We look forward to seeing you in Atlanta for a terrific 2009 FIRST Championship! We would like to invite you to make some time on Thursday to attend a presentation by Dan Sitarz as part of the FIRST Robotics Conference. Dan is the author of a book titled “Greening your Business.” Dan has graciously offered his help to FIRST to create a new fundraiser project that will give FRC teams the chance to become Energy Auditors, and hopefully give teams another way to be sustainable from year to year.
Dan will be presenting some training materials and will discuss the initial planning stages of this new project. We hope you can attend and offer input on this exciting fundraising opportunity. Dan will present on Thursday at 11 AM. at the Georgia World Congress Center, room # 204. We are looking forward to seeing you and hearing your thoughts as FIRST prepares to go “Green.”
Mark:
Is Dan’s presentation available after Atlanta? It is a great concept to educate our students in how to apply an education and make $ as well.
Footnote:
I am an Architect and renovated my office in Lancaster, CA. and achieved a LEED silver rating. Dan is looking in the right direction.
Only Dan knows for sure, but I imagine since this will be open to all FRC teams, even the one’s not at Championship, that there will be further communication from FIRST & Dan as this opportunity develops.
I missed Dan’s presentation in Atlanta, and so far I can find nothing that has been posted. Does anyone have any information they are willing to share? Perhaps contact information for Dan?
The materials from various Conference sessions will be posted within the next couple weeks. When available from the presenter, we will post any presentation materials they provided.
For a smaller set of conferences, we will make video recordings available as well.
We cannot guarantee that material from any session will get posted, and this is one of the main reasons people are strongly encouraged to attend the Conferences and have the opportunity to connect with presenters in person!
I absolutely agree with you Colleen. That is why I ALWAYS purchase multiple conference packs so every member of my team has a chance to attend the conferences. Unfortunately, we had mechanical challenges in the pit that prevented most of us getting to many of the conferences.
I appreciate the work WPI does to host the materials. It is a great and valuable service that is provided. Knowing that there are no guarantees about materials being available after the conferences, I posted here in hopes that someone who was in attendance would be able to point me in the right direction to find information sooner rather than later. If such a person exists, I’d love to hear from you. If not, I’ll just wait to see if anything surfaces later.
I attended this meeting. Here is what I got out of it:
The goal of this conference was to introduce a method of fund raising that also increases awareness of energy expenditure in local firms and businesses. The idea is as follows. Many utility companies offer a free energy audit service. Auditors survey the facilities of local businesses and provide constructive feedback. This feedback would include suggestions for saving energy. Possible suggestions could be replacing incandescent light bulbs with fluorescent light bulbs, installing socket units which shut down vending machines at hours when no one is in the building, or closing blinds (whether it be manually or automatically) at certain hours of the day. A cost benefit analysis is provided reporting the yearly savings. For a decent sized facility, the yearly savings would be tens of thousands of dollars.
The problem is that very few out there know these services exist or make use of them. This is where FIRST comes in. The program outlined in this conference seeks to mobilize the FIRST community to proactively seek out auditing opportunities, to effectively carry out these audits, and to request that half of the first year savings be donated to a FIRST team.
Of course, logistics were still being discussed in the meeting. They still need to devise a way to train auditors. There was discussion about collaborating with local power companies. Experience in energy auditing was another issue. For this, there was also talk about starting out in school districts and sponsor-run facilities. Success stories were also shared at this meeting. Apparently, some have already had some success auditing despite limited experience. The impression I got from the meeting is that FIRST hopes capitalize on the teams' enthusiasm and links to their local communities.
Unfortunately, the only contact info I got at this conference, so far, has not yielded any response. If anyone has more info, I would also like to hear more.
That is interesting, but sounds logistically intense. I see the fundraising coming from the other side of the business. Why not connect with those doing the auditing, and have them recommend the people/businesses they audited buy light bulbs, etc from your team. So, you would go around promoting the audit and then get the $$ on the sales side. If the electric company is going to do the audit work for free why would the team do it?
I had the general idea when buying light bulbs for $1 because they were subsidized. I am sure someone would buy the energy efficient bulbs for $2. Sending the kids door to door with information about being energy efficient and then selling the bulbs would be an easy sell.
I have not had a chance to investigate the feasibility or legality of either of these ideas, but I thought I would share.
Right now the program is in beta-test mode, and there are a handful of teams (ourselves included) who promised to perform these energy audits and give feedback to FIRST by the fall. Does anyone out there know of any other teams in the northeast that are participating? Steve Cremer told me there were a bunch, but didn’t give me specifics. Our team is looking for more ideas to share and collaborate with, so if you are interested, please let me know.
Right now our team is trying to get in contact with companies who might be interested in the audits. If we can’t actually turn this into a fund raising opportunity, then we will still be audition our schools (High schools and Northeastern) to teach kids and the community about the importance of saving energy.