Ithaca Will Decarbonize All Buildings by 2030

The city of Ithaca, New York has voted to decarbonize all of its real estate with an eye toward becoming 100% carbon neutral by 2030.

The aggressive initiative is part of the city’s Green New Deal, widely regarded as one of the most progressive such plans in the US. Ithaca’s common council members voted Wednesday to allow the city’s mayor to contract with Brooklyn-based climate tech firm BlocPower to kick-start the plan.

The deal with BlocPower is the first large-scale, city-wide electrification initiative in the US, the company said in a statement. Its proposal for Ithaca includes the installation of air source heat pumps and other supporting energy efficiency upgrades and building improvements it says will cut Ithaca’s 400,000 tons of CO2 by 40%. The firm says the plan will also create 400 new green economy construction, technology and management jobs. 

BlocPower has also said it will make financing green energy upgrades affordable by providing low-cost loans to building owners, which it says will be offset by the savings in energy spend.

“At the same time COP26 takes place in Glasgow, the City of Ithaca demonstrates its commitment to fight climate change by taking this very important step towards fully decarbonizing our building stock. Through this program, the City expects to eliminate most emissions from energy use in existing residential and commercial buildings, which today account for almost 40% of the total emissions in our city,” Savante Myrick, Mayor of Ithaca, said in a statement.

The commercial real estate industry, which accounts for 40% of all greenhouse gas emissions, will likely spend between $18 trillion and $36 trillion to decarbonize over the next two decades, Fifth Wall’s Greg Smithies said earlier this week. CRE consumes 40% of the world’s power and 40% of the world’s raw materials.

“That’s roughly one to two Internets worth of spend every year for the next twenty years,” Smithies told CNBC in an interview. But the total amount of venture capital in the space only totals around $100 billion, and that capital is chasing a market that’s sized at between $1 and $2 trillion each year.

Fifth Wall’s Climate Technology Fund focuses on the full life cycle of buildings starting with clean raw materials and the use of modular construction and 3D printing in the development and construction phase. A score of big names in CRE have invested in the fund to date, including Invitation Homes and Ivanhoe Cambridge.

“We did not come up with a climate fund as the result of some sort of fever dream on our side,” Smithies told CNBC. “It actually came about because our corporate partners came to us asking for help to decarbonize their buildings.”