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Member Spotlight: Blueprint Power

Medium Thursday, December 16th 2021
Robyn Beavers, CEO & Co-Founder of Blueprint Power

Dynamo Energy Hub is proud to present an interview with Robyn Beavers, CEO & Co-Founder of Blueprint Power. Robyn and her team are working towards a clear and ambitious mission — to rapidly transform the built environment into power sources that generate, store, and trade clean energy. Robyn wrote in to Dynamo’s Membership Manager, Rachel McDevitt, discussing how Blueprint is accomplishing this goal and reshaping the grid.

Rachel: Thanks for taking the time to write in, Robyn! I know it’s a particularly busy time of year for you! Blueprint has a very interesting origin story- Can you tell us about Blueprint Power? How was it founded and how are you achieving your mission?

Robyn: Blueprint was incubated while I was an executive at Lennar — the largest home builder in the U.S. As I was helping run corporate venture deals for them in proptech, I had built a strong network of commercial real estate colleagues. In working with these individuals, I discovered they were increasingly focused on decarbonization and looking for a more streamlined partner to help them achieve their green goals. I spun Blueprint out of Lennar in early 2018 and we’ve been building ever since.

Rachel: What is your background and how did you become interested in this industry?

Robyn: I first became interested in this industry while studying civil engineering at Stanford. I was learning about how the “built environment” was designed, constructed, and operated while reading books about natural capitalism and sustainability. I then started my career at Google, initially reporting directly to the founders who helped me see that you shouldn’t take the status quo for granted and that you can redesign systems for the better, no matter how daunting the effort might seem. With their support I launched Google’s first green operations team and spent the next few years “greening” Google. At one point I oversaw the country’s then-largest commercial rooftop solar project at Google’s Mountain View headquarters — a whopping 1.7MW! Since then I’ve helped create new divisions, businesses, and technologies for companies like Vestae, NRG, and Lennar. It has been thrilling to see the solar (and now DER) industry commercialize so dramatically over the past 15 years — and we expect continued, exponential growth going forward.

Rachel: Can you talk more about how your network of property owners and distributed energy resources (DERs) integrations work together to help facilitate the energy transition?

Robyn:

“We help our customers generate, manage, and sell flexible capacity from their buildings — a resource that is becoming increasingly valuable for grid services, resiliency, decarbonization and more. To do this, we offer products and services that help our customers adopt more onsite DERs and then generate and sell flexible capacity at the optimal times.”

We also aggregate DERs across our network to access more revenue streams that require minimum participation thresholds. We’ve been lucky so far to partner with some of the largest landlords in the country — their portfolios representing over 100 million square feet.

Rachel: What is Blueprint’s hardware product, DIGBOX®, and how does it work?

Robyn: Blueprint’s DIGBOX plays two roles: 1) it ingests siloed energy data feeds behind the meter (“BTM”) and sends this data to our cloud-based platform and 2) it serves as our BTM command and control device for our market interconnection services. Dispatch instructions for the DERs on our network are communicated from our platform via the DIGBOX.

Robyn: The Launchpad acquisition really came into reality thanks to Miriam Eaves, their Head of Origination. Miram attended our first Demo day in 2018 and has been tracking us ever since. During that period of time Blueprint has grown across New York and bp has initiated an ambitious pivot towards net zero, power, and other energy transition businesses. Once we learned more about what Launchpad, and bp globally, had to offer (capital, trading desks, and infrastructure), we realized that we could deliver scale and impact at an accelerated rate as part of the bp platform.

Rachel: How does the rise of remote work, increase of corporate Net Zero commitments, and growing investor demands for ESG standards affect the commercial real estate industry and what is Blueprint’s role?

Robyn: We have seen the focus on ESG and building decarbonization efforts by the real estate and broader investment community only increase coming out of the summer of 2020.

“ESG’s challenge will not be the shift to remote work, but rather how fast it can showcase standardized and demonstrable metrics that the investor community can absorb and understand going forward. Blueprint hopes to solve this issue.”

Rachel: How does the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill and President Biden’s Executive Order back in May affect your work and the Grid in general?

Robyn: We actually have two blogposts that go in depth on each of these very topics (Infrastructure BillExec Order)!

To summarize, there are several key provisions in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law that continue the trend we’ve seen from the Biden administration of putting climate solutions towards the top of the priority list, particularly around renewable energy sources, carbon capture, and, of course, distributed energy resources (DERs). But you can read more about what BIL means for helping accelerate the buildings-as-power-plants future in our recent blog post.

As for Biden’s Executive Order back in May, the administration took a monumental step to increase the Federal Government’s response to the ongoing risk associated with public sector cyber attacks. Here at Blueprint, we’ve always treated security as intrinsic and essential and have built our software and infrastructure based on the guidelines of the NIST Cyber Security Framework.

Rachel: How does connecting with the energy community through Dynamo help facilitate your growth and visibility in the industry? What are the most useful parts of your membership?

Robyn: The physical Dynamo space was incredibly helpful for us to transition from a 100% virtual to a hybrid office model. And, of course, we love being part of this great community!

Rachel: As we reach the close of 2021, what are you most excited for next year and what challenges are you looking to tackle? How can Dynamo Energy Hub help you meet the challenges ahead?

Robyn: Blueprint, as ever, will just be focused on building and scaling with our commercial real estate partners and in conjunction with our strategic partners at bp.

“Dynamo’s support, network and thorough efforts to keep us connected to the fast-paced world around us will always be incredibly helpful.”

Rachel: Thanks again for finding the time to write in, Robyn! We’re delighted to have you and the entire Blueprint Power team as part of the Dynamo community and are excited to watch all you accomplish in 2022 and beyond!

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