Celebrating ten years of blogging

Ten years ago I was starting this website as a blog. One of my goals was to show my passion for what was then called sustainable development and much more: energy issues, the environment and so on.

It was done to help me find a job in related topics and help me keep on practicing and improving my English. In both regards this has been a success. Not only this website allowed me to find employment but it made my dream come true when I went to work for a biogas company in Colombia in 2014.

Since then I have embarked to new adventures in the United States and I am now on my way to finish my MBA in Sustainable Business and Energy at Presidio Graduate School. I am happy to say that last year was an excellent one professionally.

• I started by volunteering for Distributed Energy Management, the company of my energy certificate teacher, Jimmy Jia. There I researched opportunities and solutions for improving energy efficiency, decreasing water consumption and waste generation for the food preparation industry

• A three-month Internship at the New Buildings Institute (Portland, OR). There I updated their California Zero Net Energy Watchlist ; analyzed financial and energy data ; wrote a financial case study of a low-energy remodeling office building in Sunnyvale, CA, for this national nonprofit.

• Later in the year, once Presidio had acquired Pinchot, I begun my MBA capstone project by interning at Town and Country Markets, a local chain of grocery stores. There I am collecting and analyzing the financial and technical data for the energy retrofit of a 42,000 square-foot store. I am calculating the returns (ROI) and payback periods of investments in the building’s envelope, HVAC, lighting and solar photovoltaic systems.

2017 will see the completion of the latter as well as my graduating from Presidio. I am already looking for job positions where I can make a difference and have an impact. Helping businesses and communities become carbon neutral is still my goal and I am very happy to write that my time at then Pinchot now Presidio has already enabled me to do just that.

If the writing for this blog brought me a considerable amount of knowledge on climate, energy and sustainability issues, I was lacking financial and project management skills and experience. Thanks to my MBA classes and my ongoing project at Town and Country Markets, these are being filled.

On a technical standpoint, you may have noticed the brand new design, which comes from Customizr, a WordPress theme from France. As usual, I have heavily customized it myself to better reflect my personal brand. The Earthrise photo is still very present and the color scheme has not changed. Hopefully the SEO should be better to allow more of you dear readers to find this website.

To infer this article I would like to thank you everyone who played a role in the success of this blog. From the unwaving support of my parents and family to the readers and subscribers who have been reading me for a decade, thank you, merci, gracias, obrigado, danke, cpacibo ! You are the reasons why I keep writing !