Ithaca moves to decarbonize all 6,000 of its buildings

The city of Ithaca, New York, home to Cornell University and some 30,000 people, voted Wednesday to move forward with a first-of-its-kind program aiming to decarbonize all 6,000 of its residential and commercial buildings.

Ithaca’s Common Council moved unanimously to authorize a series of firms, led by Brooklyn-based startup BlocPower, to help administer the Efficiency Retrofit and Thermal Load Electrification Program, which was developed to enable the city to meet its economywide decarbonization target of 2030.