Scaling Electrification Retrofits with XeroHome

To meet our long-term climate goals, substantial energy savings and greenhouse gas emissions reductions will have to come from existing buildings. However, according to a recent policy paper by the American Council for an Energy Efficiency Economy (ACEEE), at current rates of energy efficiency retrofits program participation, “it will take approximately 500 years to complete whole-building retrofits on all residences”. These programs have been able to address merely 1-2% of eligible buildings, falling woefully short of what is needed.

In a recent paper co-authored by XeroHome and Southern California Edison, presented at the 2020 ACEEE Summer Study on Energy Efficiency in Buildings, XeroHome co-founders Mudit Saxena and Peter May-Ostendorp present a fresh new approach to achieving scale in clean energy retrofits for residential buildings. The paper discusses XeroHome’s scalable, platform approach to target and drive deep energy retrofits.

Below is a recording of the paper’s presentation, and some highlights from the paper.

XeroHome’s platform provides a powerful predictive model for Santa Monica’s residential building stock that is helping drive investment and upgrade decisions for homeowners, utility programs, and policymakers. The platform has been used to identify valuable solar + electrification bundling opportunities that could unlock cost-effective decarbonization strategies for most homes across the city.

Here is a typical 1,700 sf Santa Monica home with gas water heating.

Electrifying with a heat pump water heater saves substantial site energy, but isn’t very cost-effective.

Bundling this measure with solar leads to even deeper decarbonization and robust ROI.

XeroHome’s platform analyzes thousands of PV configurations across thousands of home, showing how large PV systems need to be for the bundle to be cost-effective.