New York Rangers fans (myself included) can wax poetic about the legend of Mike Richter. The American goalie was one of the heroes of the New York Rangers’ 1994 Stanley Cup triumph.
Richter played 15 seasons in the National Hockey League and was a member of the USA Hockey team. After retiring from the NHL in 2002, Richter went on a long journey to determine his next steps. Today, he serves as the president of Brightcore Energy.
He recently gave an interview with Renewable Energy World, explaining how, during his playing career, he would take summer classes at Cornell and Columbia. Richter kept his education going after retiring from hockey, pursuing a bachelor’s in ethics, politics, and economics with a focus on environmental policy. He said he would stay updated with current events and intellectual discussions during his playing career, which he spent entirely with the Rangers.
His second career began after working in private equity in New York City. He invested in electronic waste and brownfield management.
After the 2008 financial crisis, Richter started Healthy Planet Partners, a small solar energy provider. It would serve as the foundation of Brightcore. He found two Wall Street backers, Rob Krugel and Konstantin Braun, to get the financial backing for his firm.
Photo Courtesy Brightcore Energy
“Our entire country was built by entrepreneurs who made a better mousetrap, and it moves society along,” he said in the Renewable Energy World interview. “That creative destruction that comes with the iPhone taking out the landline, the Uber taking out taxis. Maybe if you own Uber, you get wealthy, but society is better.”
Brightcore, based in Westchester County, New York, specializes in commercial and residential solar panel set-up, geothermal heating and cooling, energy storage, and smart building programming.
The company also offers electric vehicle charging and LED lighting installation. It has several successful projects throughout the New York metropolitan area, showing how much businesses and families can save with solar and energy storage.
Richter’s influence has shifted attention to hockey rinks. The sport is water- and energy-intensive when it comes to rink laying. Brightcore is working with Signify, an NHL partner, to bring LED energy-efficient lighting to community ice rinks. The lights lower energy use in ice facilities while still providing the exciting experience hockey brings to fans.
“Any form of waste inefficiencies — actually anything under maximum performance — makes reaching potential impossible,” Richter said about the lightning partnership with Signify.
Richter is most excited about Geothermal solutions. Brightcore is investing heavily in ground-source heat pumps. He’s working on closed-loop systems that use water-based coolants. The process is supposed to deliver significant heat to buildings from the earth.
Fortune 500 companies have tapped Brightcore’s services in recent years. JetBlue contracted Brightcore to update the airline’s Terminal 5 at John F. Kennedy International Airport.
LED lighting was the main focus of this deal, with the lights set to save more than 2.1 million kWh annually.
Richter was also featured on a White House roundtable with Michael S. Regan, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, former NHLers Andrew Ference and Patrice Bergeron, and current San Jose Sharks defenseman Mario Ferraro.
He also is a member of NHL Green, the league’s eco-friendly hockey campaign. NHL Green has focused heavily on making rink management more sustainable, being the amount of water and energy needed to layer and maintain skating ice.
Video Courtesy NHL
Richter believes athletes should be more vocal about environmental issues. The environment plays a role in a hockey player’s upbringing. And most young hockey players have played on an outdoor rink at some point. But, outdoor rinks are losing commonality due to the climate crisis.
However, athletes like runners and track stars have to deal with air pollution; skiers and snowboarders are losing days of the year to hit the powder; and crippling heat is forcing golf courses to use more water to maintain fairways and greens. Advocating for sustainability is not something athletes should shy away from.
“You think about an athlete in terms of just the air that you breathe, the water that you drink, it’s really the environment in which you live,” Richter wrote in an op-ed for NHL.com. “If you have a polluted environment, it’s going to affect your health and ultimately your performance. You see this overlap in sports and the environment all the time.”
