When Donnel Baird was a child, his parents would regularly use the oven to heat their Brooklyn apartment -- a dangerous and energy-inefficient practice that’s unfortunately not unique to New York City. As an adult traveling the country with the Obama for America campaign, Donnel saw countless homes and apartments wasting power and jeopardizing resident safety because of dated infrastructure. He founded BlocPower in 2014 to address this precise problem, focusing on low-income communities so often overlooked by innovative startups. 

This week on How I Built This Lab, Donnel talks with Guy about BlocPower’s work to modernize buildings nationwide and transition them to clean energy sources. BlocPower has raised more than $100 million from Wall Street and Silicon Valley investors, and has partnered with cities across the country to create greener, safer spaces for their residents.




This episode was produced by Carla Esteves and edited by John Isabella, with music by Ramtin Arablouei. Our audio engineer was Neal Rauch.

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Hey everyone, the How I Built This Lab team is taking a little bit of time off this summer, but don't worry, we'll be back in your feed with fresh new How I Built This Lab episodes in just a few weeks.

Meantime, I hope you enjoy 1 of our favorites from last year with Danell Baird, the founder of BlockPower.

It's a company that's electrifying buildings across the country as a way to fight climate change.

Hello and welcome to How I Built This Lab.

Almost a third of all the carbon emissions released by Americans each year come from buildings, homes, apartments, offices, to keep them lit and heated or cooled.

But there is a solution which isn't as complicated as you might think.

And the solution is to electrify our buildings and making sure that That electricity comes from renewable sources like wind or solar or hydropower or even nuclear power.

Most of our energy still comes from burning coal and gas.

But advances in technology in recent years has made it possible within our grasp to decarbonize all of our buildings and to do it quickly.

About 8 years ago, Danell Baird, an entrepreneur from Brooklyn, saw an opportunity to focus on decarbonizing buildings in low-income neighborhoods, neighborhoods like the 1 he grew up in.

He founded a company called BlockPower that converts any building into a carbon-free building by electrifying it.

So far, BlockPower has converted more than 1, 200 buildings and recently signed a deal with the city of Ithaca, New York, to electrify and decarbonize every single building in the city.

Guy Raz, I just couldn't be more delighted to talk with you.

So you grew up in Brooklyn, parents immigrants.

Tell me a little bit about where you grew up and what they did.

And my dad was an engineer and my mom was a teacher and the country's economy was collapsing.

And so they moved to the United States into a pretty tough neighborhood in Brooklyn, Bed-Stuy, which is where notorious B.I.G.

And at the time in the early 80s, most of the buildings didn't have working heating systems.

So in the winter, we and all of our neighbors, when it got super cold outside, we would open up the windows and we would turn on the oven in the kitchen and open up the oven door and use the oven to provide heat to all of our apartments all winter.

You just turn on the oven in your kitchen, cracked it open, and

you got to remember to open up the window so the carbon monoxide can flow out of the apartment.

Yeah, there's like a furnace in the basement that was supposed to like burn oil or gas and provide hot water heating through Radiators and and or vents depending on what kind of building you're in

But you know oil and gas can be super expensive and maintaining that furnace can be super expensive And so the landlady was like look we're gonna charge you guys like $25 a week for this like 1 bedroom apartment, but there's no heat.

So all of the apartments are going to have to use the gas ovens in the kitchen for heat.

I know you went on to study history and political science at Duke, but what were you sort of interested in doing?

Is that the direction you thought you'd head into?

I was really interested in trying to improve the lives of my family.

You know, we have this large immigrant family I probably have 40 or 50 cousins and I had been given a lot of educational opportunity I ended up going to an elite private school for high school and then going to Duke for undergrad.

And my giant family was like, all right, we got to Danelle through, we got to send him to Wall Street so he can make some money and come back and pay for all of his younger cousins to go to college.

And so there was this kind of community uplift component to what was the expectation.

But when I got to Duke, I learned about climate change.

I got really interested in Black civil rights and economic justice and came out of Duke extremely political and ended up becoming a community organizer.

Working initially for President Obama's, then Senator Obama's presidential campaign, I think at first, right?

Well, initially I was working with, there's a small team of community organizers who had trained President Obama when he was a community organizer back in the South Side of Chicago.

And so I did that for 3 years and was supervised by the same people that had trained Barack Obama.

And then when he announced that he was running for president in

I said goodbye to my girlfriend and friends in Brooklyn, packed up a car and drove down to South Carolina to become a senior staffer with the Obama for America campaign.

I mean you grew up with not a whole lot of access to heating in your apartment.

When you were doing that work in South Carolina, were you exposed to anything like that during that time?

