YouSaid · the spoken record

Donnel Baird

lines on the record: 62
first: 2022-07-07
most recent: 2022-07-07
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“We can do this in the next 10 years. I think that if we mobilize a generation of young people who are focused on this problem across the political aisle, right? Like I talk to young evangelical Christians who are very concerned about preserving God's creation in the face of catastrophic climate change. Like, how do we come together as a generation and say, this is a solvable problem? We have all the hardware we need. Wall Street's going to 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 doable thing.”
2022-07-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! BlocPower: Donnel Baird · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As investors as well as customers. And I think if we could achieve that, then we would also be building the broad-based political coalition that is needed to pass climate change legislation.”
2022-07-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! BlocPower: Donnel Baird · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We've filed with the SEC to raise capital also from ordinary Americans. But that's not just like a moral or ethical thing to do, right? Like we need more and more Americans to look in the mirror and say if 50% of Americans are alarmed about the climate crisis, what can we do about it? Right. So yes, we can complain and call our senators and post on Twitter or whatever. And we can go out and buy an electric vehicle. That's great. And we can decarbonize our homes. But we need like a movement of Americans across multiple parts of society that is broader than just like a thin partnership with venture capitalists and Wall Street. Like we need regular working and middle class Americans to embrace the opportunity of climate change to make money. And so in our view, it wouldn't just be the entrepreneurs and the Silicon Valley tech companies and investors in Wall Street folks who would make money off of this. But all of us would co-invest in climate companies.”
2022-07-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! BlocPower: Donnel Baird · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Then there's Wall Street. And so our partners at Goldman Sachs, for example, they have allocated $700 billion to invest in addressing the climate crisis. And I think that number is only going up. So there's trillions of dollars of capital from Wall Street and Silicon Valley and the government to invest. And they will choose a set of entrepreneurs and companies who they hope will grow and scale and expand and make a ton of money while solving the climate crisis. But I think there's a bigger question around who should, and you know, that's traditional capitalism and innovation in America and Silicon Valley style technology investing. And like, that's how it's going to go if left unchallenged. I think that there's another better path, though. We actually believe in a lot of crowdfunding, for example.”
2022-07-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! BlocPower: Donnel Baird · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And with this archetype of a founder who from what we're being told, it's like a 19 year old Caucasian male who drops out of Stanford or Harvard, you know, likes Steve Jobs, like Zuckerberg, like Bill Gates. Silicon Valley is looking to finance that kind of archetypal founder and company to solve the climate crisis. So that's one piece of it. The second piece of it is the federal government is investing billions and billions of dollars. Biden-Harris administration is providing lots of capital to small businesses and companies, just like the Obama administration loaned $500 million to Tesla and Elon Musk. There's like a ton, there's like $40 billion of loans that are being made to green energy companies using taxpayer dollars, which the companies will need to repay. Yeah.”
2022-07-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! BlocPower: Donnel Baird · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Who and how, and then I would say a third question is who should make the most money off of it, right? So I think that innovation in America from as far as I can tell is funded by Silicon Valley Venture Capitalists. They are making a ton of money. They have invested in Uber and Airbnb and all these incredible companies that have done really, really well. And they've made a ton of money. And so now folks who normally invest in other kinds of investments like Fidelity, they're like, oh, we got to come in and start investing in venture capital as well. And so to the extent that the climate crisis can be solved by the traditional Silicon Valley suite of solutions, meaning chiefly software, right?”
2022-07-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! BlocPower: Donnel Baird · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Billions of people across the world now do. And so we need that kind of solution at scale. And I think it's possible, and I wouldn't be working on it otherwise. I'd go find something else to do”
2022-07-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! BlocPower: Donnel Baird · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For example, we are signing up nine other cities across America to race Ithaca to electrify all of the buildings. And I think we got to make it interesting and competitive for local folks, right? Like what are the ways that we can collaborate in a scenario where we have robust federal investment? And how do we get this done even if that federal investment tapers off? And then, you know, there's other countries around the world, right? Like, you know, India, they don't have robust government investment across the continent of India to get this done. And so we've got to demonstrate and explore and then share data. And that data will allow capital markets to scale and replicate solutions across the country. 20 years ago, I didn't think that everyone would have an iPhone or an Android, but.”
