This week I had my first taste of writing a grant application. Even though we were very tight on time, Nate and I decided to apply for a grant from the California Energy Commission’s Energy Innovations Small Grant Program. It is part of their Public Interest Energy Research (PIER) Program aimed at smaller grants. The recent grant solicitation was related to their Electricity Program. The main problem was the due date: September 27, and it required sending a hard copy to San Diego, which meant we had to get it out via FedEx earlier today. It was quite a battle since we just finished up our business plan and didn’t have much time for the grant. Oh yeah, and we had to finish the first draft of our pitch presentation too. Anyway, the grant application turned out pretty well. We won’t get the results until February 2008, but it would really come in handy to help us deploy our prototype systems next year. There will be a Natural Gas solicitation sometime this fall. If we decide to submit a proposal for that one, I’m sure we’ll allocate a lot more time.

As I mentioned, a preliminary version of the pitch presentation was due today. This is for a “dress rehearsal” pitch on Friday. Nate is going to be delivering the pitch. He had his first run through today. It has some rough edges, but over all it was pretty good. Rob, whom I’ve mentioned before, helped once again by giving some great feedback on the pitch. It should be much smother for the Friday rehearsal. Our CCTO mentor, Ed, will be there Friday as well, so hopefully we’ll get some more feedback and have a sleek pitch ready to submit on Sunday. The actual pitch is on October 3. I have the utmost confidence that Nate will be stellar.

I’ve been riding BART to Berkeley whenever I go to the office. It’s pretty convenient and I can even work when I’m on the train. I even loaded a BART QuickPlanner application on my Palm Treo 650 phone so I always have access to schedules and station locations. The goal is to make Aptility a sustainable company, so every little bit helps. When possible, I simply work from home to avoid commuting at all. Unfortunately, BART only goes as far south as Fremont, and I live in San Jose. I have to drive up to Fremont, BART to Downtown Berkeley and then walk to our office. The drive to Fremont is about 15 miles as opposed to 43 miles to the office in Berkeley. So I’m saving about 56 miles per round trip, which is almost 2 gallons of gas in my Ford Escape Hybrid. That’s equivalent to about 40 pounds of CO2 emissions according to terrapass. Plus I get in about two miles of walking in Berkeley.

Next up: “green” business cards.