A former Obama campaigner now on the board of an environmental organization picked to receive billions by the Biden administration previously founded a green company that failed to deliver on big promises in multiple cities.
Donnel Baird — who worked for the 2012 Obama campaign on behalf of the Service Employees International Union before founding BlocPower, a building decarbonization company — joined the board of the Coalition for Green Capital (CGC) in December 2022, a group picked by the Biden EPA in April 2024 to receive about $5 billion from the Inflation Reduction Act’s (IRA) Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GGRF). BlocPower made headlines in 2021 when the company partnered with Ithaca, New York, to decarbonize 6,000 buildings in the liberal city, but the company only completed a handful of projects in town before sunsetting its partnership and effectively…