2022-07-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! BlocPower: Donnel Baird · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so heat pumps and electric ovens are now going to be incentivized through this wartime production act to be manufactured in America at low cost. We're not going to have to ship them overseas, right? And so the cost of these things are going to drop dramatically if this plan works. And over the next two and a half years, the Biden-Harris team will put a lot of capital out to finance companies and green infrastructure projects across America. And then what needs to happen, guy, is those projects, we need half of them to be successful. And then they need to share their data on their engineering, their construction, their design. They need to open source and share that data globally so that Silicon Valley and Wall Street can duplicate and scale those projects. And so with our project in Ithaca.”
2022-07-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! BlocPower: Donnel Baird · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Correct. And so, what does it look like to do that, right? And so, yes, it is important to have federal incentives. And we have some of those in the bipartisan infrastructure bill that was passed. Now, what's interesting, the president used the Defense Production Act, which puts us on like wartime footing to produce all-electric appliances.”
2022-07-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! BlocPower: Donnel Baird · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And look, more importantly, I think that allows us to build a political coalition of people who can access our technologies and who, you know, it's a broader range of people who are going to care about climate policy. So maybe we can get something passed. And that's what this is all about.”
2022-07-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! BlocPower: Donnel Baird · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. And so now you're charging people like $75K. And then you keep investing, and then you bring the cost down to $30K. Same thing with the Apple iPhone, right? 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 competitive advantage and that we can expand to be mass market before other kinds of companies that have really been focused on more affluent customers. So that's right.”
2022-07-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! BlocPower: Donnel Baird · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was expensive, right? Like most Americans can't afford that. And then as you're successful, you sell enough of those things, you invest, you buy more machines, and then now you do the sedan.”
2022-07-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! BlocPower: Donnel Baird · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think in Silicon Valley, and this is why we had such a hard time raising capital initially, you know, look at Tesla, like they come out with the Roadster first, and it's like, I don't know, would it cost 100 grand, 200 grand? Yeah.”
2022-07-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! BlocPower: Donnel Baird · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We got to 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. Want to be able to like go on Google and see that you're a publicly traded and you're stable and your financials are good and if a mayor signs an agreement with us that five years from now all his voters aren't going to kick him out of or her out of office because we went bankrupt, right? So they want that stability and transparency and we're going to need to do that in the public markets. Absolutely.”
2022-07-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! BlocPower: Donnel Baird · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Use digital models and software to figure out how to profitably upgrade an individual building and to make an investment using Wall Street Capital in greening and electrifying that building and saving so much on the energy bill that the building owner sees them savings and our lenders see some profit. And if we play our cards right, so do we in our Silicon Valley investors. Now having said that over the next two to five years as we prepare to like go public in IPO, we will not be profitable if I'm doing my job. 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 the message of electrification to every corner of the country. And so our job is to make those investments so that we can grow rapidly. And I think that that'll be the best thing for our company. And I think it'll be the best thing for the planet.”
2022-07-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! BlocPower: Donnel Baird · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“On Wall Street, you do have to be profitable, right? And so 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 that we generate. So again, our business model is to go in.”
2022-07-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! BlocPower: Donnel Baird · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, but again, we have a mix of capital from Silicon Valley and Wall Street. And Silicon Valley, you don't really have to be profitable, as we're all learning.”
2022-07-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! BlocPower: Donnel Baird · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 made a million. I think we did like $18 million in revenue last year.”
2022-07-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! BlocPower: Donnel Baird · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so they need people to come in and partner with them to actually implement and deliver. And because we have a full suite of services, we do the engineering, we do the design, we order the equipment, we finance it, we project manage everything, we measure and verify the avoided emissions. We're like a great partner for certain kinds of cities to help them figure out how to decarbonize their building. So we're doing that in DC 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 100% green by the year 2030. Then we're really hopeful that that's going to be successful.”
