In 2021, the small city of Ithaca announced it would electrify all of its 6,000 buildings with the help of one key partner: a technology company called BlocPower, whose then-CEO Donnel Baird said the company would make the mass electrification process fast and affordable.
“There’s a lot of expensive engineering and financial and workforce development costs,” Baird told Ithaca’s common council in 2021, after it approved the mass electrification plan. “Our job is to remove all of that friction.”
Buildings account for nearly 40% of carbon emissions nationwide, which contribute to climate change. Ithaca planned to curb those emissions, largely by switching out gas appliances for electric ones. The city named BlocPower as the program manager for the electrification effort.
BlocPower’s pitch was that it could make electrification affordable, largely by bulk purchasing equipment and providing low-cost loans to building owners. The city’s then-director of sustainability, Luis Aguirre-Torres, told the city council he expected the partnership could reduce electrification costs by 30% or more.
The agreement catapulted the small college town into the national spotlight as the first city in the country to commit to electrifying all of its buildings by 2030. Soon after, BlocPower forged similar partnerships with other cities, like Oakland and Menlo Park, California.
“To me, the hardest part is done,” Baird told the Washington Post after Ithaca’s city council approved the plan to work with BlocPower. “The hardest part is finding the city with the courage to make the commitment.”
But in recent months, BlocPower has quietly deserted its electrification and workforce training programs in Ithaca and several other cities, according to municipal leaders and organizations that worked with BlocPower. While many of these programs continue without BlocPower’s partnership, the company’s support has vanished.
In Ithaca, BlocPower ended its collaboration with the city after completing the electrification of only 10 buildings, according to Ithaca’s current sustainability director, Rebecca Evans. Last November, the company furloughed its Ithaca staff members and ended all partnerships in the city, Evans said.
BlocPower’s departure from Ithaca and other cities comes in the wake of Baird stepping down as the company’s CEO. In a response to a LinkedIn message, Baird said that he left BlocPower in the middle of last year. Baird declined to answer questions for this story.
BlocPower’s chief operating officer, Sydney Tanaka, said in a statement that the company has changed its direction to focus on providing financing services and construction management for energy-saving projects.
“This means we’ve sunsetted many of our city programs, including Ithaca,” said Tanaka in the statement. “This shift represents our continued commitment to building a profitable company that delivers impact, and equitable [sic] reduces the carbon footprint of America’s buildings.”
Tanaka said that BlocPower had initiated 14 electrification projects in Ithaca before ending its work in the city. The company’s only remaining public-private partnership is with the city of Denver.
In Ithaca, the city's contract stipulated it would not pay BlocPower until it electrified at least 200 buildings, so no city money ever went to the company, according to Evans. The city remains committed to reducing greenhouse gas emission and continues to take advantage of grants that BlocPower helped it secure, she said.
Still, Evans and some others involved in Ithaca’s electrification efforts said BlocPower’s departure is disappointing. BlocPower raised millions of dollars and won awards, including from former Vice President Kamala Harris, based on its projects in cities like Ithaca. Now it has disappeared as Ithaca and other cities fall behind on their electrification commitments.
“We helped BlocPower make headlines, and really created a national market for BlocPower based on this program,” Evans said. “It put us in a position to make a lot of promises that we weren't able to fulfill.”
Mounting delays
Ithaca’s goal to electrify its buildings was part of the city’s Green New Deal, which passed in 2019 and included a commitment to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. The city’s former sustainability director, Luis Aguirre-Torres, was hired in 2021 to lead the effort to achieve those goals.
Aguirre-Torres spearheaded collaborations between the city and several outside companies and firms, including BlocPower and a company called Alturus, to help the city meet its climate targets. Standing on the steps of the Southside Community Center in Ithaca’s historically Black Southside neighborhood in July 2022, Aguirre-Torres launched the new electrification program, backed by a recently-signed contract with BlocPower and financed by $100 million from Alturus.
At the time, BlocPower’s promise was celebrated across the country. National news outlets profiled Baird, and business schools and climate organizations invited him to share the company’s plan to electrify all of Ithaca's buildings. Baird explained that BlocPower would build software to streamline the electrification process, and would raise money from investors to make upfront electrification costs cheaper.
