In this episode, we profile an entrepreneur who’s applying lessons from politics, community organizing, and data crunching to clean energy in inner cities: Donnel Baird.
In this episode, an entrepreneur who’s applying community organizing tactics and data crunching to clean energy in inner cities: Donnel Baird.
Donnel is the CEO and Founder of Blocpower, a startup based in Brooklyn, New York.
Blocpower helps inner-city buildings lease heat pumps, install new lighting systems, or invest in solar. And it has a piece of software to help microtarget the right buildings and make installations faster.
Donnel grew up in a small apartment in Brooklyn, where he experienced energy poverty and was forced to think about how the environment directly impacts quality of life.
“I think when you're poor you have to be aware of your environment and the kinds of adverse health impacts that can be caused by your environment. That's part of surviving as a poor person in America or any country. And I think that in my family we were, we were definitely super attuned to that,” explains Donnel.
Later, he played a role in the green jobs push within the Obama Administration. It opened his eyes to the limitations of the green building sector.
“The green buildings and energy efficiency industry is fundamentally broken. It has sales problems, it has mechanical engineering and energy efficiency audit problems. It has a huge financing problem, it has a construction and installation problem. It has an M&V problem, and if you pour $7 billion into that failed industry and hyper fragmented industry, we didn't get the results that we would've hoped,” he says.
In this episode, we tell Donnel’s story of frustration, confusion and inspiration that led him to become a founder.
Brad Langley: (00:02)
Man, Devren, it's hard to believe, but did you notice, but almost exactly 11 years since Barack Obama won the election.
Devren Hobbs: (00:09)
Oh wow. Has it been that long? You know, I actually worked on that election, registering people to vote.
Brad Langley: (00:14)
Nice. Yeah, I still remember where I was when I saw that unforgettable speech at Hyde Park in Chicago. It was pretty surreal watching a former community organizer turned Senator address hundreds of thousands of people as the first black president. But there's something also historic that's maybe less apparent in that story. Devren, I'm curious, what do you think is the most lasting impact of Obama's 2008 campaign?
Devren Hobbs: (00:41)
Hmm. Most lasting impact of the campaign. Well, the campaign makes me think about that poster. Do you remember the Hope poster designed by Shepard Fairey?
Brad Langley: (00:50)
Yeah. Who can forget that. It was plastered everywhere at the time and while it's iconic, it's not quite what I'm thinking of.
Devren Hobbs: (00:56)
Okay. All right. Well, okay. How about the the first presidential fist bump with the first lady?
Brad Langley: (01:08)
I'd forgotten about that. Obviously a fun moment, but, no, here's what I'm thinking. It was actually the use of psychographic data. It was this really interesting blend of community organizing and data mining. Our guest this week, he's a product of those efforts. He actually worked on the campaign and within the Obama white house as a senior staffer on their energy team. And today his company is using old fashioned organizing and new sources of data to uncover an untapped market for clean energy in inner cities.
Donnel Baird: (01:38)
I started with politics and community organizing, ended up in presidential politics and now the action I take that I think can move the needle forward is tech entrepreneurship.
Brad Langley: (01:51)
This is Illuminators a show about the people and the forces transforming the business of energy. I'm Brad Langley, I'm a marketing director of at Uplight.
Devren Hobbs: (02:04)
And I'm Devren Hobbs. I run a product team at Uplight. In this series we talk with founders, executives, decision makers who are all at the forefront of disruption in energy. What do their stories tell us about this crazy competitive business world we find ourselves in?
Brad Langley: (02:18)
In this episode we talked to an entrepreneur who is applying community organizing and data crunching to clean local energy. His name is Donnel Baird and Donnel's the CEO and founder of a company called BlocPower. They're a startup based in Brooklyn, New York. BlocPower works with churches and community centers and affordable housing units to become more energy efficient. And they do this by leasing heat pumps, installing new lighting systems, investing in solar or all three. At BlocPower They have a piece of software to help micro target the right buildings in these inner cities. Now lots of companies are doing variations of this, true, but as Donnel explains, BlocPower took a very different approach from the start.