2022-07-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! BlocPower: Donnel Baird · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's going to be the first city in the whole world to be 100% electric. There's several cities across the United States where the mayor is just like, screw it, we're decarbonizing the city by the year 2030. And it's the law in that city. Yeah.”
2022-07-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! BlocPower: Donnel Baird · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. I mean, we just want a contract from the city of Ithaca, New York where Cornell University is located. And we had four years to electrify every single building inside City Limits.”
2022-07-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! BlocPower: Donnel Baird · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we're really excited to be able to start addressing this double waste, right? The waste of human potential in these communities alongside the waste of fossil fuel energy. It's really inspiring for me after 10 years of work to be able to come full circle on that. We're thrilled about it.”
2022-07-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! BlocPower: Donnel Baird · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“100%. We have got a really cool project in New York with Mayor Eric Adams. We're hiring 1,500 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're paying them 20 to 40 bucks an hour and putting them to work to decarbonize buildings in New York City to install heat pumps and solar panels. And so we've got 1500 of these workers. 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, electrifying buildings where we can make 70 grand a year, 80 grand a year, and we don't have to run from the cops or run from the rival gangs, like we will shut down the street gang. And so we set up a training specifically for them. And, you know, we shut down a whole street rank.”
2022-07-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! BlocPower: Donnel Baird · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All of it, all of it. The engineering, the design, the architects, the contractors, the equipment. We call the manufacturer. We negotiate the warranties. We do all of it. On behalf of the customer”
2022-07-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! BlocPower: Donnel Baird · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That come from doing the project. And so our job is to explain to people look, it's going to be a hassle. We're going to make it as easy as possible, but we're going to save you money. Your billing's going to be healthier and it's going to be more valuable. 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.”
2022-07-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! BlocPower: Donnel Baird · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right? He was paying 10. Now he's paying eight. And he's got a brand new, awesome, clean energy system that he feels good about. He's preserving God's creation, the millennials and Gen Z's in the congregation are excited about it because he's taking care of the planet. Everyone is healthier because it's, you know, you're not burning oil in the basement and breathing it in while he's preaching. Like everything's better, man. And so there's all these benefits. Yeah.”
2022-07-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! BlocPower: Donnel Baird · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Have 25,000 dollars laying around, right? So, we're going to lend it to him, and we're going to buy the equipment, pay the contractor, supervise the contractor, complete the project, and reduce his annual energy costs from $10,000 a month to $7,000 a month. And then we're going to charge him $1,000 a month for four years or five years or 10 years or however long it takes to repay the $25,000 loan that we've provided. But to the pastor, he's still seeing”
2022-07-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! BlocPower: Donnel Baird · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We say this project is going to be a pain in the butt. It's going to be a little bit of a hassle, but it's going to be worth it because we're going to save you money and we're going to make you money. So for example, the church pastor that I told you about in Brooklyn who was spending $10,000 a month on his energy bill, on his oil bill, because he had a school and senior lunch and all these programs in his giant church that was so expensive to heat and cool. We went into that church in 2014 and figured out we could reduce his energy costs from $10,000 a month to like $7,000 a month. So we would immediately save him $36,000 a year. And we thought that in order to generate that $36,000 a year savings, that it would cost $25,000 of capital to pay a local construction firm to come in and reduce energy waste and improve his energy equipment. So he doesn't have to.”
2022-07-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! BlocPower: Donnel Baird · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When we electrify our home, we think we're going to save you 20, 40, sixty percent 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 your home. So the question then becomes, how can we stretch out that $100,000 cost over seven years or 10 years or 15 years so that the cost of repaying that $100,000 project is less than the amount that you're saving by shifting from fossil fuels to clean energy?”
2022-07-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! BlocPower: Donnel Baird · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it took us about five years to figure this out. But what we've done is created a new financial product where let's say we're going to spend $100,000 to electrify a home. What we're going to do is calculate the size and the cost of the equipment that we're going to use to electrify the building, the cost of removing the fossil fuel equipment, the cost of that conversion, the labor cost, right, the cost of paying the well-trained certified contractor to come to your home and physically remove the equipment, put it in the back of the pickup truck, drive it, you know, demolish it, install the new equipment. All in, that's going to be $100,000, right?”
