In a four-story apartment building in Brooklyn, New York, a very small company is pursuing a very big idea: to electrify every building in the United States by renting out the necessary transition equipment to homeowners.
BlocPower is a Brooklyn-based startup that has greened over 1,200 buildings in New York City and has similar projects in two dozen other cities. It uses a rental platform to offer landlords and homeowners green heating and cooling systems, electrical appliances and solar panels. He installs the equipment and maintains it. Landlords make monthly payments that cover these costs and offer income to investors.
The company says that in current projects it has reduced energy costs in buildings by 30-50% and reduced greenhouse gas emissions by 40-70%. It says it can cut US greenhouse gas emissions by up to 25% in 10 years and recover up to 30% of millions of dollars of wasted energy.
“I know what’s inside those buildings, right? And so I see an investment opportunity,” said BlocPower CEO Donnel Baird, who grew up in Brooklyn. “My job as CEO is to make it transparent to potential climate investors.”
“We are going to reduce the amount of oil, gas and fossil fuels that these buildings consume, reduce the amount of emissions they create,” Baird said. “We are going to save building owners money and you will actually make a 10% financial return by investing in these buildings.”
BlocPower electrifies this building in Brooklyn, NY
Lisa Rizzolo | CNBC
In the basement of a Brooklyn building, Byrd waded through a web of old wiring and obsolete systems being dismantled, including old boilers and carbon-emitting gas lines.
“We look at it and say, ‘Oh my God, what a great opportunity to save the planet and make some money by focusing on what’s down here, right?’ Byrd said.
BlocPower leases the equipment for about 10 or 15 years, and after enough money is raised to pay off investors and BlocPower collects its fees, ownership of the equipment is transferred to the building owner.
The company is behind the US city of Ithaca, New York’s first plan to go zero net emissions by 2030. It starts with the building fund of the city.
“When we started working together on this program, we knew it was possible,” said Luis Aguirre-Torres, Director of Sustainability for the City of Ithaca. “You know, it’s not just about being the first city in America, on the entire planet, to be completely decarbonized. It’s really about showing that it’s possible.”
“If you’re working on climate change, you think it’s possible; you’re always thinking about how you can really make a difference,” Aguirre-Torres said. “The reality is that the technology didn’t exist a few years ago, and the financial innovation that was required didn’t exist a few years ago.”
BlocPower’s early supporters were Andreessen Horowitz, Exelon, American Family Insurance, the Schmidt Family Foundation, Goldman Sachs Urban Investment, Kapor Capital, and Salesforce. Then, in January, he received a large infusion of debt from Microsoft, bringing his total funding to about $100 billion. He also just received a $5 million grant from the Bezos Earth Foundation to digitally map some 125 million buildings across America so that each of those buildings has a free plan on how to become sustainable.
The company is currently in talks with several cities in California, New York, Massachusetts and Georgia about decarbonisation.