From saving pucks to saving the planet: Rangers legend Mike Richter is flourishing as an “unlikely environmentalist”

Thirty years ago in June, the New York Rangers defeated the Vancouver Canucks in a decisive game seven, winning the Stanley Cup and ending a then-record 54-year championship drought.

The ensuing ticker-tape parade on June 17, 1994, is remembered as the opening act of one of the wildest days in sports news history – one that included the commencement of the FIFA World Cup, game five of the NBA Finals between the Rockets and Knicks, Arnold Palmer’s final round at the U.S. Open, and Ken Griffey Jr. tying Babe Ruth’s record for most home runs before June 30; not to mention O.J. Simpson’s highway Bronco chase.

For goaltender Mike Richter, a core component of that Rangers team and its literal backstop, hoisting Lord Stanley’s Cup was a dream come true.

“You’re living like a monk. Watch film, go to sleep, get up, practice, play a game, repeat,” Richter explains.
“And then one day, boom, the season’s over. You don’t have to worry about what you eat, where you’re sleeping, if you sleep. And we had a great deal of fun, you know, sharing that with the city, as you say.”

“It’s amazing because you win that as an entire organization,” he recalls. “There are people behind the scenes everywhere, but the biggest people behind the scenes are the town that you represented. New York is written across your chest.”

That ’94 Cup was the pinnacle of Richter’s Hall of Fame-caliber career; one unexpectedly cut short a decade later after he suffered a skull fracture and brain injury.

“I had a really enjoyable career,” Richter reflects. “But I think you’re a little lost when you first retire.”

“You’ve become that thing you’ve always wanted to become. Your focus is better, your capabilities are at their peak, but your body starts to run out of runway.”

If Richter was lost, he has since been found. The president of Brightcore Energy has gone on to enjoy a renewable energy career longer than his previous one; that’s not too shabby, considering the 14 years of NHL action on his resume. Instead of focusing on saving pucks, Mike is now dedicated to saving the planet- one building efficiency measure at a time.

Starting a second career

“When you get done playing, you feel like you’re 1,000 years old,” Richter laughs.

That might feel especially true for a recent retiree spending his newfound free time on college campuses.

When Richter left the University of Wisconsin-Madison to represent the United States in the 1988 Olympic Games, he made a bargain with himself to one day return to school and finish his degree. During his pro career as a New York Ranger (before kids entered the equation), he’d take summer classes at Cornell and Columbia to stay sharp.

“I felt that was a really healthy way to kind of break the stress and cut the cord from last year,” Richter recalls.

After hanging up his skates, he resumed his education at Yale, ultimately earning a long-awaited BA in ethics, politics, and economics with a focus on environmental policy.

“I was 36 or 37 and once or twice mistaken for the professor,” Richter remembers. “More for the hairline rather than what I contributed in class, I can guarantee you that.”

“But that was an amazing experience,” he adds.

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“I loved what I was doing. I’d still be playing if I could, but I love the idea of having a second career and a new way of learning about yourself, and in this case, maybe helping make the world a bit better.”

– Mike Richter, president of Brightcore Energy on a second career

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The odd man in the arena

It’s commonly understood in hockey circles that plenty of goalies are odd ducks.

I would know, I was one myself. Although we couldn’t afford ice time growing up, I have always been a hockey player: in backyards, basements, and kitchens; on rollerskates, sneakers, or barefoot; in a garage, at sports courts, or on the carpet with mini-sticks- count me in. Mike Richter was one of the dudes I pretended to be in my neighbor’s driveway while my brother and I were smashing his vinyl siding with errant tennis ball shots.

The reasoning behind the apparent weirdness is simple enough: goalies play a unique, isolated position in a team sport that requires being repeatedly struck with a chunk of frozen rubber. You do that for a while and let me know if it loosens a couple of screws – if they were all tightened to begin with.

“I don’t know if you can ever take that out of you,” ponders Richter. “Maybe just weirdos are attracted to the position? Or does the position make you one? It’s a bit of a chicken and the egg story.”

“Even now I get that comment sometimes, where something a little bit odd would come up,” Brightcore’s president confesses. “And the response is just a knowing nod, going: Goalie.”

During his time with the Rangers, that goalie was likelier to spend his downtime exploring intellectual curiosities than causing trouble. He was fascinated by nonfiction books about resource depletion and the insatiable demand for energy in the first and third world. Such interests might have made him seem boring to teammates, but that reading changed the way Richter looked at the rest of the world.

“I was resource efficient. Other people would just call it plain old cheap,” he chuckles.

