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April 29, 2011 Update: Aneesh Chopra, U.S. chief technology officer, has written an extensive blog about his visit with Daniela Lapidous and Shreya Indukuri, both grade 11. Read the blog here. April 20, 2011 Two Harker students attending Power Shift ’11 in Washington, D.C., earlier this month had the ear of 8,000 attendees, then had a private meeting with Aneesh Chopra, U.S. chief technology officer in the Obama administration. Shreya Indukuri and Daniela Lapidous, both grade 11, addressed the crowd of 8,000-plus at the conference then went on to meet with Chopra for about 30 minutes. The two students have been very active in advocating for reducing energy use through technology and other methods. A list of Harker News Online articles on their activities is at the end of this article. “The meeting [with Chopra] went really well,” said Indukuri. “He was very impressed with the opportunities for energy efficiency in schools and he wants to have Lisa Jackson, administrator of the EPA, and Arne Duncan, Secretary of Education, write a letter to schools to launch a campaign for energy benchmarking. “He loved Harker’s new energy efficiency with the smart energy system and was very supportive of our efforts to take this to other schools; we already helped students implement this project successfully in the Los Gatos – Saratoga High School District,” she added. “We also met with staff members and the director of ARPA-E, (Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy),” added Lapidous. “Their director is Arun Majumdar, and they basically invest in breakthrough clean energy technologies in hopes of finding the next big thing. “We made two presentations,” said Lapidous. “The first was more of an informal conversation while the second was a formal presentation including a segment of the Alliance for Climate Education (ACE) presentation. The audience was a varying number of ARPA-E staff, who are all rather young and very nice.” Following the presentations, “Majumdar came to talk to us personally for about 30 minutes,” said Lapidous. “The post-doctoral fellow who organized the meeting for us, Karma Sawyer, said she couldn’t remember the last time she scheduled a 30-minute meeting for him – usually they are 10 minutes. He lives in the Bay Area when not working in D.C., and he knew exactly where Harker was. “Both he and Mr. Chopra said that this smart energy project was essentially a no-brainer with an obvious positive impact for schools. They both acknowledged the environmental importance but were understandably more interested in the 250 percent ROI our project turned over in about a year,” Lapidous said. “PowerShift, the meeting with Mr. Chopra, and the meeting with Mr. Majumdar were all very exciting and we are extremely inspired to work 10 times harder on SmartPowerEd and expand it to more schools in the Bay Area before the fall comes around,” she finished. http://skylark.harker.org/hno/backups/green-projects-featured-on-49ers-kids-program/ http://skylark.harker.org/hno/backups/energy-dashboard-goes-live/ http://skylark.harker.org/hno/backups/unicef-video-includes-activist-students-in-video/ http://skylark.harker.org/hno/backups/students-filmed-for-video-on-ace-grant-recipients/ http://skylark.harker.org/hno/backups/student-presents-at-tech-titans-conference/ http://skylark.harker.org/hno/backups/harker-trio-gangs-up-on-global-warming/ http://skylark.harker.org/hno/backups/winged-post-reports-on-teen-tech-conference/ http://skylark.harker.org/hno/backups/sophomores-report-on-l-a-climate-conference/ http://skylark.harker.org/hno/backups/students-invited-to-climate-summit/