2022-07-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! BlocPower: Donnel Baird · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, if CO2's the refrigerant that we're going to be using, in effect, we're putting a price on carbon, right? Because we're using that CO2 as air conditioning. So one of the things that I'm really excited about and really hopeful about is if Mitsubishi and Dacon and Fujitsu and the giant heat pump manufacturers are able to crack the code on CO2 refrigerant globally at scale, this is one of the most important things that can happen because then we're going to start to power buildings with CO2. And that's just going to be huge.”
2022-07-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! BlocPower: Donnel Baird · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, no. They have refrigerants. One of the cool things that we're really excited about is they're actually using CO2 as a refrigerant. So now if you take a step back, right, and you look at our climate challenge of like, oh my God, what's going to happen when we put 100 million air conditioning units in India and China as middle class folks buy houses and build houses and want air conditioning, right? To stay cool?”
2022-07-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! BlocPower: Donnel Baird · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so it's a cool piece of technology, even if it's cold outside, there's some amount of warm air that's embedded in outdoor air, even if it's below freezing. And so they're going to find that warm air and suck it into the system, running across a refrigerant line and a compressor, and then pump that condensed heat into your home. And then in the summer, it reverses itself and sucks in the warm air that's inside your apartment, runs it across the refrigerant line, and pumps it outside. So it's like an air conditioner that can go forwards and backwards to pump heat where it's needed.”
2022-07-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! BlocPower: Donnel Baird · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, sir. We're going into each unit. We're putting in all electric induction stoves that use electricity to cook on the stove top and use the electricity to bake. And then in certain kinds of projects, we're going to put in a small modular air conditioner-sized heating and cooling system so that that apartment building can control its own comfort with a local in-unit electric heat pump.”
2022-07-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! BlocPower: Donnel Baird · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. So that 10 story building, maybe burning oil or burning gas right now for heating and cooling and hot water and for cooking. So we rip out all of that fossil fuel equipment, replace it with all the electric, we electrify everything in the building”
2022-07-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! BlocPower: Donnel Baird · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If it was a building in downtown Cleveland, you could put enough solar on the roof. But because New York is so dense, the roofs in New York aren't big enough to providing enough power to the tall buildings. 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. And so there's this giant dam in Quebec that bends a bunch of turbines and produces clean electricity and sends that electricity down to New York City. And so the source of our electricity in New York is going to be far, far cleaner than it is right now. And then it is in most places in the country. And so”
2022-07-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! BlocPower: Donnel Baird · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Project. And so by converting the building to 100% all electric equipment, you create the opportunity to fully remove fossil fuel consumption in that building. So that's what we do.”
2022-07-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! BlocPower: Donnel Baird · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's a set of new hardware that allows us to make buildings all-electric in the same way that Tesla and Rivian can take an automobile and rip out the fossil fuel engine and replace it with an all-electric engine, we can now do the same thing with hardware in buildings. And so we can go into basically any building in America and rip out the existing fossil fuel equipment that heats the building, heats the hot water for cooking and showering. We can rip all of that fossil fuel equipment out and replace it with equipment that only uses electricity and actually reduces greenhouse gas emissions by as high as 70%. And so then the next question is like, okay, well, if it's using electricity, is that electricity sourced from like burning coal or gas? Well, sometimes, but you can also source that electricity from solar on the roof of that building or a solar farm or a wind farm or a hydrogen.”
2022-07-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! BlocPower: Donnel Baird · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We thought that we could go into the poorest neighborhoods in America and build a business, making those buildings greener, smarter, and healthier and make our investors a ton of money. That's what we thought. And that's what we've been trying to prove.”
