to invest in what others see as time-consuming, high-risk—and often high-cost—change. In the end, however, they are pioneers—all building a smarter, greener, more advanced community, one good idea at a time.

BRIGHT BUT LITE
Organization: Metrolight
Location: Franklin, Tenn.

If you've ever scrutinized a scrambled play during a nighttime NFL game or been grateful for a well-lit parking lot, you've literally basked in the glow of high-intensity discharge lighting. That's the technical term for the powerful lights used to illuminate city streets, stadiums, industrial warehouses and Wal-Marts. But what rarely occurs to the average Joe is the staggering amount of electricity required to run these incandescent goliaths.

"There are something like half a billion of these HID light bulbs out there," explains Peter Revesz, general manager for Franklin-based engineering company Metrolight. "They look almost like an oversized light bulb. And they consume about 6 percent of the energy produced worldwide. Every 15th or 16th power station is in service to power these light bulbs."

That 6 percent is a greedy drain on energy. It's nearly a quarter of the light-related electricity used all over the world, helping produce emissions on par with two-thirds of the globe's automobiles. And half of those HID lights are used in outdoor lighting that never gets switched off.

"As you fly over the country in an airplane and look out the window, you see a tremendous amount of lights, and they're running at 100 percent—even at 1 a.m.," says Revesz. "There's no need for that. You want a certain amount of light for safety, of course, but if you're running at 100 percent all the time, it's just inefficient."

So Metrolight perfected technology capable of cutting that worldwide energy use in half. Its instrument is a high-powered, more efficient light bulb that lasts twice as long and lights twice as brightly. What's more, a communications interface can tailor its output to peak usage hours, saving energy when nobody's around.

As word of Metrolight's product spread throughout the green movement, ears pricked up. Among those impressed was Sir Richard Branson, the Virgin exec and billionaire adventurer. He devoted serious coin to Metrolight through his Virgin Green Fund. The U.S. Department of Energy followed, honoring the company with its coveted Energy Innovator Award last November. Today Metrolight corners the world market with their patented control-system technology.

"What we offer is a 50-percent-plus reduction in the usage of energy, so now, every other one of those power stations can power something else," Revesz says. Since a typical Metrolight installation saves 300,000 kWh a year—enough to run 30 homes, take 26 vehicles off the road and spare 75 acres of forest—that something else could be the first step in a sustainable future.

EATING GREEN
Organization: tayst Restaurant
Location: Nashville, Tenn.

Imagine, for a moment, that you own your own restaurant. It's not difficult to list some changes you'd make to soften your carbon footprint: use local ingredients, lay off the Styrofoam, use soy and beeswax candles (no carcinogen-releasing paraffin) and install low-flow toilets. Oh, and screw in some of those swirly energy-efficient light bulbs.

But that's just a potato peel in the bucket under the rigorous standards of the Green Restaurant Association, the Boston nonprofit certification company that has become the arbiter for green conduct. Its stamp of approval guarantees you won't be accused of dishonest dabbling or "greenwashing"—a flourishing problem in this unregulated market, where companies routinely boast green features that do little to reduce waste or energy consumption.

Getting that certification, though, means meeting a checklist 14 pages long. Then there's the little matter of running a top-flight dining destination—spending hours searching for products and ingredients that satisfy those standards while meeting a chef's exacting tastes, not to mention a diner's.