It was two weeks into Jimmy Carter's presidency in 1977 that the Georgian donned a sweater on national television and said there was a permanent energy shortage so we should all turn down our thermostats.

Helen Perrine is still trying to repair the damage done by that speech.

Americans don't want to sit around in the cold waiting for summer to come, said Mrs. Perrine, executive director of Affordable Comfort Inc., of Waynesburg, Greene County, a nonprofit organization dedicated to using less energy in homes.

Since the 1980s, Mrs. Perrine has been trying to convince people that they can be comfortable in their own homes and still use less energy.

This summer, Mrs. Perrine, 65, who lives in Washington Township, announced she would be retiring in August 2010. The announcement has people in private industry and the government hoping a successor will be able to pull together the kinds of constituencies that she has turned into unnatural allies within the field.

It was just a couple of summer ago, when green energy was starting to come into the nation's consciousness that Mrs. Perrine looked a step beyond everyone else, said Larry Zarker, CEO of Building Performances Institute in Washington, D.C.

"When we started talking 'green,' she started talking about green work-force development and what that means," he said. "She was thinking out ahead of us. She's not the policy person; what she does is pull everyone together to make sure we get it right."

Mr. Zarker said Mrs. Perrine had been such an important force in the residential energy efficiency industry, that she was selected for the Building Performance Industry Hall of Fame in April.

She is known at all levels of government and industry, said David Lee, who oversees the Energy Star program at the Environmental Protection Agency in Washington, D.C. "She's this stable force."

Mrs. Perrine does not jump out and say what needs to be done, he said. Instead, her accomplishments tend to come by working in the background, bringing key players together.

"At big meetings she is really quiet until something really needs to be spoken," Mr. Lee said.

"I think of Helen as knitting together all of the different threads that come together in the energy conservation and home performance communities," said Tom White, the publisher of Home Energy Magazine, a nonprofit publication about residential energy use and conservation. "She's a real community builder, an activist and to some degree a good politician who gets things done."

Through those years Mrs. Perrine has pulled the industry together -- both in terms of making sure professionals received the education they needed and in terms of networking so scientists have a chance to talk to people who work in the field -- at the annual Affordable Comfort conference held every April and at various smaller conferences sponsored by the nonprofit group.

Because of her, Mr. White said, "People are more cognizant that homes are emitting more greenhouse gases than their cars."

Mrs. Perrine is quick to say she is no expert in energy efficiency or how to make a house work better. But through the years, she has learned, including that for $5,000 the average house in Pennsylvania can undergo an energy makeover that will significantly save money on heating and electricity use.

Early attempts at making homes more energy efficient caused new problems as they solved others, such as venting the dryer to the house, which captured the heat but also captured the moisture and caused mold. "We super-insulated homes and didn't know we had to ventilate them," she said.

"Canada really invented the phrase 'house as a system,'" she said.

Mr. Zarker said the home energy industry came to understand that not only is a house a system but that there are subsystems in that system. That thinking, Mrs. Perrine said, has led to new thinking on energy use and making sure housing is as healthy as it is comfortable.

Mr. White said studies had found is that it is more cost effective to have consumers save energy in their daily lives than it is to build more factories to meet new energy needs. The term for community solutions, he said, is "negawatts."

"What she's done is create negawatt power plants," he said, meaning that through her conservation efforts Mrs. Perrine has eliminated the need for more power generation.

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