The City of San Luis Obispo was awarded $400,000 by the Department of Energy to institute the SLO Green and Healthy Homes project, a “community-led concierge service” meant to improve access to energy efficiency for low-income building owners, according to a recent City news release.
The project will invest in energy-efficient and electric appliances for the roughly 1,400 community members living in mobile and manufactured homes, the press release said.
“Because we’re supporting low-income community members, we want to make sure we really get this right,” San Luis Obispo’s Sustainability Manager Chris Read said. “So the first phase of the award is really looking at some of the background research to identify, ‘how do we make sure that when folks transition to electric appliances, their utility bills are going to stay the same or stabilize?’”
Read said the project can improve building air quality and the comfort of its occupants, while also advancing the City’s plan to achieve carbon neutrality by 2035.
“Our work is driven by our commitment to equity and we see all of our work through an equity lens,” Read said.
Getting access to federal funding can be difficult, Read said and SLO Green and Healthy Homes aims to make that service easier.
The concierge service “just makes it simple for folks that want to improve their buildings to get the resources to do so,” he said.
The project is expected to start in early 2024, according to Read.
The Department of Energy’s Buildings Upgrade Prize (Buildings UP) awarded a total of more than $22 million to 45 groups around the United States who are looking to improve their use of clean energy in existing buildings in their cities, according to its website.
In collaboration with the Community Action Partnership of SLO County (CAPSLO) and the Diversity Coalition of SLO County, the project’s funding will first go to low-income building owners and then to the rest of the community.
Information on further phases of the Buildings UP prize has yet to be released.
“We expect there to be subsequent phases announced from the Department of Energy that will start to fund our pilots and then ultimately, if all things go well, full-scale deployment and implementation of the program,” Read said.
More information on the City’s climate initiatives can be found on the City’s website.