R2E2 recently released the Residential Retrofits for Energy Equity Playbook, a comprehensive guide for program administrators and government offices seeking to establish, improve, or expand current building energy upgrade programs for low- and moderate-income housing. The program aims to ensure that such programs meet three criteria:
The Playbook is an excellent resource and a free download.
67% percent of U.S. households with low incomes face a high energy burden, spending more than 6% of their income on energy bills
These energy burdens disproportionately impact Black, Hispanic, Native American, older adult households, and families residing in low-income multifamily housing, manufactured housing, and older buildings.
Roughly 27.5% of all U.S. households have low incomes, but these households receive only about 13% of spending from retrofit programs administered by utilities.
Communities can leverage federal funding from the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) to design building energy upgrade programs that address critical inequities, create healthier and more affordable housing, reduce energy burdens, and uncover new economic opportunities for local workers and business owners while reducing emissions across the U.S.
We highly recommend downloading the full Playbook. As a provider of rapid residential energy and carbon data for communities, our platform supports key sections from the Checklist of Best Practices for Program Administrators on pages 6 – 9.
This early and foundational aspect of the program design process is critical to success. However, it is often one of the more costly and time-consuming aspects, as it requires the collection of a robust dataset on the existing building stock.
Climative takes the pain out of this process by providing communities with rapid, accurate, and cost-effective access to their housing stock’s energy use, carbon emissions, and energy costs. Program administrators can view data breakdown by home fuel type, building type, and building age.
The Playbook emphasizes that communities can design programs that successfully address goals for racial equity, housing, workforce development, health, environmental justice, and greenhouse gas emissions.
Strong goal-setting requires in-depth knowledge of the community’s needs. Program administrators can confidently design impactful goals by cross-referencing data from different sources, such as home energy data, census data, flood maps, and more. This is only possible with a robust data platform that can intake disparate data and provide insights that give clear direction for impactful programs.
What home upgrades and offers will homeowners access to accomplish the program’s goals? Climative gives communities superpowers with a rapid impact estimator: run scenario analysis for different retrofits and view the detailed impact on community energy, greenhouse gas emissions, and costs.
Program administrators can even drill down to the building and neighborhood levels to design programs that impact specific demographics and communities. They can estimate program uptake and impact right in the Climative platform.
The Playbook discusses employing a “one-stop shop” approach with a single point of contact for participants. Climative makes it easy to engage homeowners and streamline the retrofit program process with a web-based portal. Each homeowner gets a personalized home energy report with retrofit recommendations, financial breakdown, and easy access to support resources such as professional advice and funding programs.
Successful citizen-led home decarbonization will only happen if we use better data to break down barriers and provide more opportunities for homeowners to access financial support. We invite you to read our article 3 Strategies for Communities to Drive Citizen-Led Home Decarbonization and download the full Residential Retrofits for Energy Equity Playbook.
Climative provides a collaborative AI-assisted data platform for organizations to enable personalized advice and offers to building owners, taking the guesswork out of building upgrades and transforming the low carbon economy.
