This CEO wants to reduce emissions by turning buildings 'into Teslas'

Hello, Earthlings! This is our weekly newsletter on all things environmental, where we highlight trends and solutions that are moving us to a more sustainable world. (Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Thursday.)

This week:

From Jeff Bezos to Microsoft, CEO Donnel Baird has attracted big investors in his New York-based company BlocPower, which reduces emissions by electrifying many aspects of buildings across the United States. BlocPower does this through retrofits, and according to the company's website, it has retrofitted more than 1,200 buildings since it was founded in 2014. Baird spoke with What On Earth host Laura Lynch about what BlocPower does, why he chose climate tech and how he stays connected to his roots in community organizing. 

Q: Give me your elevator pitch: What's the solution you're trying to deliver on?

A: We turn buildings into Teslas. Just like Tesla has ripped the fossil fuel engine out of vehicles, we're going to rip fossil fuel equipment out of your home. Fossil fuel equipment is poisoning your family with methane and nitrogen dioxide and carbon monoxide. It's also poisoning the planet with greenhouse gas emissions. And so we're going to rip all that stuff out and replace it with all electric heating and cooling and hot water, and we're going to save you money. While we're doing it, we're going to make your home healthier, more comfortable, more modern, and we're going to save you a bunch of money on your energy expenses.

Q: Prior to launching BlocPower, you worked as a community organizer in Brooklyn and then as a consultant under U.S. president Barack Obama. How did you end up in a climate tech startup?

A: I was a consultant to the U.S. Department of Energy as they invested six and a half billion dollars in greening buildings across America — or trying to — and some of it worked really well, but a lot of it didn't. And, you know, we needed a lot of Wall Street capital to invest — billions and billions of dollars. I think there's like $90 billion of pension fund assets that folks wanted to invest. And a lot of the bankers would not invest that capital. They thought that green buildings investments were not a good investment at that time. And so we didn't get all those programs to work as well as we'd hoped. 

So after doing that for a few years, I went to Columbia Business School to try to learn enough about business and finance to figure out how to have an impact on greenhouse gas emissions. And while I was there, I learned that … in order to have a real impact at scale, to help invest the trillions of dollars that need to be invested in greening buildings across the United States, and across North America and Canada as well … it's going to cost trillions of dollars to decarbonize real estate and buildings. And there just is no path to organizing that kind of capital to do anything unless there's a for-profit motive and rationale. And so, while in business school, I kind of pivoted. It was painful, but I pivoted, and learned enough about business and finance and technology to kind of start my company.

Q: You started your career in social justice. I'm kind of curious to know how you've been able to hold onto the community organizer side of yourself while you're knocking on the doors of Wall Street.

A: I think that it's been interesting that some of the best managers and leadership skills actually rely on a lot of principles that are very similar to community organizing. Community organizing is really hard. You have nothing. You have to persuade a lot of other people who have a little more than nothing to become a team and partner with you around your shared agenda, and so you have to paint a clear vision for an achievable goal. That's what you know, [and] you're supposed to do [it] on Wall Street. I'm not really motivated by money, and so that has been a little bit of a disconnect for me, you know, having to raise capital and communicate about how we're going to make all this money and repay investors. I'm much more focused on the climate fight and creating jobs. But this is the path. 

And if you think seriously about climate change, and what needs to happen to address climate change, you'll see that aggressively engaging with Wall Street and Silicon Valley, as well as the government, must be a priority. And so we can't be too self-righteous or too cool for school … we have to engage with the economy in a way that's going to allow us to decarbonize.

– Manusha Janakiram

This interview has been edited and condensed.

In response to some of the stories we've written recently on non-fossil fuel heating solutions, Peter D.A. Warwick had this to say: