Blueprint Power

Blueprint Power is a New York City-based real estate and energy technology company that builds software allowing owners of commercial building portfolios to convert their properties into flexible sources of electricity, or "urban power plants." Its cloud platform connects to building management systems, on-site generation and distributed energy assets — solar, battery storage, cogeneration/combined heat and power, fuel cells, thermal storage and controllable loads such as HVAC and lighting — along with meters and sensors, to track real-time performance and manage a building's overall energy profile.

Using machine learning, the platform ingests building and energy-market data, identifies which combination of on-site assets will produce the greatest utility-bill savings and revenue, and then actively dispatches those assets. Its Energy Marketplace software receives price signals and matches building supply and demand flexibility to revenue sources including utility demand response programs (for example Con Edison in New York City) and wholesale markets operated by grid operators such as NYISO. The company does not install or own the underlying energy equipment.

Blueprint's stated aim is to help large real estate companies become suppliers of clean electricity, initially selling into power markets and over time to other classes of buyers such as vehicles, buses and other buildings, creating urban energy marketplaces in which buildings, fleets and the grid transact with each other.

Founding story

Blueprint Power was founded in 2017 by Robyn Beavers, Claire Woo and Nicholas Squires, prompted by new energy regulation adopted after the Hurricane Sandy blackout in New York City. Beavers had led green operations and strategy at Google, including its first large rooftop solar installation in 2006, was part of the founding team of NRG Energy's Station A unit, worked at Vestas, and then led technology investment for homebuilder Lennar — experience that combined energy and real estate and led to the company's formation. Co-founder Claire Woo (previously Bosch and NRG) headed technology and Nicholas Squires (previously Boeing) headed systems integration.

Business model

Blueprint Power licenses and operates software for commercial property owners rather than owning or installing energy hardware. It advises customers on which on-site distributed energy assets to deploy and how to configure them, then actively manages those assets to capture utility bill savings, demand response payments and wholesale energy market revenue, taking a share of the proceeds generated.

The company takes a cut of the savings and revenues its software generates for building owners from utility bill reduction, utility demand response programs and wholesale energy market participation.

Traction

By October 2021 the company worked with several of New York City's largest commercial real estate owners — reported to include Hines, LeFrak Organization, Lennar, Macerich, Related, Tishman Speyer and Vornado Realty Trust — collectively owning more than 100 million square feet in the city, and orchestrated 13 MW of combined-heat-and-power, solar and flexible load capacity. Following the BP acquisition the target was 36 MW of flexible capacity by the end of 2022. The company had 11 full-time employees at the time of the acquisition.

Latest developments

In October 2021 BP acquired Blueprint Power on undisclosed financial terms, with a BP spokesperson describing the price as in the "tens of millions" of dollars. Blueprint joined bp Launchpad, BP's in-house accelerator focused on multi-year funding and startup growth, with plans to hire and scale, expand into additional U.S. urban markets, work with BP's power trading and EV charging platforms, and raise managed flexible capacity from 13 MW to 36 MW by the end of 2022. Shortly before the deal the company launched a project deploying 150 EV chargers at residential buildings in Queens.