Mike Richter spent more than a decade playing professional hockey with the New York Rangers.
Now he’s the president of Brightcore Energy, a company that specializes in clean energy and energy efficiency updates for buildings.
He says those two careers are not as different as they sound.
“Everything you do as an athlete is based on efficiency and performance,” he says.
Now Richter is connecting his two careers even more directly.
Brightcore is partnering with the National Hockey League to install energy-efficient LED lighting in community ice rinks across the country.
Richter says that conventional bulbs use more energy. And they produce heat, which is counterproductive when you are trying to keep an ice rink frozen.
“So you may have 120 toaster ovens up on your roof, basically, while you’re trying to keep the surface area below 30,” he says.
But LED lighting uses less energy and stays cooler.
So switching to LEDs can help ice rinks lower their energy bills. And Richter says it can also set an example for the community about the importance of improving energy efficiency.
“Sports is such a great tool to change people’s idea of how we work in society, what the status quo is,” he says. “And we need to change the status quo.”
Reporting credit: Ethan Freedman/ChavoBart Digital Media