But cracks soon began to form in the plan.
A few months after announcing the electrification program, Aguirre-Torres resigned from his position. He told the local news outlet The Ithaca Voice that city staff had been “resistant” to his work on the program. Aguirre-Torres, who is Mexican, also said that some staff and council members didn’t take his work seriously and had said disparaging things to him that referenced his country of origin. Aguirre-Torres did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this story.
As well, Alturus never signed a contract with the city, according to Evans, who took over as city sustainability director after Aguirre-Torres's departure. Instead, BlocPower proceeded with the electrification program alone. Alturus did not respond to questions for this story.
By mid-2022, the city staff who had shepherded the new electrification program were gone, and the “consortium” of outside companies once expected to contribute had disappeared. Only BlocPower remained.
The company hired staff in Ithaca who began working with businesses and organizations that were interested in electrification, including the Unitarian Society and a downtown coffee shop. It also rolled out an online form where residents could plug in their address and learn more about upgrades they could make to their homes. (The form disappeared from BlocPower’s website earlier this month after WSKG began inquiring about the company’s status in Ithaca.)
But to some residents, the offerings seemed limited. When Dan Antonioli, who owns a home a few miles outside of Ithaca in the town of Dryden, plugged his address into BlocPower’s website to get a quote for a heat pump installation, he said he was shocked. The 15-year heat pump lease BlocPower offered him would cost $135,000 — more than five times what a local contractor had quoted him to buy and install a heat pump outright, he wrote in an op-ed for a local news outlet in May 2023.
“I was not at all clear on how they were going to make this affordable,” Antonioli told WSKG. “Meaning, how are they going to bring the price down?”
Larger economic problems were brewing too. BlocPower relied on investors, including big banks like Goldman Sachs, to help fund its electrification effort. The company expected to make money largely by leasing equipment, which would turn into returns for investors. But reporting in The American Prospect in 2023 highlighted that amid post-pandemic inflation and rising energy costs, the profit margin was expected to be very low. As interest rates rose, it became unclear how BlocPower would attract investors.
BlocPower also expected to take advantage of federal incentives for home electrification that were included in the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act, according to its filings with the SEC. But the rollout for many of those incentives were slow, limiting their usefulness. Many of the incentives may now end under President Trump.
To Antonioli, the agreement with BlocPower seemed questionable from the start. The company said it held “turnkey” solutions to make electrification affordable. But neither BlocPower nor city officials at the time ever clarified the math of how it would do so, Antonioli said.
“BlocPower presented itself as a grassroots, politically-progressive business,” said Antonioli. “Behind the scenes, they really just boiled down to a capitalist financial investment business.”
A rapid expansion
Still, in Ithaca and around the country, BlocPower continued to expand its offerings.
In January 2024, Ithaca announced the first group of 10 commercial buildings that would be electrified. Around the same time, a press release from BlocPower stated it had completed energy efficiency projects at multiple Ithaca locations, including a local history nonprofit and a senior center, and had trained several residents for energy-related jobs. (The release was removed from BlocPower’s website following WSKG’s inquiries.)
By that point, BlocPower had struck up new partnerships in several other cities, including Denver and Oakland, to help electrify buildings and train workers. The company partnered with a small town in New Hampshire to decarbonize its buildings and with the city of Menlo Park to electrify 1,000 buildings per year between 2024 and 2030.
Many of BlocPower’s programs were funded by public grants and outside organizations. But in some places, like New York City, millions of dollars of city funds went directly to BlocPower.
Through 2024, the company continued to win awards for its work. But in Ithaca, things were stalling.
One of the first buildings BlocPower helped electrify in the city belonged to the First Unitarian Society of Ithaca, which hoped to replace an old gas-powered furnace with electric heat pumps. The project was expected to cost around $150,000, said Marie McRae, a member of the church who led the electrification effort. BlocPower helped the group secure a grant from the local utility, NYSEG, for $125,000, which made the project affordable, she added.
