The Oakland EcoBlock, Phase II: A Zero Net Energy, Low Water-Use Retrofit Neighborhood Demonstration Project
Research Team:
California Institute for Energy and Environment, UC Berkeley, City Of Oakland, AEA, LBNL, Sherwood Design Engineers, Integral Group, Siegal and Strain, Redhorse Construction, SmartBlocks, Ciyfi, Coop Law Group
The Oakland EcoBlock, Phase II: A Zero Net Energy, Low Water-Use Retrofit Neighborhood Demonstration Project
Research Team:
California Institute for Energy and Environment, UC Berkeley, City Of Oakland, AEA, LBNL, Sherwood Design Engineers, Integral Group, Siegal and Strain, Redhorse Construction, SmartBlocks, Ciyfi, Coop Law Group
Challenge
Buildings consume about half the energy used in the US; globally, buildings account for 39% of greenhouse gas emissions. Getting all buildings to net zero emissions is a critical task for climate change mitigation, but new building construction creates significant new emissions—typically two to four times more than renovations—and house by house retrofits are too slow. The adoption of energy efficiency (EE) and distributed energy resources (DERs) in the existing residential building stock is happening at too slow a rate to meet California’s aggressive energy and climate goals.
Project Objective
The Oakland EcoBlock project aims to demonstrate technical, social, legal, and financial methods for radically reducing the environmental footprint of buildings through cost-effective retrofits at the block scale. It is a whole-systems urban sustainability project that aims to prototype a pathway to affordable urban decarbonization by means of block-scale retrofitting. The EcoBlock model is designed to be deployed in residential and mixed-use neighborhoods as a holistic process that (1) undertakes electrification and deep EE retrofits in buildings, and (2) harnesses local renewable resources to significantly reduce the households’ energy, transportation, and water footprint. By aggregating the required design, permitting, financing, and construction work across a block of homes, the EcoBlock concept reduces transaction costs, overcomes information barriers, and allows access to lower-cost financing mechanisms that are not available to individual building owners. Moreover, aggregating the electrical load of an entire block allows the cost-effective construction of a microgrid with shared DERs that further lowers capital costs and improves operational efficiency. The resulting EcoBlock microgrid provides net-negative greenhouse gas emissions and reduces residents’ energy bills, while providing grid services and improving local power reliability and quality. If the EcoBlock can be demonstrated to cost-effectively deliver all these benefits, as our preliminary analysis shows it can, it will be a revolutionary advance in achieving California’s clean energy goals.