Zero Net Energy Projects To Transform Affordable Housing & Grocery Industry

This post originally appeared on CityMinded.org.

With the recent signing of SB 32 by the California Governor Jerry Brown, the State will be maintaining its aggressive emission reduction goals and taking it even further to achieve an additional 40% cut in emissions by 2030. This further strengthened effort to reduce emissions will mean that all industries, from transportation to manufacturing and construction, will need to take new measures and innovate across sectors.

One of the biggest culprits of greenhouse gas emissions are buildings. In this context, ProspectSV has taken on a couple of ambitious projects in San Francisco. With two $3M grants from the California Energy Commission, it is working with an impressive set of partners to upgrade a Whole Foods Market and a historic, mixed-use building to Zero Net Energy (ZNE). ZNE design means that the building will utilize no more energy than it can produce onsite over the course of a calendar year, resulting in no energy utility costs and will emit no greenhouse gasses through energy use.

The MarketZero project will convert a Whole Foods Market to ZNE (or near-ZNE) and showcase advanced strategies in energy efficiency. The project will include pre-commercial technologies and will serve as a case study for grocery stores throughout California. The ZNE benefits for the store range from lower operating costs to greater reliability and energy security. The Whole Foods Market that will receive the upgrade is located at 3950 24th street in San Francisco. Project partners include Whole Foods Market, Arup, SF Environment, and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab.

The InnovateNetZero project will retrofit a historic building in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood, which houses 91 low-income residents and is owned and operated by the Chinatown Community Development Center. The project will apply the same cost cutting strategies that high-end commercial buildings use, while at the same time passing those savings to the nonprofit that runs this housing facility. Project partners include Chinatown Community Development Center, RMW architecture & interiors, Integral Group, National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), and the San Francisco 2030 District. Read more about InnovateNetZero in Fast Company Co.Exist and Govtech.

These projects will demonstrate the methods and market viability of California’s aggressive ZNE building goals — 50% of existing buildings by 2030. Both of these projects are targeting building types that are especially challenging to upgrade to ZNE and typically have not been targeted by the ZNE design community. There will also be benefits to economy as these projects could serve as a model for future projects in these sectors, and identify solutions that will work at scale for future multi-unit retrofits or other grocery stores.

For startup companies, this is an incredibly unique opportunity, not only is this a highly-visible project, but new technologies submitted will have an opportunity to gain multi-stakeholder feedback from teams of designers, engineers and building operators.

Interested startup applicants should respond to the Request for Information (RFI). Deadline for submission is September 30, 2016.

Reprinted with permission.