McRae said BlocPower’s help was invaluable. But by the time the project was complete, the NYSEG grant had closed, meaning new projects would be much more expensive. “I was really hoping to make this sort of a poster child project,” said McRae. Without more funding, she said that became impossible.
Across town, the Southside Community Center was meant to be one of the first buildings in the city that BlocPower would help electrify. But progress was slow, and today the community center still uses gas, according to Anne Rhodes, a community energy educator at the local Cornell Cooperative Extension.
Rhodes has been collaborating with the community center to help Southside residents improve their homes’ energy efficiency. She said the team stopped relying on BlocPower's assistance more than a year ago. The news that the company had stopped working with the city last November did not surprise her.
“We knew that we weren't getting 6,000 buildings electrified,” said Rhodes. “We knew that more than a year and a half ago.”
Officials in several other cities say they also stopped working with BlocPower last year.
In Milwaukee, Erick Shambarger, the city's director of environmental sustainability, said he received an email from BlocPower last September stating that the company could no longer support the city’s electrification efforts. In New York City, the company's publicly-funded workforce training program ended last summer after the city said it failed to report how many people had participated, as Gothamist reported.
In Oakland, a non-profit energy provider called Ava, which pledged $1 million to fund BlocPower’s work to upgrade homes, said it no longer works with the company. And in Menlo Park, the city’s sustainability manager, Rachael Londer, said nothing came of the city’s plans to work with BlocPower on its electrification effort.
In Ithaca, officials received no formal notice that BlocPower had pulled out of the partnership, according to Sustainability Director Rebecca Evans. Evans said she heard from BlocPower’s former Ithaca employees in November that they had been furloughed. She said she expected to hear more from BlocPower after that, but never did.
Continuing efforts without BlocPower
Several people involved in Ithaca’s effort to reduce emissions emphasized that BlocPower’s departure does not mean an end to the city’s effort to reduce its climate-warming emissions. In several other cities, officials said programs that BlocPower had been working on had been completed or are now run by other groups.
In Ithaca, where the promise of a fully-electrified city by 2030 now appears out of reach, the city is working on a new plan for how it will achieve some of its climate commitments. The new approach, according to Evans, focuses on helping residents adapt to a warming world rather than electrifying buildings.
As for BlocPower’s role, Evans said Ithaca’s electrification program never got the support she felt it needed from the company. Even so, she said she does not regret the city’s decision to work with BlocPower. She said she believes the partnership brought attention to Ithaca's climate commitments, which may have helped the city win certain federal grants, including a recent grant of almost $3 million to train low-income residents for energy-related jobs.
“It was big dreaming, and I think that's what decarbonization is all about,” said Evans. “We didn't lose anything out of it.”
Even without BlocPower, several commercial buildings are now electrified, more workers are trained in jobs related to insulation and heat pump installation, and the city continues to work towards reducing emissions. That’s all positive news to some residents, like Brian Eden, who served as chair of the local environmental organization HeatSmart Tompkins until 2021.
“I don't feel defeated by the fact that they are no longer active,” said Eden. “They were part of the transition. They played a role in that. Now we've moved on to other models.”
Such is the case in the Southside neighborhood. Anne Rhodes, the Cornell Cooperative Extension employee working to help neighborhood residents with energy-saving home upgrades, said that effort remains underway, even without BlocPower. “None of it has died, none of it has stopped,” said Rhodes. “It's just faltered.”
But elsewhere in Ithaca, BlocPower’s departure has been more painful. Around the corner from the community center stands the St. James AME Zion Church, a historic Black church. There, Rev. Terrance King had worked with BlocPower for more than a year on a plan to improve the nearly 200-year-old building’s insulation and replace its gas heater with electric heat pumps.
King had signed a contract with BlocPower for the work. He hoped the partnership would help the church reduce emissions and lower its monthly heating bills, which can cost more than $500 in the winter, he said. But in the end, nothing came of the agreement.
“When we signed on, there were so many hopes that this would be a turning of the tide for the church,” said King. “For it to just really feel like a rug being pulled from under our foot, it's like, what do we do?”