From a small start-up to a multimillion-dollar company with a team of over 150 employees – Bright Power’s first 20 years have been a time of growth, partnership, and progress, while never losing sight of our mission and vision to help both the planet and people.
To celebrate our 20th anniversary, Bright Power’s Founder and Chief Strategy Officer, Jeffrey Perlman, reflects on the early days and how far both the company and the energy efficiency industry have come in the last two decades. Andrea Mancino, Chief Executive Officer, shares a few partnership and collaboration highlights in honor of the many who have been a part of Bright Power’s 20-year journey.
Reflecting on Our Journey with Jeff Perlman
I started Bright Power when I was 25. I had a naïve determination to create an impactful clean energy company…and a lot more hair. The vision was simple – bring renewable energy and energy efficiency solutions together in buildings to reduce their environmental footprint in economical ways.
For the first five years, we took whatever interesting projects we could get our hands on. This included working with small New York City industrial businesses under an efficiency retrofit grant program, and collaborating as National Grid representatives, providing gas efficiency audits throughout Brooklyn and Queens. This opportunity opened often unseen corners of NYC to us: bakeries, pillow factories, metal fabricators, Broadway set builders, and many, many boiler rooms.
During those early years, we developed certain areas of expertise, especially in energy efficiency for multifamily buildings. Through our relationships with organizations like Stewards of Affordable Housing for the Future (SAHF), we learned that our multifamily expertise, developed in New York, was applicable more broadly across the country, too. We embraced our role as translators: between the alphabet soup of energy and the alphabet soup of affordable housing – realizing that we were as much a real estate services company as an energy solutions company.
We were introduced to the world of finance – Community Preservation Corporation, Bank of America, Fannie Mae, and others. If we could help “green” the capital structures that finance buildings, then we could unlock a whole lot more impact. Those early projects with lenders from over a decade ago laid the groundwork for our lender services today, which include consulting with large-scale lenders and now with the budding Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund.
During our 9th year, we raised outside capital for the first time, fueling our growth. We became the leading energy auditing and affordable housing sustainability consultant in NYC, and we expanded our services to California. We survived the Great Recession and the COVID pandemic.
Over the last few years, the company has continued to grow into its own. We’ve built relationships with policy leaders who craft the rules and laws, like Local Law 97 in New York, that will bring us to our decarbonized future.
Bright Power, no longer a startup, has become an established sustainability player and industry expert, ultimately touching 110,000 buildings, 2.1 million apartment units, and 2.2 B square feet! We’ve impacted more than 10% of the apartments in the country, and we are excited to continue on the journey to a zero-carbon future.
Honoring Our Past and Inspiring Our Future with Andrea Mancino
One thing we can be sure of is this industry is complex and ever-changing. It’s the many collaborations and partnerships that make it possible to get this extremely hard but critical work done. If one thing has been clear over the last couple of decades, it’s that we can’t wait for the change – we have to carve the path and then barrel through it ourselves, learning and evolving along the way.
In my tenure at Bright Power, we’ve gone from being an early provider of Local Law 87 services, to installing the first ever battery+co-generation+solar system in NYC, to becoming the largest Enterprise Green Communities provider in the country. So much of this has been possible through the relationships we’ve built along the way. Recently, we took time to celebrate our milestones with clients and partners, and we honored a few of the key partners that have been particularly integral to Bright Power’s mission.
Financing Innovator: Community Preservation Corporation
As Jeff mentioned, Bright Power has had the privilege of working with Community Preservation Corporation (CPC) for more than a decade on industry-leading efforts to incorporate energy efficiency and decarbonization into financial lending. We’ve collaborated on cutting-edge tools like the Underwriting Efficiency Handbook, CPC VeriFi, the Future Housing Initiative, and measurement and verification for the Climate Friendly Homes Fund (CFHF).
We’re proud of our technical support for CPC’s comprehensive sustainability program and measurement platform, which has impacted over 12,000 sustainability-financed units since 2015. Now, we’re thrilled to see what future impact is in store for the CPC Climate Capital coalition, which was awarded $7 billion this year from the National Clean Investment Fund. Sadie Mckeown, President of CPC, is also a personal mentor of mine who continues to pay it forward to so many of us women. Bright Power is honored to work alongside Sadie and the CPC team.
Policy Innovator: Jennifer Leone, NYC Housing Preservation & Development
Bright Power also recognizes the invaluable work of Jen Leone, Assistant Commissioner and Chief Sustainability Officer at The Department of Housing Preservation & Development, affectionately known as HPD. In her time at HPD, Jen has always pushed for a continued understanding of the complexities of building to high performance – sending many middle-of-the-night or early-morning emails to us energy geeks asking for clarification on different systems and standards. She’s also been empowered and even excited to tackle some of the most complex challenges like creating certification program overlays specific to our city, ensuring policies are strict but not burdensome, and updating M&O standards for electrification, calling many working groups together to solve for these issues and then implementing solutions-based, common sense policy.
By layering high-performance standards into virtually all of HPD’s work in preservation and new construction development, Jen has helped create minimum performance standards for affordable housing in NYC that makes this housing stock the beacon of decarbonization in the country.
High-Performance Champion: Magnusson Architecture + Planning
We’d like to highlight the efforts of MAP Architects’ Fernando Villa, Principal, and Sara Bayer, Associate Principal and Director of Sustainability, both of whom we’ve worked with for over a decade. MAP has been a leading design firm for high-performance, affordable housing for years, earning many awards and ensuring they have mechanisms for tracking their impact through energy use intensity metrics. Their work goes beyond high performance, designing buildings meant to foster community and serve specific populations with an emphasis on reducing embodied carbon. Together, MAP Architects and Bright Power have collaborated on several Buildings of Excellence-winning buildings, and dozens of passive house and LEED-certified buildings, all including cutting-edge technologies. Our firms have truly grown with one another.
MAP Architects has helped make building to high performance a standard for many developers by demonstrating the ability to control costs and realize tangible benefits for years to come. Sara also collaborated with us in the infancy of many green standards and continues to be an open-minded sustainability advocate willing to try new things and push the envelope, no pun intended.
Industry Innovator: Catholic Charities of Brooklyn & Queens
Catholic Charities’ longstanding commitment to leadership in energy efficiency and sustainable design in partnership with Bright Power, began with our first-ever Enterprise Green Project in 2011, and has continued with the construction of Gail P. Dukes Residence in Brownsville, which was a Buildings of Excellence award winner based on its project scope to achieve carbon neutral design and passive house certification.
Catholic Charities also innovates with its work installing solar PV arrays on previously underutilized roof space across their portfolio. The program makes use of an Inclusive Community Solar Agreement, which sells solar power generated from the arrays to local subscribers that wish to purchase electricity from a local, renewable source. The funds generated through this program are then reinvested into future Catholic Charities Brooklyn and Queens sustainability initiatives.
As we look toward the next 20 years of decarbonizing the built environment, we will continue paving the way to a zero carbon future with partnerships and alliances across the industry. It is a privilege to have served so many in the real estate industry and to be able to continue creating trailblazing green buildings.
Here’s to a healthy, resilient, energy–efficient future!