Richter admits he probably gained a few pounds after ’94, thanks to Rangers fans generously offering an extra New York slice (or two) when he was out and about.

“I was once told that I never met a free meal I didn’t like,” he says with a smile.

Richter attributes that to having a mother who grew up during the Great Depression.

“She turned out lights while you were still in them,” he jokes.

Resource-conscious behaviors became ingrained at an early age, and Richter has since felt an ethical responsibility to help those among us who don’t have reliable access to food, clothing, or an adequately warm or cool place to sleep. Once his playing career was over, he began to find ways to take action.

An unlikely environmentalist?

Richter says he has joined a lot of boards. He’s not talking about constructing hockey rinks- more like sitting on the advisory kind.

Riverkeeper stands out amongst his favorites- he gushes over the beauty of the West River (and the need to protect it) during our conversation.

“That river is amazing to watch!” Richter raves. “The flows in the wintertime- and it’s an estuary and all these cool things- but also, it’s got an amazing history, you know, it’s the Mississippi of the East! It’s 300 miles long, and you get the sturgeon spawn 1000’s of miles away.”

Richter’s palpable passion for conservation once caught the eye of another board member, who called him an “unlikely environmentalist.”

“I always thought that was such a curious thought, because: A) What does one look like? and B) Who the hell isn’t, when you really think about it?” he questions.

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“I mean, who doesn’t want fresh air, fresh water, and abundant resources for themselves, for their kids, and for their community? I tend to think we get this overplayed thing where it’s just not a political issue.”

– Mike Richter, president of Brightcore Energy on environmentalism

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Richter argues you don’t need to be an athlete to appreciate having a clean environment. He borrows an axiom attributed to Nike co-founders Bill Bowerman and Phil Knight: if you have a body, you’re an athlete.

“I say: If you breathe, you’re an environmentalist,” Richter quips. “So everybody has a stake in getting this right.”

“It’s a moment in time that’s increasingly more dire, and it can’t be ignored- eight billion people with seemingly unlimited demand for limited resources.”

Building a better environment by bettering buildings

Richter started his second career at a private equity shop downtown in New York City, investing in electronic waste recycling and brownfield management. The firm washed out during the economic downturn of the late aughts, leading him to start Healthy Planet Partners, a small solar company focusing on industrial buildings. It represented a pivot into project finance- underwriting projects rather than underwriting a service provided by someone else. It felt like a natural fit.

“Basically, Brightcore Energy is that concept on steroids,” the company’s president explains. “The two guys who found it (Rob Krugel and Konstantin Braun) were structured finance guys on Wall Street. I needed that financial acumen. I don’t have the financial background like they do, and really, I think that’s one of the real differentiators. You can have that cutting-edge technology, but you better make sure these things are underwritten properly.”

He sees the current landscape as rife with opportunity, including plenty of proven, off-the-shelf technologies ready to deploy as soon as we can accommodate the velocity and scale necessary to solve our problems. That’s where the capital markets come in.

“Our entire country was built by entrepreneurs who made a better mousetrap, and it moves society along,” Richter asserts. “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.”

“Why has Tesla got such traction in the marketplace?” Richter asks rhetorically. “That car is a better car than what it’s replacing. It’s got fewer moving parts, it needs less maintenance, and I can upgrade that thing in my garage overnight.”

“There’s range anxiety, and all the things that come with new technologies,” he admits. “There are hurdles we have to get over. It’s not perfect, but it’s got a low center of gravity and can beat a Ferrari off the line.”

Brightcore’s goal is decarbonizing the schools, multi-family homes, and businesses that account for about a third of our overall carbon footprint. In dense urban settings like Manhattan, Richter says buildings can be responsible for as much as 70% of greenhouse gases, and most of those structures aren’t going anywhere anytime soon.

“You have to upgrade the operating systems of these buildings,” Richter proclaims. “And that’s precisely what we do.”

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Brightcore operates in three primary verticals: lighting, solar, and geothermal HVAC. The company’s president calls the latter the “real elephant in the room,” as heating and cooling comprise 60-80% of a structure’s energy load.

“We can change everybody’s lightbulbs out, but we’re just not hitting our marks in terms of carbon diminishment,” he laments.

That doesn’t mean the LED conversion is complete- far from it. Richter says he’s working with the New York Power Authority to modernize lighting in school systems, police precincts, and other city government facilities. But that’s exactly why Brightcore exists. Without a chunk of upfront capital to purchase LEDs, many building managers seem perfectly content leaving functional lightbulbs in place- ultimately never realizing the savings promised by energy efficiency measures.

