Brooklyn Climate Tech CEO Raises $ 63 Million, Targets North BK Pipeline
Brooklyn-based climate tech entrepreneur Donnel Baird may have just raised $ 63 million in Series A funding for his BlocPower business, but he’s not mince words when it comes to its overall mission.
“It’s good to have Wall Street and Silicon Valley on board with a vision to build a better planet,” he said. “But I’m not doing this for the money. I do this because – deep in my heart – we are totally screwed if we don’t stop climate change. “
Baird’s Brooklyn-based Navy Yard BlockPower works to reduce the country’s greenhouse gas emissions by “greening” older buildings through its software and clean energy partners.
Aging buildings in the United States produce more greenhouse gases than the entire U.S. transportation industry, according to the company.
However, Baird believes that BlocPower could reduce America’s greenhouse gases by an incredible 3 to 25% in five to 10 years. He has already “greened” over 1,000 buildings in New York, including over 200 in Brownsville, and is now working urgently in 23 other cities.
The funding will allow BlocPower to expand and expand its downtown energy retrofit projects across the country, as well as make them available to building owners at no up-front cost through a financing option where loans can be fully reimbursed from the cost savings of lower energy bills.
“We have ten years left on the climate. We have to fix this problem, ”he said.
From Bed-Stuy to the Obama administration
Baird, who is proudly “born and raised in Brooklyn,” said his parents moved from Guyana to Bed-Stuy in the 1980s as the country’s economy collapsed.
“They had to start over. My father was a manager in Guyana, and he had to clean the boilers in the MTA, which was depressing and difficult for him. My mother is a teacher and philanthropist, and she had to clean the bedpans.
Baird lived with his parents and sister in a one-bedroom apartment on Decatur Street with no heating. When it was cold, his family would heat their apartment with the oven and open the window to release the carbon monoxide.
Many in his neighborhood were also struggling in different ways around this time, Baird said. When he was 5 or 6 years old, he saw a teenager shoot another teenager in the face.
“As I got older and continued to process that memory… it became the genesis of understanding how bad things could be and the help that everyone needed,” he said. “The person being shot and the shooter needed better employment options.”
Baird has become a senior Obama campaign executive and a consultant to the Obama administration on a plan to hire and train unemployed union workers to “green” buildings across the country. However, at the time, the costs of renovations exceeded the savings from switching to clean energy.
“The parts that weren’t working were frustrating because I saw huge job creation potential and such huge environmental impact potential,” Baird said.
Around the same time, a Baptist church in Bed-Stuy contacted him to ask if he could help reduce his energy bill by $ 10,000 per month. Baird said he could see how the church could save $ 36,000 a year on its energy – and a seed of a business model that could work.
He enrolled in Columbia Business School, which helped him launch BlocPower in 2014.
These days, BlowPower’s machine learning technology platform works in buildings by determining which renovations will yield the most energy savings on a large scale, while remotely monitoring energy consumption.
Common renovations include the electric cold climate heat pump, which has been shown to be effective in drastically reduce energy waste in partner buildings, as well as solar panels.
No love for the North Brooklyn pipeline
The ultimate goal of BlocPower now is to completely eliminate dependence on fossil fuels in urban buildings.
Baird, who now lives in Ditmas Park, is passionate about climate justice and tackling environmental racism. Communities of color and low-income communities – many of them in Brooklyn – are disproportionately located in areas vulnerable to extreme weather events and locations polluted with toxic waste.
After a CEO of solar energy told Baird he would not put solar panels in Brownsville due to bad credit from its residents, Baird traveled to Brownsville and helped more than 200 homes neighborhood. to settle with solar panels.
“It’s important for us to come in and say, ‘It can be done here.’ Anyone can put a solar panel around JP Morgan’s corner, ”he said.
Over the past year, Brooklyn residents from Brownsville to Greenpoint have team up to fight against the construction by National Grid of a new fractured gas pipeline under the district. Baird said he was not only against the pipeline, but was prepared to prove it wasn’t necessary.
“F * ck the North Brooklyn Pipeline,” Baird said. “This pipeline is a horrible utility company project… I know some of these people and – God bless them – but they just want to make money on this pipeline.”
He said the utility has a “fake excuse” for not being able to heat affordable housing without a pipeline, when new technology available allows us to heat and cool all buildings with electricity.
Baird said he would like to equip thousands of homes in eastern New York City with clean energy to prove the Brooklyn community doesn’t need the pipeline.
“It’s one thing to protest the pipeline, it’s another to show the potential solution and do it.
“Our Series A funding is specifically raised to demonstrate that the technology is available and affordable, so let’s throw Brooklyn on that and show that [fossil fuels] are obsolete.