Affordable clean energy system for low income families

Recently, the people of East Bay Community Energy have been thinking about expanding its services, to better deliver on its mission: to purchase clean energy and to transmit it through the PG&E infrastructure to communities across the East Bay.

With that in mind, a four-year-old nonprofit public agency approached BlockPower, a Brooklyn-based company formed in 2014 to restore low-income community buildings with emission-reducing solar panels and other technologies.

Outcome: A single-announced program for low-to-middle-income single-family households already served by EBCE with the goal of electrifying 60 homes in EBCE’s service area. These include clean heating, cooling and hot water systems, and the installation of electrical equipment. The goal is to reduce indoor air pollution, improve health outcomes, and increase both the quality of the home and its ability to withstand extreme weather events.

“We hope to be very successful and we will scale the program very quickly,” said Nick Cheset, CEO of EBCE.

EMBC is providing প্রাথমিক 1.4 million in low-cost loans and incentives at an early stage to help homeowners finance changes to repay within 15 years. Electrification systems will include everything from heat pump water heaters to window treatments that improve air quality.

Gorgeous ceremony of gap calculation

According to Chassett, the program will provide new applications for equipment such as ground source heat pumps, which are used to replace old reactors. “Switching old gas appliances to new, electrical ones has not been emphasized by existing utilities,” he said. Gas furnaces are a major source of indoor air pollution, as they inefficiently burn natural gas and can affect the quality of that combustion air.

According to Grace Park-Bradbury, general manager of BlockPower in the West, blockPower customers typically experience savings of 20% to 40%.

Ultimately, the goal of the program is to provide low-income residents with upgraded equipment that typically requires higher up-front costs জিনিস something that only wealthy homeowners can afford. According to Chasset, energy programs typically focus on such high-income customers or provide free services. But there are many low-income homeowners who can pay their bills and need these upgraded systems. “We want to fill that gap,” Cheset said.

BlockPower will bring out the most suitable technology and come up with an affordable package with EBCE incentives. It is working with local contractors to install and service the equipment Potential users include EBCE customers who think they have older equipment at home, such as data analysis.

No cookie cutters

The procedure is somewhat complicated, since each home situation is unique. “It’s not like building a new building, where you can replicate it on a cookie-cutter basis,” Chassett said. For that reason, it is difficult to know how long the program will last before it expands to more homes. However, Chasset hopes that the current initiative will provide insights on how to best engage with customers and turn them into participants.

In the end, Park-Bradberry says, the goal is to establish enough interest, “so we have 600 more homes and then 6,000 more and more.”