“You look at some of these buildings and their works of art,” Richter details. “They’re hip inside, they’re a cool place to live and work, but they’re incredibly inefficient. These aren’t just affordable housing somewhere in the Bronx. These are high-end buildings, but they’re not performing particularly well.”

Brightcore’s president is most excited about the potential of ground-source heat pumps, which are often lumped in alongside “geothermal” technologies, but are distinct from the deep boreholes more common out West. The ones he’s working with are closed-loop systems that use a water-based coolant to transfer BTUs from a building to the earth or vice versa, depending on whether you want to heat or cool the structure. It’s not dissimilar from what happens when you wrap a warm hand around a cold glass.

“Utilities love it because we’re shaving off those enormous peak flows,” Richter beams.

He marvels over the intersection of art and science that comprise such efficient systems and wishes they had greater market penetration. It turns out it’s not often easy to find a good spot for a massive bore field in the average urban environment, but Brightcore’s president sees opportunity via innovation.

“We’re taking some very specific technology from Europe, where they’re probably a few decades ahead of us, being able to drill on angles in very tight spots and truly underneath buildings,” Richter explains. “Small perforations at the surface, enormous thermal mass down below. Right into the bedrock of Manhattan.”

Richter raves over the benefits. The pumps are efficient. They save money. They’re quiet. The ambient indoor temperature is more consistent. The people inside the building, often an afterthought, are content.

“They are not just better for the spotted owl in the environment,” he jokes.

“It’s not a win-win situation- Brightcore gets money and the owner gets money- it’s like five W’s because the communities are better off. The utilities are better off because you’re modulating with efficiency and that can dampen the upward pressure of pricing on a kilowatt-hour basis. Globally, you have less carbon in the atmosphere… There are a lot of wins there.”

Winning as a team

When an NHL team wins the Stanley Cup, it’s customary that each player and coach gets a day with the trophy. They can take it anywhere and do pretty much anything, and if you can imagine it, it has probably already been done.

“You could bring that thing to a retirement home and it would be a rager,” the former New York Rangers goalie laughs.

On his day with the Cup, Richter started his evening at a “quiet dinner,” which led to an appearance at a bachelorette party, and eventually devolved into “a conga line down in Greenwich Village.”

“I was hailing a cab the next morning,” Richter recalls. “And there’s no case, you just have the Stanley Cup. I’m holding it and hailing a cab, and a guy walks by and goes: ‘Is that…?’ I was like, yeah.”

“It was a perfectly sunny day and here’s some moron walking down the street with a giant trophy.”

The man didn’t care to meet one of the most famous athletes in New York City at the time. He just asked to touch the Cup.

“He put his hands on it like it was a little baby,” Richter remembers. “New Yorkers, for all their reputation about being hardos – and they are- they are amazing. And they’re amazingly respectful at the right time, too.”

Richter still gets recognized, but just like in his playing days, that’s not why he gets up in the morning. He’s happy to contribute to a meaningful goal as a part of a larger unit, regardless of accolades. Now instead of chasing the Cup, he’s taking a side in the resource wars he used to read about on flights between games. Perhaps even more than in his playing days, it’s a team sport.

“Do what you’re capable of doing, your piece of the puzzle. You’re not the whole damn picture,” he pontificates. “Do (your job) well, and other people thrive. We hire great people. Use your talent, and I’ll get out of the way! I always had that trust on any team, inside an arena or out.”

“I know when I’m contributing or not to my company,” Richter continues. “And I know how important the stakes are. So I don’t need a ticker tape parade, I just need success as a company.”

“But I think we as a society need many, many more Brightcores to do this,” he adds. “Because the scale of these issues is so overwhelmingly large that it could keep you from getting up and going to work in the morning. But If you really think about it, the odds are no different than thinking about playing in the NHL. The odds are against you, but you cannot think about that. You have to go out there and do your piece.”

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One last thing…

As you can probably tell if you’ve read this far, it was a lot of fun for me personally to have this conversation with Mike Richter. I had plenty to ask him, and he gave me thoughtful, well-spoken responses to just about everything I could come up with.

The last thing I asked him about wasn’t intended to be for Renewable Energy World – it was just for me – but I’ll include it here for our readers who share my passion for pucks.

If you could’ve fought any goalie you played against, who would you have dropped the gloves with?

“Everybody wanted to fight (Ron) Hextall because he was kind of the standard bearer,” Richter immediately replies. “I watched him as a kid and then ended up playing against him. He’s only a couple of years older.”

“But I always felt like if they’re relying on me to beat somebody up, I’ve not done my job stopping it too well,” he adds. “I think my last real fight was in fourth grade, and I’ve tried to keep that undefeated record.”