REALIZE-CA: Mass Deployment Model for Zero Net Carbon Retrofits
Research Team:
Rocky Mountain Institute (prime, Market Solutions Team Lead), AEA (Technical Solutions Team Lead), the U.C. Davis’s Western Cooling Efficiency Center, David Baker Architects, Integral Group, Stone Energy Associates, San Francisco Department of the Environment, California Housing Partnership, and Prospect Silicon Valley.
REALIZE-CA: Mass Deployment Model for Zero Net Carbon Retrofits
Research Team:
Rocky Mountain Institute (prime, Market Solutions Team Lead), AEA (Technical Solutions Team Lead), the U.C. Davis’s Western Cooling Efficiency Center, David Baker Architects, Integral Group, Stone Energy Associates, San Francisco Department of the Environment, California Housing Partnership, and Prospect Silicon Valley.
Challenge
Low-income Californians face a disproportionate energy burden, spending up to three times as much of their income on energy compared to median households. Low-income multifamily buildings house more than three million Californians. At the same time, residential building stock in California currently accounts for approximately 10% of the state’s carbon emissions.
Addressing these challenges has proven difficult due to a number of persistent barriers in the efficiency sector, such as building owner mistrust in achieving savings, high upfront costs, project complexity and lack of industry know-how, split incentives between building owners and tenants, and a fragmented value chain.
But the pressure is mounting, as California has set aggressive energy efficiency and carbon reduction goals, enacting the policies necessary to achieve those goals. We can drive a sustainable manufacturing revolution by re-focusing efforts from building new to rebuilding what we already have. California’s multifamily building housing market is the perfect place to start.
Project Objective
The REALIZE-CA team is developing an innovative, industrialized, and scalable approach to home energy retrofits, bringing more comfortable, affordable homes to tenants, while creating jobs, and stimulating our economy in the sectors where we need it most.
REALIZE-CA is inspired by an innovative market facilitation model from the Netherlands known as Energiesprong. Energiesprong has catalyzed thousands of retrofits of affordable housing in the Netherlands with tens of thousands of additional projects in the pipeline across Europe. Their model employs a process that reduces market barriers, aggregates demand and coordinates the supply chain to deploy prefabricated, mass-scale retrofits.
REALIZE-CA addresses gaps and barriers in the building retrofit marketplace in order to scale and increase the speed of adoption that will be required to decarbonize the building stock. REALIZE-CA does so through four main pillars:
- Demonstration projects
- Market facilitation
- Inclusive economy development
- Policy and market reform
REALIZE-CA and our partners are conducting four pilots that demonstrate advanced building construction processes and pre-integrated decarbonization technologies that are meant to reduce retrofit delivery times and cost. The California Energy Commission has awarded REALIZE-CA funds to make the technical and market solutions research possible for success.
Impact
REALIZE will precipitate roughly $7.7 billion in utility cost reductions for Californian’s by 2030, 8.4 million metric tons of greenhouse gas emission reductions, and nearly 69 billion gallons of water savings.