Yeah, that was what was so interesting, guys.

When I, you know, I ended up going to like 8 or 9 states with the Obama presidential campaign.

And there's a pattern that I saw as we would head into low income and working communities to persuade them that Barack Obama was their guy and he was going to support their interests and they should turn out.

There's this persistent pattern where there's just this tremendous waste of energy and neglected low and moderate income buildings that really reminded me of where I grew up.

I remember walking around outside 1 day and it was 20 degrees outside and I was looking at this giant apartment building with all the windows open and I was like, ah, that's just like my 3 story apartment building where I grew up.

They're heating their houses with their oven.

They're heating this giant apartment building with their ovens.

Um, and So there is an inefficiency in the energy system that I saw not only in Brooklyn, but in Cleveland and in Charlotte, on the South Carolina-Georgia border, and the Obama campaign that led me to believe that this was a persistent pattern of energy neglect or energy poverty that needed to be addressed.

I didn't understand at the time that it was like a business or market opportunity, but I just saw it was like a pattern.

Because if you don't open up the windows, you're breathing in carbon monoxide and nitrogen dioxide and stuff that's very unhealthy for you and your kids.

And so I knew it was an energy problem as well as a public health problem.

You went on to work for the US Department of Energy for a couple years.

Tell me a little about what you did during that time.

So remember there was a financial collapse.

Department of Energy and a bunch of labor unions and energy utility companies and Wall Street banks around a particular part of the 2009 Recovery Act.

It was 6 and a half billion dollars with a B that was being invested in greening low-income buildings, which of course was becoming my thing.

And they're like, great, you can work with these labor unions and energy companies.

billion of pension funds that they wanted to co-invest in greening buildings with $6 billion that was provided from the federal government as part of the Recovery Act Wow And so the plan was we were gonna create this new green buildings industry across America We were gonna retrain and rehire a million laid-off construction workers to you know Go building to building And Secretary of Energy Chu had this vision of an 18-wheeler Mack truck filled with organic insulation.

And it was just going to drive down the block and stop at every house and pump green, organic insulation into every home, into every attic to save people money.

So that was the vision, and we were just gonna have a hundred billion dollars to do this with.

And guys, you might imagine, we could not quite pull it off.

You get to create jobs, You get to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Greening buildings is a pretty compelling policy goal with a lot of social and environmental and financial outcomes.

It didn't work out quite as well as we'd hoped.

Like other things work, like they loaned half a billion dollars to Tesla, they invested a ton of money in rooftop solar, and those things worked really great.

But the idea of going building to building to green all the buildings in America, we were not able to pull that off.

14.05 Marc Thiessen So what I'm curious about, you're working on this federally financed project to help quote unquote green these buildings, which is to make them more energy efficient and maybe put in solar panels and things like that.

Presumably while you're doing this, you're learning a lot about the inefficiency of buildings, because when we think of like carbon emissions, we think of coal-powered energy plants, right?

But buildings, I didn't know this, buildings account for 15% of the world's CO2 emissions.

And in New York City, where I am, buildings are

So if you look at New York City and San Francisco, you have massive amounts of CO2 and greenhouse gas that's being emitted by buildings.

And so there just isn't a way to deal with climate change unless you green the buildings.

Will Duffield And that comes from presumably the energy used by everybody in the building.

So then when they plug stuff in or the lights or whatever, you know, but also other things like in a home, I guess your washing machine, your dryer, your gas oven and stovetop.

Are all those the factors that add up to 30% of carbon emissions?

There's all the appliances and all the electricity that we use in our buildings.

And so we burn oil and gas or coal in some places to produce electricity and send it through transmission lines to use the electricity in our homes.

And then on site in our homes, we burn gas to cook with, to produce hot water that we shower with, and we also burn oil and gas for heating.

And so, for example, in New York City, there's 10, 000 giant apartment buildings that burn oil for hot water and for heat.

Like a truck filled with oil pulls up once a week and runs this like tube into the basement, into the heating system, and like pumps oil from the back of the truck into the basement.

And then you burn that oil to produce hot water year round.

So it's a pretty significant amount of greenhouse gas emissions.

And even these so-called energy-efficient buildings or these programs that you were part of to insulate homes better and to make them more efficient and with efficient appliances, even with those things, it's still a problem.

Why are we digging up dead dinosaurs and burning them in our houses?

It's just a compressed plant and animal life from millions of years ago.

Yeah, there's a better way to do this, right?

I mean, there's all the pollution that it produces, that we breathe in, but you know, look, if you put a gas explosion alert in Google, as I do, then every week or so you're going to get an email about some poor American family's home blowing up and exploding because the gas was leaking and someone lit a match or flipped on a light bulb.