Donnel Baird: (02:59)
I remember being in a meeting, I'm not going to throw anybody under the bus, but it was at a major national environmental organization and we were in a training workshop. And there's this really powerful woman who's an investor who has, I don't know, $50 million or whatever, just a really powerful wealthy person. And we were talking about how to get low income people involved in the climate movement and she was like, "Look like we're going to start with the rich people first who can afford to pay for the solar and we'll get to the poor people at some point down the line and the rich people will figure it out for them."
Donnel Baird: (03:32)
That was like her approach and that is the approach of many activists and advocates and business people in clean energy, unfortunately. But the low income buildings waste the most energy. They wasted most fossil fuels per square foot. The hyper affluent buildings and the hyper low income buildings consume more energy per square foot than any other class of buildings. And so head to head, apples to apples, there's just a ton of money to be saved in low income buildings.
Devren Hobbs: (04:02)
And what's the size of that particular slice of the market?
Brad Langley: (04:04)
It's huge. And we're talking millions of properties worth tens of billions of dollars in energy costs. And so Donnel saw this potential well before going to business school and founding the company or thinking about things like total addressable market. And it's because he lived it, his parents moved to Brooklyn from Guyana in the 1980s you know that country's economy had just collapsed. And despite his parents being successful in Guyana, they had to start completely from scratch in Brooklyn.
Donnel Baird: (04:33)
Lived in Brooklyn until I was eight or nine with my parents and my aunts and cousins in a one bedroom apartment in Bedford-Stuyvesant, which was back in the 80s was a pretty terrible neighborhood, a lot of drug dealing, lot of gun violence, largely surrounding the drug trade. So you know, pretty tough circumstances.
Brad Langley: (04:58)
And from an early age Donnel was forced to think about how the environment directly impacts quality of life. How did that upbringing shaped the way you understood your relationship to energy or the environment?
Donnel Baird: (05:10)
Yeah, I mean my dad ran this box site mining operation and so like any mining operation, there's a set of environmental health impacts that as you manage people, miners who you know are breathing stuff in and out, dealing with the waste treatment from the manufacturing processes. So you know, in hindsight all of that environmental waste from the mining and manufacturing may or may not have contributed to some of the difficulties my mother faced in losing her first several pregnancies. While the health impacts of environmental triggers is something that we've always been attuned to because coming from that environment in the minds where this health impact moving into a low income neighborhood with no heat, often hot water, having to heat our apartment with the oven and being aware that we needed to open up the windows so that we can release carbon monoxide.
Donnel Baird: (06:06)
I think when you're poor you have to be aware of your environment and the kinds of adverse health impacts that can be caused by your environment. That's part of surviving as a poor person in America or any country. And I think that in my family we were, we were definitely super attuned to that.
Brad Langley: (06:25)
They were also really aware that success had to be built. Donnel's parents were constructing their lives all over again and they wanted to make sure he had a strong educational foundation. When you grow up in an environment like Brooklyn, as you describe it with drug dealing and violence, what was it about you that got you out of it and not into it?
Donnel Baird: (06:45)
You know, my parents really imparted to me even though we were in difficult circumstances, how important education was. They really enforce like pretty strict rules around when we could play outside, which was basically we couldn't. They got us tested and sent us to magnet schools. They spent a lot of time taking us to libraries. We had to write separate book reports and had separate home work assignments from my mom on top of whatever homework we got from school.
Donnel Baird: (07:14)
And so my parents were really focused on making sure that we were like safe and well educated. And then personally I just happened to have a talent for standardized testing and so was always really able to do well on the kind of generic standardized tests and so had some educational opportunities that really kind of separated me out of the neighborhood. I was bused to different schools that kind of stuff. So I think those were kind of the two components there.
Brad Langley: (07:45)
It was that talent that landed Donnel at Duke university, but admittedly he didn't take school very seriously at first. Instead, he got involved in activism. He joined multiple groups on campus. There was one that was protesting the fact that Duke sports apparel was made in sweatshops. Another that was pressing the school to increase pay for cafeteria workers. It was a way for him to channel frustrations that he was just starting to grapple with.
Donnel Baird: (08:09)
I was really angry in college. I was really isolated and it was taking baby steps one step at a time to figure out how to learn about political activism and advocacy and kind of put two and two together. But the one shining light for me was that I started to study the student nonviolent coordinating committee, which led the African American civil rights movement, starting with the sit-ins at lunch counters in North Carolina, in Greensboro, and also Nashville, Tennessee.
Donnel Baird: (08:40)
And so reading and learning and studying and eventually meeting some of my civil rights heroes who are 19, 20 years old, when they started to sit in at lunch counters and get beat up, get thrown into jail because they were fighting for the right for black people to vote in this country. And seeing that people who were so young could make such a huge difference really, really left an impression on me. And so in college I made a commitment that when I graduated I was going to become a community organizer and that's exactly what I did.
Brad Langley: (09:12)
So you got all this anger and frustration. What brought you out of that? What gave you the clarity you were seeking?
Donnel Baird: (09:18)
Hmm, good question. It was actually my professor who actually became like a surrogate grandpa to me. He's a white dude from Texas. His name is Lawrence Goodwin. He wrote this book called the Populous Moment and he taught a class on the history of social movements. And so we studied the populous, we studied the black civil rights movement. So we studied like what were the mechanics by which a large successful social movement starts. How does it maintain itself, how does it grow, how does it create impact on the society and on the world?
Donnel Baird: (09:57)
The farmers' revolt, many people viewed as a failure in the 80s and 90s but what they were looking for eventually became the federal reserve bank, which our country countries still use today. And they laid the groundwork for a lot of the new deal that FDR put in place in the 30s. It helped me to understand that yes, I was angry. Yes, I was frustrated and isolated. I thought things were really unfair, which they are, but they often have been unfair for most human beings throughout human history. And so the thing to do is not get all down in dumps and frowny all the time, but to figure out a way of taking action to make progress on the issues that you care about.
Brad Langley: (10:37)
So he gets this job that has a knocking on the doors of community leaders and talking with them about what they need in their neighborhoods. This was actually the same group that Barack Obama worked for in his mid 20s some of the people who train Donnel were the same people who trained Obama for Obama. That work set him up to campaign for office for Donnel it gave him the foundation to eventually start a business persistence, time management and credibility.
Donnel Baird: (11:02)
So there's all these stories about, that I know Obama talks about the process by which you gain credibility and people slam the door in your face initially, but you're persistent and they appreciate your persistence and eventually they come to respect and admire you. I remember one of the first three meetings that I did was in a low income, horrible building in Brownsville. And I asked this 50 year old mother well, why do you want to work to improve the community by getting a local high school, a new local high school built in this neighborhood?
Donnel Baird: (11:37)
And she said, "To be honest with you, I haven't talked to anybody about it, but my eldest son is incarcerated. And I think if we'd had a better high school in our community with, with activities and resources for him that he would have found a different." So you try to understand what's driving people, what they care about, what their sacred stories are. And your job really as a community organizer is to get people to work on the things that they already want to work on. And you're just providing them a framework. And so really at the end of the day, your job is like, look, like if you want to build a new high school in this neighborhood, like I don't live in this neighborhood. You do, what are you willing to do in order to build this new high school?
Brad Langley: (12:22)
Did that high school get built?
Donnel Baird: (12:23)
Yeah.
Brad Langley: (12:24)
Is that one of your crowning achievements of community organization? I mean I imagine you had a lot of those under your belt, but which one are you most proud of as you look back on those days?
Donnel Baird: (12:36)
My crowning achievement as a community organizer was a green jobs campaign that we ran in DC. My assignment was to commute back and forth to DC from New York a few days a week to work with a coalition of labor unions who were trying to partner with the US Department of Energy on energy efficiency and building work across the country as a part of the stimulus package. And so the Obama administration was investing I think seven and a half billion dollars to green buildings across the country. And the labor unions wanted in on the action. They wanted to make sure that those jobs were union jobs. Green construction jobs are union jobs with a living wage and healthcare. And the labor unions had actually set aside something like $50 billion that they were going to co-invest with the stimulus to help create those jobs and create the green buildings industry across America.
Donnel Baird: (13:31)
So that was my job was to kind of coordinate all that across the country. That was clergy, people of faith, Sierra club, environmentalist, and then a bunch of labor union dudes and women. And that coalition that we built, we hosted a meeting in a church in the poorest part of DC that had a thousand people show up to the meeting. And the mayor of DC, Adrian Fenty attended the meeting, and we asked them to invest $100 million to train and hire ex offenders, formerly incarcerated people in DC to do green construction work, to green low income buildings in DC. And Adrian Fenty said yes. And he went ahead and actually invested the hundred million dollars. And so as a community organizer, that was one of my proudest accomplishment. The other one was that we used our community organizing skill set to help elect Barack Obama in 2008. And I'm pretty proud of that as well.
Devren Hobbs: (14:26)
So was that the start of BlocPower?
Brad Langley: (14:29)
Yeah, it was, although not for the reasons you might think. Getting all those commitments from city leaders and rallying the union groups was obviously an incredible lift, but when the money came in for green jobs programs, there were so many barriers again into the right place. And the administration's plan and create millions of green jobs. It fell flat and Donnel saw these problems up close. It convinced him that something else needed to be fixed.
Donnel Baird: (14:54)
The Genesis for BlocPower is that a lot of what we were working on didn't work. That portion of the stimulus didn't work as well as we would've hoped. And our green jobs campaign in DC with the 100 million didn't work as well as we would have hoped. And a part of it is because the green buildings and energy efficiency industry is fundamentally broken. It has sales problems, it has mechanical engineering and energy efficiency audit problems. It has a huge financing problem, it has a construction and installation problem. It has an M and V problem, and if you pour $7 billion into that failed industry and hyper fragmented industry, we didn't get the results that we would've hoped.
Brad Langley: (15:40)
So is this the point where you realize that to make the impact that you wanted to, you had to go start your own company and to tackle these challenges?
Donnel Baird: (15:48)
Yes. Three years in, I took a look around and said we didn't hit our goals and we're not going to, we've created some jobs, but now we're going to have to lay some people off because we're running out of money. And we didn't find a way to create this new industry in a robust way. In order to fix this, I'm going to need to learn something about business, something about finance. I need to go to business school.
Devren Hobbs: (16:13)
Oh, back at school he wasn't in the best mindset for undergrad. Was business school any different?
Brad Langley: (16:20)
You know, it was definitely a major adjustment for him. He went from a world of clipboards and nonprofits to a world of spreadsheets and bottom lines. Business school sounds like the oil to your water talk. Talk to me a little bit about your experience.
Donnel Baird: (16:34)
Business school was rough on me. The first year is really, really tough. The second year was much, much better. In the first year I just had a culture shock and a value shock, right? Like the values of the private sector are fundamentally different from the government and the civic sector, the citizenship sector of nonprofits and community institutions. Columbia has deep relationships with wall street, banks has deep relationships with leading consulting firms but can see Deloitte, Bain, et cetera.
Donnel Baird: (17:05)
And so as the recruiters were coming to campus as we were training to meet with them, as we were reading our case studies, as we were going through corporate finance or corporate strategy, the basis for all of the decisions was profitability and that just was really foreign to me and it was tough for me to swallow that.
Brad Langley: (17:22)
It was hard at first, but the business framework, it helped Donnel gestate ideas he had been thinking about for years ideas he thought about as an organizer, as a senior staffer in the White House as a kid who had the heat is one bedroom apartment with an oven. There's tens of billions of dollars going into making buildings cleaner and more efficient. Donnel wanted to know how do you get it to the places that need it most and how do you spend it the right way. Those are tall tasks, so he got his business plan and his elevator pitch dialed in and for the last six years it's absolutely consumed him.
Brad Langley: (17:58)
Talk to me then about BlocPower. We've just met at a cocktail party and you're giving me the 10,000 foot view of what it is you do, what problem you're trying to solve.
Donnel Baird: (18:09)
There's 5 million buildings across the country that are medium size buildings, schools, churches, synagogues, nonprofits, government buildings, small businesses, apartment complexes. They waste $100 billion per year paying for fossil fuel energy that they pay for but do not use. They just waste it. It's responsible for something like 7% to 12% of the U S greenhouse gas emissions and it's just pure waste. And so BlocPower is building a software platform to reduce that hundred billion dollars of waste and hopefully make $20 billion in the process.
Brad Langley: (18:48)
And you guys got a unique approach and the fact that you're using IOT sensors in buildings. So talk a little bit about the technology that allows you to, I think really improve a pretty antiquated audit process that's currently in place for how people determine if these buildings are losing energy or how much, so talk to me a bit about your approach.
Donnel Baird: (19:07)
Yeah, I mean there's been several tech revolutions that have occurred in the last 10 years, right? There's a revolution in mobile computing and smart phones, which we take for granted at this point, but was like just getting off the ground 10 years ago. There's a revolution in machine learning and artificial intelligence and the cost and accessibility of using that software. Like any college kid in a computer science class uses machine learning.
Donnel Baird: (19:34)
There's a collapse in the cost of cloud computing. And the ability to remotely host your applications and data. And there's a revolution in the internet of things. And the fact that devices or low cost sensors can stream real time data to you and you can put that data into the cloud and you can analyze it with machine learning. It's going to view all that stuff in your mobile phone, blah blah blah. Right. So the question is how do you apply that software revolution to the energy efficiency industry, which largely hasn't changed since 1980.
Donnel Baird: (20:09)
All of the new datasets and software applications that are available to us allow us to collapse the cost of energy audits to make predictions about scopes of work, to integrate information from construction firms, financial firms, and energy efficiency audit firms in order to dramatically reduce the cost of servicing green equipment upgrades and energy efficiency upgrades in medium sized buildings.
Brad Langley: (20:44)
And so how's it going? So you mentioned there's 5 million buildings, which I guess represents your addressable market. How many buildings right now are you guys retrofitting? And maybe talk to me about a recent project that exemplifies what you've done and the impacts of that work?
Donnel Baird: (21:03)
Yeah, so we've completed a thousand buildings. We think there's 30,000 target buildings in New York, so what's that 3% we've done 3% of the market. We feel pretty good about that as an early stage company. Now that our software works in New York, we feel comfortable and have a plan for expanding it across the country to the next 20 to 50 cities. A cool project that we're really proud of in the electrification project in Brooklyn, there is a low income building that has six units. We have upgraded that building to solar panels on the roof and in unit ductless mini split air source heat pumps in the building which reduces the need for natural gas to provide heat and hot water to that building.
Donnel Baird: (21:52)
And so instead of burning natural gas all day for heating hot water, 24/7 365 this building is now using solar power to power its heat and its hot water. It's dramatically reduce utility costs. Their building is now more valuable, it's healthier and it's darn near fossil fuel free. So we're excited that in a low income urban building in Brooklyn with no money, we were able to electrify it. And we think that's the future is electrifying buildings that the entire utility sector and real estate sector are going to need to move to beneficial electrification. And so we're proud to be at the cutting edge of that.
Brad Langley: (22:35)
So, but I also know running a startup is hard and you guys have lots of different stakeholders that you're trying to engage with. And there's complexity in that as well. What, what are the biggest challenges facing BlocPower right now? You guys have aggressive growth aspirations. What are you concerned is going to prevent you from achieving those?
Donnel Baird: (22:57)
Our biggest challenge is my failure as a fundraiser. I'm just a horrible fundraiser. I hate it. I mean, we've raised some venture capital, not nearly enough to be commensurate with what we've achieved as a company. You look at SunRun, they raised $300 million before they did a project finance facility. But we've only raised like $3 million of venture equity. And so our business is quite under-capitalized. I think that makes it hard for utility executives to feel the level of confidence that they need to in partnering with us. We're grateful for kind of Edison and PG and E and the other partners that we have. But we need to raise more capital. And fundamentally that's my fault. I'm the CEO, I'm the founder and I should go out and just raise more capital. But that's really the constraint.
Donnel Baird: (23:51)
We've won large eight figure utility contracts and now we have developed our software. It has proven that it can reduce costs of energy efficiency projects by 90% for buildings that we target. We have a 60% project conversion and completion rate when other competitors, their conversion and completion rates are less than 1%. so we've accomplished a ton and we need to go off and raise some venture capital or private equity so that we can kind of serve 20, 30, 40 cities at a time. Again, I'm black. I don't think that Silicon Valley and wall street are beating down the door to invest in black led companies, unfortunately. But that's no excuse. There's a climate crisis to deal with. And so, so that's something that we're working on but that's our major constraint.
Brad Langley: (24:48)
So as an entrepreneur of color in a predominantly white industry, what else have you faced or what else have your experiences been like?
Donnel Baird: (25:02)
There's a lot of challenges with the energy industry. I mean, on top of race, there's obviously a gender problem. I also think the fact that most of the people are like mechanical engineers. Is a whole unexplored problem that we need to get into at some point as well. If we're looking at really innovate and transform this industry, right? There's a risk aversion inside our industry that isn't great. It doesn't serve as well. It doesn't serve the industry well, and we're not going to be able to innovate our way out of the climate crisis unless we get on top of that. You know, look, our job is to survive and advance and take a licking and keep on ticking and grow our company and serve our customers and get bigger and stronger and tougher. And we're more than competent enough to outperform any competitor regardless of what color they are.
Donnel Baird: (25:55)
And so we set a standard internally that our job is to provide the best service and solutions to our customers. And that's what we do. And we're so good at it that whatever drag we may face because of our skin color, we also have a lot of women in our company. Our job is to outperform and to educate so that we can kind of bring our customers and our industry partners along according to our vision of how the world should be and how it will be and to kind of make that happen. So that's what we do.
Devren Hobbs: (26:29)
I like his clarity of vision.
Brad Langley: (26:31)
Yeah, no doubt. You know, like so many entrepreneurs, it took years of angst and second guessing and personal transformation to get there. It also took years of canvassing in neighborhoods listening and sometimes getting doors slammed in his face. So then I've got one last question for you. It's clear that community organizing directly shaped the way you run your company. What can it teach us about how utilities and other companies can foster and spread the benefits of the energy transition?
Donnel Baird: (27:01)
The lesson from community organizing is you're a community organizer. You're walking into a low income community, everyone's been screwed over, whether it's at work by the government police or... There's a bunch of bad experiences that low income people have in. Your job is to show up and build trust and demonstrate to them that you're not going to treat them like dirt. You're not going to treat them poorly. You're going to respect them and they can trust you.
Donnel Baird: (27:26)
Part of the challenge that our industry has to solve going forward is how can we gain and maintain the trust of all of our customers as we go through a massive conversion to distributed energy and clean energy, and how do we do this together in a way that works for everybody? There's going to have to be a ton of trust. The ability for any of our customers to kind of look us in the eye and know that we're telling them the truth about what's best for them and what's best for their building. That's how we're able to convince a low income co-op to spend $150,000 that they don't have to install solar and shift to an all electric heating system.
Donnel Baird: (28:03)
When it's twice the cost of the natural gas system. The ability to develop and maintain that trust at scale, that's like the secret sauce of our company because our customers trust us, we can persuade them to take on innovative, interesting, complicated, clean energy projects that that other firms can't. So that's the major lesson.
Brad Langley: (28:26)
Well, this has been fantastic. I really wish you and BlocPower nothing but success. I love what you guys are doing. I think more importantly, I love how you're doing it and I appreciate you giving us this time today. We're really pleased to tell your story to our listeners.
Donnel Baird: (28:40)
Awesome. This is an awesome podcast.
Brad Langley: (28:42)
Thank you.
Donnel Baird: (28:43)
Uplight's amazing company. Super excited to be here.
Devren Hobbs: (28:51)
All right, so in coming episodes we'll be talking to Miranda Ballantine and she used to run the sustainability programs for Walmart and for the air force and now she's CEO of the Renewable Energy Buyers Alliance where she helps the world's biggest companies buy tons of wind and solar energy. And then we'll be hearing from Michael Lee brick, a clean energy data guru, Olympic skier and founder of Bloomberg New Energy Finance.
Brad Langley: (29:18)
Illuminators is a podcast from Uplight a software and analytics leader, changing the way the world uses energy to learn more about how we're helping the biggest utilities engage with their customers like Amazon and Netflix do go to uplight.com
Devren Hobbs: (29:31)
if you liked the show, please support us by subscribing and then send out the word on social media or rate and review us on Apple podcasts. You can also find out more at uplight.com/illuminators.
Brad Langley: (29:43)
Illuminators is produced by post-script audio in collaboration with Uplight, Stephen Lacey and Daniel Waldorf are our producers. Our theme music is composed by Title Card Music and Sound. Again, I am Brad Langley.
Devren Hobbs: (29:56)
And I'm Devren Hobbs. This is Illuminators a show about the people and the forces transforming the business of energy.