Hardware Podcasts

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

How I Built This · 22 Jun 2023 · 47m

What this episode covers

Donnel Baird, founder of BlocPower, explains how he founded the company to electrify and decarbonize low-income buildings, drawing on his childhood experience in Brooklyn where residents used gas ovens for heat. He details BlocPower’s business model of financing full building conversions—replacing fossil fuel systems with heat pumps and induction stoves—so that energy savings cover the loan costs. Baird discusses the company's growth, its partnership with the city of Ithaca to electrify every building, and its strategy to scale through Wall Street capital, government incentives, and public crowdfunding.

Most relevant to

companies scaling up

Topics

Mentioned

Companies
BlocPower, Goldman Sachs, Tesla, Microsoft
Products
heat pumps, induction stoves
Also
Ithaca

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