2022 WCIA Series: BlocPower is helping turn old buildings green, affordably for everyone

On a recent cold night in April, a drone flew over Ithaca, New York, using thermal imaging to map which buildings were losing the most heat. The data may be used to help the city strategize as it begins to tackle an ambitious goal: By 2030, the city plans to decarbonize every building–from houses to schools to offices—helping residents save money on energy while the entire city moves off the fossil-powered grid. 

“If we’re serious about decarbonization and dealing with climate change from a mathematical and scientific perspective, we have to find a way to decarbonize buildings,” says Donnel Baird, CEO of BlocPower, the company working with the city to implement the plan. The small-scale drone mapping project is just one experiment in BlocPower’s larger mission to help decarbonize entire cities. The company, which first began retrofitting aging apartment buildings in New York City, is the winner of the climate category of Fast Company’s 2022 World Changing Ideas Awards. 

In Ithaca, as in other cities, building retrofits have happened slowly in the past. Some homeowners have swapped out gas furnaces for electric heat pumps or added solar panels or insulation to make their houses more efficient. But the process is often time-consuming and typically requires a large upfront cost, and relatively few people have been willing or able to make the changes. BlocPower, which started working first in low-income apartment buildings in Brooklyn, realized that a different model was needed. 

In the past, Baird says, it was a struggle to get something like solar panels installed in low-income neighborhoods in cities like Brooklyn because banks didn’t want to give loans to subprime customers. Baird, who grew up in an apartment in Bedford-Stuyvesant where the heat rarely worked, knew that low-income residents were most in need of building retrofits, but least likely to get them. 

BlocPower borrows money from large banks—which want to invest in green infrastructure, but can’t easily work on individual small projects—to pay for new equipment and energy efficiency upgrades for buildings, from heat pumps to new windows to insulation. The company uses its own software to create a custom plan to upgrade each building, sometimes including other steps to improve indoor air quality, such as removing asbestos or mold. Then it leases the equipment to the building owner for 15 years, through a low-cost loan, before transferring ownership. Building owners can make lease payments through the money saved on energy bills. The company has worked on more than 1,200 buildings so far in 25 cities, including New York City, Philadelphia, and Oakland.

Because there’s also a labor shortage in the industry, the company is helping train a new workforce of people who can make the installations. In New York City last year, using funds from the federal Cares Act, BlocPower helped train 1,500 residents through what it called a “Civilian Climate Corps,” working with partners to teach people who had recently returned from prison and others looking for a new career how to install new HVAC systems or solar panels. It now hopes to do the same in other parts of New York and potentially other states. 

The company uses its own software to make digital twins of buildings and predict how much energy they’re using—and wasting—and how much money the owner could save on energy bills. “We’re able to create an algorithm that allows us to identify and target which buildings are easiest to decarbonize and hardest to decarbonize before we visit,” Baird says. In Ithaca, the data from the drones may be shared with citizens to help show them more details about how much energy they’re wasting. The software, which recently received funding from the Bezos Earth Fund, will soon have a model of essentially every building in the country, minus skyscrapers. 

“Every building in America has a decarbonization plan that’s free,” says Baird. Anyone will be able to “search for their address, pull down their decarbonization plan after answering 10 minutes’ worth of questions, and then take the plan to a local contractor and begin to decarbonize their home,” he says. “If they don’t have a local contractor, or they don’t have enough money, they can email BlocPower, and we will provide a contractor and provide the money.”