Jul 7, 2022 · 47m · how-i-built-this
HIBT Lab! BlocPower: Donnel Baird
0:00 / 0:00
gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
In this episode of How I Built This Lab, Guy Raz speaks with BlocPower founder Donnel Baird about his journey from grassroots organizing to building an innovative climate tech company that electrifies urban buildings, cuts emissions, and creates economic opportunity in underserved communities.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Guy holds 28.2% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Guy as informed peer 3.6 Guest teaching 4.3 Guest disagreement 1.3 Guy pushing back 1.3
speaking balance: gold is Guy, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 40:46 Reframing the wealth generation question
Donnel rejects Guy's premise of merely asking who will make money off the green transition, pivoting to challenge the conventional Silicon Valley dropout archetype and arguing for broad public equity.
Hardest push from Guy ▶ 24:22 Guy presses on high upfront electrification costsGuy challenges Donnel on the practicality of electrifying low-income housing when hardware like induction stoves and solar installations cost up to $100,000 per home.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 9:02 Donnel corrects building emission statisticsWhen Guy mentions that buildings generate 15% of global emissions, Donnel educates him on the much steeper numbers in the US (30%) and urban centers like New York City (67%).
Guy holds their own ▶ 37:17 Guy asserts the necessity of federal-scale interventionGuy offers sharp analysis that private venture capital and philanthropists cannot scale climate solutions alone without immense federal infrastructure backing.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Guy as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Guy pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Growing Up in Bed-Stuy and Kitchen Oven Heating | 3 | 3 | 1 | 1 | Guy prompts Donnel about his background in Bed-Stuy and path to Duke. Donnel shares vivid details of heating apartments with open gas ovens and carbon monoxide risks. | |
| Identifying Energy Poverty on the Campaign Trail | 3 | 4 | 1 | 1 | Guy asks about Donnel's work during the Obama campaign and DOE Recovery Act. Donnel explains realizing energy poverty was nationwide and recounting the challenges of the $6.5B green building initiative. | |
| The True Scale of Building Carbon Emissions | 4 | 5 | 2 | 1 | Guy cites global building emission figures, and Donnel immediately expands with higher US (30%) and NYC (67%) data points. Donnel passionately questions burning fossil fuels indoors in modern times. | |
| Business School and the Genesis of BlocPower | 3 | 4 | 1 | 1 | Guy asks about Donnel's MBA applications and focus on low-income communities. Donnel illustrates the massive pain point using a local church paying $10k monthly on heating oil. | |
| Mid-Episode Break One | 4 | 4 | 1 | 1 | Guy explores the transition from insulation to full building electrification. Donnel explains ripping out fossil fuel hardware and relying on clean grid power like Quebec hydro. | |
| Heat Pump Innovations and CO2 Refrigerants | 4 | 5 | 1 | 1 | Guy demonstrates understanding of heat pump mechanics and asks about refrigerants. Donnel explains how heat pumps function in extreme weather and the breakthrough of CO2 refrigerants. | |
| Financing Decarbonization Through Energy Savings | 4 | 4 | 2 | 2 | Guy highlights the high upfront cost of electrification for low-income homeowners. Donnel playfully pushes back on how easily investment was attracted and explains their energy savings debt amortization model. | |
| Pitching Building Conversions and Demonstrating Value | 3 | 4 | 1 | 1 | Guy asks how BlocPower convinces building owners to endure renovation hassles. Donnel uses the Brooklyn church example to show immediate net savings and improved property valuation. | |
| Workforce Development and Community Job Creation | 3 | 4 | 1 | 1 | Guy brings up BlocPower's local workforce sourcing. Donnel describes partnering with NYC to train 1,500 workers, including successfully recruiting an entire street gang into green construction. | |
| Mid-Episode Break Two | 4 | 5 | 1 | 2 | Guy presses Donnel on BlocPower's timeline to profitability. Donnel reveals they achieved profitability last year on $18M in revenue, balancing Wall Street debt obligations with VC growth strategies. | |
| The Bottom-Up Competitive Advantage and Public Trust | 4 | 5 | 1 | 1 | Guy asks about BlocPower's competitive moat against competitors. Donnel contrasts Tesla's top-down luxury approach with BlocPower's bottom-up mass-market strategy. | |
| Federal Incentives and Open-Source Scaling | 4 | 4 | 1 | 2 | Guy asserts that scaling decarbonization requires massive federal incentives beyond venture funding. Donnel agrees, citing the Defense Production Act and the necessity of open-sourcing data to replicate city-scale decarbonization. | |
| Equity in Wealth Generation and Crowdfunding | 4 | 6 | 3 | 2 | Guy asks who will generate the most wealth from the green transition. Donnel reframes the question to who should benefit, challenging traditional elite VC archetypes and advocating for community crowdfunding. | |
| Mobilizing for a Ten-Year Electrification Goal | 3 | 3 | 1 | 1 | Guy summarizes the viability and speed of building electrification compared to vehicle fleet turnover. Donnel delivers an optimistic closing call for a 10-year cross-coalition mobilization. |
Statements from this episode (28)
Baird: Most Bed-Stuy buildings lacked working heating systems in early 1980s
“And at the time in the early eighties, most of the buildings didn't have working heating systems.”
Baird: Bed-Stuy residents relied on open gas ovens for winter heat
“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.”
