Just before the 2019 holiday season, musician Isaac Zones got an email, forwarded from a friend. It asked, “Do you and your neighbors want to save money on your energy bills, reduce carbon emissions and survive the next power outage?”
His answer was, well, yeah.
“Basically, I read it as like free solar for everybody on my block,” Zones said. Zones lives on an East Oakland street lined with century-old single-family Victorians, mid-century, boxy apartment buildings and everything in between.
The initiative, headed by researchers at UC Berkeley, invited entire neighborhoods to apply for major upgrades: energy- and water-efficient appliances, insulation and solar panels, along with a shared back-up battery and microgrid to protect the street from power blackouts. All for free.
In return, the researchers would get to test out a theory: would retrofitting buildings together, all at once, save money by buying in bulk? Would it save time for a contractor to walk from one job across the street to another? Would people even want to sign up?
In 2019, Peffer and her colleagues at UC Berkeley got a $5 million grant from the state of California to test out a new, block-scale approach.
And Isaac Zones was ready to sign his block up as the guinea pig.
Tl;dr: UC Berkeley hypothesized that committing to retrofitting an entire block of buildings to green energy would be cheaper than doing one building at a time. They found a block with willing participants, and over 5 years, they proved that the hypothesis was correct. They estimate that if future initiatives follow their model, those initiatives will save even more money. They also found that the greatest barrier to success was NIMBYs. Having a few very dedicated residents smoothed all that over.