2022-07-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! BlocPower: Donnel Baird · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Trillion by investing $5 trillion. So someone's going to make like huge fortunes, right? Wow, by investing in greening all the buildings. And like, that's why we work with Goldman Sachs, right? It's not like, I mean, they are nice people, or at least the part of the bank that we work with are nice people, but they're going to make a lot of money if this all works out.”
2022-07-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! BlocPower: Donnel Baird · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Literally, someone's gonna have to put up $5 trillion. But there's a way to do it and make a financial return. So someone's going to make like.”
2022-07-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! BlocPower: Donnel Baird · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. Correct. I learned enough about business in business school to say, well, look, I mean, greening buildings in America is going to cost like $5 trillion. There's 125 million buildings in America.”
2022-07-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! BlocPower: Donnel Baird · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it's a massive pain point for low income people, right? So the other part of it is like, you know, when I was growing up in Brooklyn, man, there's like two kinds of waste that I saw when I was growing up and when I was a community organizer, there's like a waste of all of the energy and the fossil fuel. It's just wasteful, right? When you look at it as someone who cares about climate or just someone who cares about efficiency, like why are you heating a building to 90 degrees when it's 20 degrees outside and doing that with gas ovens and then all of the heat is floating out the window? It's absurd. And then the other waste is the waste of human potential when you walk around these neighborhoods and you see scores of unemployed young people who have children that they need to provide for and they have talent and they have genius and they have dreams, but they don't have any opportunity. And it's like you can address both pieces of this waste by training those young people to go in.”
2022-07-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! BlocPower: Donnel Baird · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So he had 150 year old formerly Catholic building and he had a school for neighborhood kids like elementary school and then he had senior activities and lunches. So the church was like constantly filled seven days a week. And so the heating system and air conditioning system was always on, right? So he's spending $10,000 a month on his energy costs and he goes, I only have $300,000 a year of revenue coming into the church and $120,000 of that is going out on energy.”
2022-07-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! BlocPower: Donnel Baird · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“From the get-go, that was my focus. I wanted to engage with the communities that I grew up in and grew up near and served to green their buildings. I mean, when I was working with the Obama folks, I had one of my favorite pastors in Bedstey call me, and he goes, hey, you're working on greening buildings, right? I'm like, yeah. He's like, I'm spending $10,000 a month on my energy bill. And I'm like, what?”
2022-07-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! BlocPower: Donnel Baird · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Their whole life and make it their mission to solve this problem at scale. And for me, because I care about climate change and because I care about creating jobs in low-income communities, like the one where I grew up, Green buildings just seem like a really important mission, and it seemed like it could just check a lot of”
2022-07-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! BlocPower: Donnel Baird · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I did, guy. Apparently in my Columbia business school application, I wrote up the argument for block power. And basically it was that there seemed to be all of these challenges and opportunities in the green buildings industry that I was learning about while I was working with the Department of Energy and the labor unions. And I just couldn't figure out why we couldn't do a better job of like fixing the industry. And so I would ask this question around, well, why can't Wall Street provide the capital to pay for us to green all the buildings? And the answer would be, well, Wall Street can provide all the capital. And I'd be like, okay, why can't we train more mechanical engineers to do a better job of analyzing the buildings and figuring out what kinds of green equipment should go into buildings? And the answer would be like, well, nothing's stopping us from doing that. There was just no one who was focused on it who was willing to kind of invest, I guess.”
2022-07-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! BlocPower: Donnel Baird · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, there's a better way to do this, right? By the way, it's really dangerous. I mean, there's all the pollution that it produces that we breathe in. But, you know, look, if you put a gas explosion alert in Google, as I do, then every week or so, you're going to get an email about. Some poor American family's home blowing up and exploding because the gas was leaking and someone lit a match or flipped on a light bulb. And so this is like an unsustainable, unhealthy, unsafe, and super expensive way to power buildings. And so we need to do something new.”
2022-07-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! BlocPower: Donnel Baird · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a huge problem. Why are we digging up dead dinosaurs and burning them in our houses? This is an ancient Mesopotamia. Like what are we doing? It's 2022.”
2022-07-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! BlocPower: Donnel Baird · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT