EVERY MAN A NODE:

Baird founded BlocPower in 2014--but the company's agenda just became even more relevant with the passage of Biden's Build Back Better bill, which includes $6 billion toward home energy retrofits. The company replaces aging systems that run on fossil fuels with more efficient alternatives like electric heat pumps and solar panels, saving building owners between 10% and 50% on energy costs.

Earlier this month, BlocPower partnered with the city of Ithaca, New York, to electrify every single building in the city (that's over 6,000 homes and buildings) by 2030. The company is projected to cut about 40% of the city's overall carbon footprint--saving approximately 160,000 tons of carbon dioxide by 2030, or the equivalent of about 35,000 cars driven in a year. It's a tall order, but it's only the beginning.

Buildings account for almost 40% of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States. And a whopping 80% of domestic energy comes from fossil fuels. In the winter of 2019-2020, about 5.5 million households in the United States used oil as their main heating fuel, almost entirely in the Northeast. "Literally, a truck will pull up and dump oil into the basement," says Baird. "365 days a year, they are burning oil in the basement."

We know by now that burning fossil fuels releases large amounts of carbon dioxide into the air, which causes global warming. So, the roadmap is obvious: To slow climate change, we need to decarbonize our buildings. And to decarbonize our buildings, we need to electrify them.

For Baird, the answer lies in heat pumps. These devices use a small amount of electricity to move heat from one place to another. Heat pumps have been around for decades, but they're getting more efficient. In fact, your fridge is a heat pump, as is your air conditioning, except they only push heat in one direction. Heat pumps do both: they can heat in the winter and cool in the summer. (Baird wants to rebrand them as "climate pumps.")

When heat pumps are installed, sometimes coupled with solar panels, the need for radiators or air conditioning--and fuel-burning boilers--is gone. "We want to turn buildings into a Tesla," says Baird. "If Tesla can take the fossil fuel engine out of an automobile, we can now take all the fossil fuel equipment out of a building."

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