Baird: Labor unions planned $90B pension co-investment under 2009 Recovery Act
“And the labor unions had ninety billion dollars of pension funds that they wanted to co-invest in greening buildings with six billion dollars that was provided from the federal government as part of the Recovery Act.”
Baird: Buildings account for 30% of US and 67% of NYC emissions
“30%. Of the United States CO two emissions. Wow. And in New York City, where I am, buildings are 67%.”
Baird: 10,000 NYC apartment buildings burn delivered oil for heat and hot water
“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 …”
Baird: Training local youth to green buildings solves energy and employment waste
“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, and so that's what I wanted to do.”
Baird: Decarbonizing America's 125M buildings will cost $5 trillion
“Greening buildings in America is going to cost like Five trillion dollars. There's a hundred and twenty-five million buildings in America.”
Baird: Investing $5T to green buildings will yield $700B in returns
“Someone's gonna make, like.7 trillion dollars by investing five trillion dollars. So someone's gonna make, like, huge fortunes, right?”
Baird: NYC will get most electricity from Quebec hydro by 2023
“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. Oh. And so there's this giant dam in Quebec that spins a bunch of turbines, and Produces clean electricity and sends that electricity…”
Baird: BlocPower Installs In-Unit Induction Stoves and Modular Heat Pumps
“We're going into each unit. We're putting in all electric induction stoves that use electricity to cook on the stovetop 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 …”
Baird: Heat Pumps Function from -5°F to 105°F
“Whether it's a 105 degrees or whether it's five degrees below zero, they are able to function.”
Baird: Electrifying the Average American Home Costs Around $100,000
“Yeah, you might spend a 100,000 dollars to electrify the average American's home.”
Baird: Electrification Cuts Home Energy Bills by 20% to 60%
“When we electrify your home, we think we're going to save you 2040, 60% on your annual energy bill. Because The modern all-electric equipment that we're putting in is so much more efficient than the wasteful, unhealthy fossil fuel equipment that's currently in…”
Baird: Greening a building increases its sale value 10% to 15%
“If you were going to sell this building, now it's a green building, and it's going to be worth 10, 15% more than it otherwise would be.”
Baird: BlocPower is hiring and training 1,500 NYC workers for building electrification
“We have got a really cool project in New York with Mayor Eric Adams. We're hiring 1500 people from the low income communities where I grew up and where I was a community organizer in New York City, and we're training them on how to electrify buildings. And we'…”
BlocPower trained and disbanded a 50-member New York street gang
“Guy, we had a whole street gang that was like out dealing drugs a few months ago, and there's like 50 of them, and they came to us and they said, look, we're willing to shut down the gang if you guys are willing to train us and get us certified and get us jobs…”
Baird: BlocPower won a contract to electrify every building in Ithaca
“We just want a contract from the city of Ithaca, New York, where Cornell University is located. And we have four years to electrify every single building inside city limits.”
Baird: BlocPower operates decarbonization partnerships in D.C., Georgia, and California
“So we're doing that in In D.C., and in Georgia, and in San Luis Obispo, and Oakland, California, and lots of places across the country who are headed this way, who've already passed laws that they're going to be a hundred percent green by the year 2030.”
Donnel Baird: BlocPower hit $18M revenue and turned profitable in 2021
“I think we were profitable last year. There was like a stray million dollars in there that I couldn't quite get my little grubby CEO hands on that they hid from me, and so I think we, like, made a million, I think we did, like, eighteen million in revenue last…”
Donnel Baird: Goldman and Microsoft debt provides most of BlocPower's capital
“The majority of the capital that we've raised is actually from Goldman and Microsoft, and we have to repay them. And so, every dollar that we take in from them has to have a plan where we can give them four, five, six, seven percent return. Out of the profits …”
Donnel Baird: BlocPower will forfeit profitability to scale for IPO
“Over the next two to five years, as we prepare to like go public and IPO, we will not be profitable. If I'm doing my job, like we will be investing in R&D and expansion, just like Uber did, right? Or Airbnb or any other tech company, because we want to take th…”
Baird: BlocPower must go public to win municipal and utility trust
“We gotta go public. And again, why? We partner with conservative energy utility companies, with mayors, with congresspeople, with city council folks who are trying to decarbonize and electrify their city. They don't want to partner with a startup. They want to…”
Baird: Targeting low-income customers gives BlocPower a mass-market advantage
“We've flipped that on its head and said, we're going to start with the lowest income people first, and that allows us to be mass market first, and so that has been a painful journey, but now that we've seen a little bit of success, yeah, we do have a competiti…”
Baird: Carbon capture market will be larger than gold and oil
“Yeah, it's going to be like Bigger than gold and oil. That's correct.”
Baird: BlocPower is signing up nine cities to race Ithaca's electrification
“With our project in Ithaca, for example, we are signing up nine other cities across America to race Ithaca to electrify all of the buildings.”
BlocPower filed with the SEC to allow retail crowdfunding
“We've filed with the SEC to raise capital also from ordinary Americans.”
Baird: Building decarbonization can be accomplished within ten years
“We can do this in the next 10 years.”
Baird: All required hardware, AI, and capital exist to electrify buildings
“We have all the hardware we need. Wall Street's gonna give us all the capital we need. We have all the machine learning and digital twin technology that we need to figure this out. We have everything we need to go do this, right? And like, we can do it. It's a…”