While Teslas and the like
make for good headlines,
the reality is that even if every car on the road
today went electric, it wouldn't be enough
to curb global emissions to avoid
catastrophic climate change.
Greenhouse gas emissions from transportation account
for about 29% of total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.
So what about the other 71%?
Buildings across America
burn fossil fuels to operate.
What we wanna do is make that all electric.
Instead of burning oil and gas
to give us the energy and the electricity we need,
we want to do a hundred percent clean energy, all electric.
We want to turn buildings into Teslas.
Just like a Tesla or an electric vehicle
is all electric with no fossil fuels,
we want to do that with our buildings
and if we can do it in one building,
we can do it in all buildings.
And if we do it in all buildings, we'll reduce 30% of U.S.
greenhouse gas emissions.
If such a reduction in emissions
from buildings everywhere became a reality
in the near future,
the planet could potentially avoid the worst consequences
of global warming.
Donnell Baird is the CEO and founder of BlocPower,
whose mission is to help America's building
infrastructure go green.
We're a climate tech startup
that turns buildings into Teslas.
We rip out the fossil fuel equipment, heating, cooling
hot water equipment,
we replace it with all electric equipment
that makes buildings greener
healthier and smarter all across America.
We want every American to have a free, data-driven
clean energy recommendation for their building
or their church or their school or their synagogue.
So that's the first part.
The second part is we gotta help them raise
the trillions of dollars that are gonna be required
to pay green construction firms
to install clean energy equipment in every home,
in every building in America.
We've been working with Goldman Sachs and Microsoft
to develop a new financial product that allows
us to finance or lease clean energy to all Americans,
including the lowest income Americans.
I started thinking about BlocPower,
really, I was 22, 23 years old.
I was a community organizer.
I was trained by the same community organizing
group that had trained Barack Obama.
And I was walking around Brooklyn one freezing winter day,
it must have been like 21 degrees Fahrenheit.
And I looked around and all of the apartment buildings
had their windows open.
You could see the steam and the heat like pouring
out of the windows because the giant apartment buildings
and complexes were being overheated.
And it reminded me of when I was a kid,
we had to have our windows open
in our apartment during the winter on very cold days
because we did not have heat in our building.
So we had to turn on the oven, open up the oven door
and then we had to open
up a window to release carbon monoxide.
In 2019, New York city passed the Climate
Mobilization Act,
a commitment to right their wrongs.
Nearly 70% of New York's carbon emissions
are from their buildings and the city aims
by 2030 to cut their pollution by 40%.
Building owners who don't meet the reduction
requirements will be faced with fines,
a penalty of $268 per every assessed ton
of carbon over the limit.
What we're doing is trying to modernize energy efficiency
in green buildings by building it right
from day one, with software, with mobile computing
cloud computing, statistical analysis, machine learning
using the internet of things and low cost sensors,
BlocPower purchases, clean energy equipment.
We hire green construction firms
and we project manage them to install green energy equipment
in every building in every home.
When a building owner first is interested in working
with BlocPower, we have them fill out a 10 minute quiz
or survey about how the energy equipment
in their building currently works.
Our software system collects the data from the form.
We start to run an analysis of what kinds
of clean energy recommendations
make sense for that building.
The building owner gets a report
from us that tells them what kinds of mix
of clean energy equipment makes sense for their building.
While building owners
may save money in the long run,
the upfront investment in energy efficiency
can be insurmountable for some.
Based on data from the Department of Energy,
the national average energy burden
for low income households is three times higher
than for other households.
One of the main reasons is
that low income homes are more frequently burdened
with outdated equipment
and other poor housing conditions that can lead
to higher than average energy use and costs.
Groundswell, a nonprofit renewable energy advocacy group,
noted in an analysis that the bottom 20%
of earners spend almost 10% of their income on electricity.
That's more than seven times
the portion of income that the top 20% pays.
Most Americans don't have, you know, $20,000, $50,000,
$100,00 dollars laying around
to convert your building to make it all electric.
But if we can stretch those payments out
over time and make sure that the monthly payment is lower
than what you're currently paying for oil or for gas,
then that's an attractive option
for saving money and saving the planet.
This model is already being implemented
in New York, Maryland, Colorado
and other states with incentive programs for solar panels
whereby low interest loans allow homeowners
to make monthly payments that are comparable
and often less than typical electric bills.
I think to date we've raised
around $100 million dollars.
We have been really fortunate to have
some world-class investors.
Salesforce is an investor, Goldman Sachs,
The American Family Life Insurance Corporation,
but there's $4 trillion of projects to do.
I mean, there's $4 trillion worth
of buildings to decarbonize across America.
I think the most important thing that we're doing
is recently we were selected by the city
of Ithaca to decarbonize the entire city,
meaning every building, no fossil fuels.
We have an eight year timeline
by which we have to decarbonize the entire city.
So it's the first city in America,
in the first city in the world to fully decarbonize.
We know that we have eight
or nine years to make massive interventions
in the way that we operate
and the way that our economy works
in order to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.
And if we can decarbonize all cities
across America then 30%
of our greenhouse gas emissions will be avoided.
And that means America will have led the world
away from the worst consequences of climate change.
And so we're feeling the pressure,
but we're really excited to try
and step up to the challenge.