Donnel Baird
Founder & CEO, BlocPower · 1 appearance on the record.
computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →
28statements → 14claims → 7claims resolved → 29%fully supported → 3.86/5average certainty → 1.68/5average debate potential → ≈4.5/5argument clarity, estimated →
2 supported 1 partly supported 4 contradicted 1 not yet assessed 6 not checkable as stated how the 14 claims stand · each chip opens the sources
4 predictions · 10 assertions · 2 opinions · 2 insights · 10 disclosures · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 14 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 7 are resolved, 1 is not yet assessed, and 6 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.
The record, in short
What the tape says about how Donnel argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.
Their most notable supported claim
Their most notable contradicted claim
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…”
Expressed certainty vs assessment result
weighted support: a fully supported claim counts one, a partly supported claim counts half. Each filled bar is clickable and opens exactly those claims; "none yet" means nothing said at that certainty level has resolved yet
How they sound: not measured why? →
We measure speaking style by listening to the audio itself, and a fair number needs at least 2,000 words from one person on tape we have measured. There is too little of Donnel Baird on measured tape to publish a rate. This says nothing about how they speak.
Everything Donnel Baird said on How I Built This that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →
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: 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…”
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…”
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: 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: 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…”
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: 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 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.”
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 …”
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: 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.”
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: 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'…”
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.”
Appearances (1)
| Episode | Date | Speaking time |
|---|---|---|
| HIBT Lab! BlocPower: Donnel Baird | Jul 7, 2022 | 31m |