And so this is like an unsustainable, unhealthy, unsafe, and super expensive way to power buildings.

So you start to realize this and it's around 2012, you decided to go to business school.

Did you have a fully formed idea in mind about what you thought you might want to do?

Apparently, in my Columbia Business School application, I wrote up the argument for block power.

Basically, it was that there seemed to be all of these challenges and opportunities in the green buildings industry that I was learning about while I was working with the Department of Energy and the labor unions.

And I just couldn't figure out why we couldn't do a better job of fixing the industry.

And so I would ask this question around, well, why can't Wall Street provide the capital to pay for us to green all the buildings?

And the answer would be, well, Wall Street can provide all the capital.

And I'd be like, okay, why can't we train more mechanical engineers to do a better job of analyzing the buildings and figuring out what kinds of green equipment should go into buildings.

And the answer would be like, well, nothing's stopping us from doing that.

There was just no 1 who was focused on it, who was willing to kind of invest, I guess, their whole life and make it their mission to solve this problem at scale.

And for me, because I care about climate change and because I care about creating jobs in low-income communities like the 1 where I grew up, green buildings just seemed like a really important mission And it seemed like it could just check a lot of boxes for me and be a life well-lived if I pursued figuring out how to solve the problem of greening buildings.

And so in order to do that, I needed to get an MBA to at least learn enough about business.

And I did have an explicit mission of trying to figure out how to build a nonprofit called BlockPower or something similar.

So people who have solar panels and all of these things that enable them to live in a less carbon polluting way tend to be higher income people.

You essentially said, look, there are tens of millions of people who live in low-income buildings, not only in the US, but around the world, and they should also have the opportunity to live in a green building.

And that was, from the get-go, that would be your focus?

I wanted to engage with the communities that I grew up in and grew up near and served to green their buildings.

I mean when I was working with the Obama folks, I had 1 of my favorite pastors in Bed-Stuy call me and he goes, hey you're working on greening buildings right?

He's like I'm spending 10000 dollars a month on my energy bill and I'm like what?

So he had a 150 year old formerly Catholic building and he had a school for neighborhood kids like elementary school and then he had senior activities and lunches.

So the church was like constantly filled 7 days a week and So the heating system and air conditioning system was always on, right?

So he's spending $10, 000 a month on his energy costs and he goes, I only have $300, 000 a year of revenue coming into the church and $120, 000 of that is going out on energy.

So it's a massive pain point for low-income people.

So the other part of it is like, when I was growing up in Brooklyn, there was like 2 kinds of waste that I saw when I was growing up and when I was a community organizer.

There was like a waste of all of the energy and the fossil fuel.

When you look at it as someone who cares about climate or just someone who cares about efficiency, like why are you heating a building to 90 degrees when it's 20 degrees outside and doing that with gas ovens and then all of the heat is floating out the window.

And then the other waste is the waste of human potential.

When you walk around these neighborhoods and you see scores of unemployed young people who have children that they need to provide for and they have talent and they have genius and they have dreams, but they don't have any opportunity.

And it's like, you can address both pieces of this waste by training those young people to go and green those buildings and just make everything much more efficient.

We'll be back with more from Danelle Baird of Black Power in just a moment.

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My guest is Donnell Baird, founder of Blackpower.

So you literally founded this company while you were a business school, right?

And you launched it formally in 2014, but not as a nonprofit, as a for-profit business.

I learned enough about business in business school to say, well, look, I mean, greening buildings in America is going to cost like $5 trillion.

There's 125 million buildings in America.

Literally someone's going to have to put up $5 trillion.

But there's a way to do it and make a financial return.

So someone's gonna make like huge fortunes, right?

By investing and greening all the buildings and like that's why we work with Goldman Sachs, right?

It's not like, I mean, they are nice people or at least the part of the bank that we work with are nice people, but they're gonna make a lot of money if this all works out.

But you started this as a for-profit business because you wanted to attract capital and you wanted to show that there was a business model in basically converting low-income apartment buildings into not just energy efficient, but carbon free buildings with solar panels.

And the idea was you could actually do this and it can make money.

We thought that we could go into the poorest neighborhoods in America and build a business making those buildings greener, smarter and healthier and make our investors a ton of money.

That's what we thought, and that's what we've been trying to prove.

All right, so you've got the concept, and you know what you wanna do.

Now, help me understand what that is, because This is not what the Obama administration was doing when you were trying to green buildings or make them more efficient.

It wasn't about pumping better insulation to the building.

You had a very different plan, which was to take a building and to do what with it?

There's a set of new hardware that allows us to make buildings all electric.

In the same way that Tesla and Rivian can take an automobile and rip out the fossil fuel engine and replace it with an all-electric engine, we can now do the same thing with hardware in buildings.

And so we can go into basically any building in America and rip out the existing fossil fuel equipment that heats the building, heats the hot water for cooking and showering.

We can rip all of that fossil fuel equipment out and replace it with equipment that only uses electricity and actually reduces greenhouse gas emissions by as high as 70%.

And so then the next question is like, okay, well, if it's using electricity, is that electricity sourced from like burning coal or gas?

Well, sometimes, but you can also source that electricity from solar on the roof of that building, or a solar farm, or a wind farm, or a hydroelectric project.

And so by converting the building to 100% all electric equipment, you create the opportunity to fully remove fossil fuel consumption in that building.

And let's just take a, let's say a 10 story apartment complex in Bed-Stuy.

And it's an old building built in the late 60s, early 70s, not super well insulated, not super efficient, but you want to convert that building.

You can essentially put enough solar panels on the roof of that building to power that building or would it require other sources of energy as well?

If it was a building in like downtown Cleveland, you could put enough solar on the roof.

But because New York is so dense, the roofs in New York aren't big enough to like provide enough power to the tall buildings.

What we do have in New York City is we get most of our electricity, or will next year, from a hydroelectric project in Quebec.

And so there's this giant dam in Quebec that spins a bunch of turbines and produces clean electricity and sends that electricity down to New York City.

And so the source of our electricity in New York is going to be far, far cleaner than it is right now, and than it is in most places in the country.

So you can convert that building to that power source in Quebec, for example.

So that 10-story building may be burning oil or burning gas right now for heating and cooling and hot water and for cooking.

So we rip out all of that fossil fuel equipment, replace it with all the electric.

The fundamental core of this is it has to first be electrified.

The building, you gotta remove gas and oil, and then you focus on the source of that electricity.

And then, let's say you're talking about a 10-story building with, I don't know, 7 or 8 units per floor.

Are you going into each unit and replacing the stovetops, putting in electric ovens, and so on and so forth?

We're putting in all electric induction stoves that use electricity to cook on the stove top and use electricity to bake.

And then in certain kinds of projects, we're going to put in a small, modular, air conditioner-sized heating and cooling system so that that apartment building can control its own comfort with a local, in-unit, electric heat pump.

Basically replacing an in-unit air conditioning that might be hanging out.

And the heat pump is electric powered and they're still relatively new in the US for sure.

And they basically work by like sucking out warm air in the summertime from a house and by pumping in warm air into the house in the winter?

Yeah, so it's a cool piece of technology.

Even if it's cold outside, there's some amount of warm air that's embedded in outdoor air, even if it's below freezing.

And so they're going to find that warm air and suck it into the system, run it across a refrigerant line and a compressor, and then pump that condensed heat into your home.

And then in the summer, it reverses itself and sucks in the warm air that's inside your apartment, runs it across the refrigerant line, and pumps it outside.

So it's like an air conditioner that can go forwards and backwards to pump heat where it's needed.

And they're just as effective as a gas-powered air conditioner, even if it's super hot outside, like 105 degrees, it can still bring in cool air, like really cool air.

Whether it's 105 degrees or whether it's 5 degrees below 0, they are able to function.

And it's not cooled by Freon or the same chemicals that cool?

of the cool things that we're really excited about is they're actually using CO2 as a refrigerant.

So now if you take a step back, right, and you look at our climate challenge of like, oh my God, what's going to happen when we put 100 million air conditioning units in India and China as middle class folks, like buy houses and build houses and want air conditioning to stay cool?

Well, if CO2 is the refrigerant that we're going to be using, In effect, we're putting a price on carbon, right?

Because we're using that CO2 as air conditioning.

1 of the things that I'm really excited about and really hopeful about is if Mitsubishi and Dacon and Fujitsu and the giant heat pump manufacturers are able to crack the code on CO2 refrigerant globally at scale, this is 1 of the most important things that can happen because then we're going to start to power buildings with CO2.

So now you have this clear idea of what you wanted to do and you've already done some of it at this point, but this is back in 2014, and you start to attract some investments.

Attract a strong, but it took a while, it took a while.

But today you've attracted, I think, over $60 million in investments.

If you go to Goldman Sachs' headquarters and you say, I want to electrify this building, they're just going to write you a check.

If you go to a, not even a low-income building, even a family that has some money, it is very expensive to do it now.

See all How I Built This with Guy Raz transcripts on Applepodcasts

Reinvesting in our cities with renewable energy with Donnel Baird of BlocPower (2022)