This document profiles the Chicago-area non-profit Elevate Energy, which offers a full-service energy efficiency retrofit program for owners of and tenants in affordable multifamily buildings in eleven states.

This summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call focused on unique challenges for energy efficiency and weatherization programs serving lower income residents in single-family and multifamily housing. Speakers include American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, Elevate Energy, and Energy Outreach Colorado.

This summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call summary focused on leveraging smart tech, health and/or utility data to increase participation in multifamily energy efficiency programs. It featured speakers from The Network for Energy, Water and Health in
Affordable Buildings, New Ecology, Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition, and Emerald Cities Collaborative.

Elevate Energy constructed a database of 143,000 Chicago multifamily buildings and segmented them based on age, size, and other traits in order to better understand the Chicago multifamily sector. The segmentation findings point to opportunities to improve ChicagoÕs energy efficiency programs. The size of the unsubsidized lower-cost multifamily market in Chicago, added benefits of improved health outcomes for low-income residents, and greater investment in disadvantaged neighborhoods strengthen the case for prioritizing multifamily market for energy efficiency. The report is organized into three parts. The first part describes the datasets used to build a database of ChicagoÕs multifamily buildings. The second reviews key findings from the analysis. The third section provides recommended improvements to efficiency programs based on the segmentation.

This summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call focused on how recent policy changes have impacted residential energy efficiency program implementation. Speakers include Efficiency Maine, Michigan Environmental Council, and Groundwork Center for Resilient Communities.

This report examines how State Energy Offices and state-level partners are supporting growth and uptake of Commercial Property Assessed Clean Energy (C-PACE) financing around the country. The report offers examples, insights, and strategies for State Energy Offices, green banks, state financing agencies, and other public and private entities to catalyze, accelerate, organize, and expand C-PACE markets.

This summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call focused on how home energy upgrade programs can interact and connect with the real estate market.

This webcast in a multi-part series highlighting efforts by state and local agencies, non-profits, and utilities to bring energy efficiency and renewable energy (EE/RE) to low-income communities.

This report explores how governments and energy efficiency implementers could help stakeholders better analyze and act upon building performance data to unlock savings.

This case study addresses multifamily energy upgrade experiences by two members of the Better Buildings Residential Network—Elevate Energy and the International Center for Appropriate and Sustainable Technology (ICAST).

The Better Buildings Home Energy Information Accelerator aims to make energy data more accessible to home buyers, realtors and others. This presentation covers how Colorado launched a statewide residential labeling initiative that made home energy data available at point of sale, and how partnerships in the Northeast are incorporating energy efficiency into the Multiple Listing Service (MLS), with Vermont pioneering the regional effort.

Lists a number of resources related to Michigan Saves, including contractor application, home energy loan implementation guide, and training presentations for residential contractors.

This report was developed to help inform national stakeholders about the strategies that have been used to achieve deep energy savings in the multifamily housing sector through energy efficiency upgrades. These strategies could be used as models in areas where utility program administrators and policymakers seek to achieve deep energy savings in the multifamily building stock for the purposes of reducing energy costs, creating comfortable and healthy homes, meeting regulatory requirements, or reducing the environmental impacts of energy consumption. This report includes a national multifamily market characterization, barriers and opportunities for program and policy efforts, and eight exemplary case studies from across the country.

In this project, the U.S. Department of Energy Building America team Partnership for Advanced Residential Retrofit (PARR) worked with Elevate Energy on three tasks: to conduct pre- and post-retrofit analysis on the income and expense data of 13 Chicago-area multifamily buildings, to compare Chicago income and expense data to two national samples, and to explore the ramifications that energy-efficiency retrofits have on nine Chicago-area neighborhoods.

The multifamily sector can be hard to reach when it comes to energy efficiency programs. Besides being diverse and complex, the sector presents a unique set of challenges to efficiency investments. The result is that multifamily customers are often underserved by energy efficiency programs. Drawing on data requests and interviews with program administrators, this report summarizes the challenges to program participation and identifies best practices that programs can use to reach and retain large numbers of multifamily participants.

This webinar covers the Multifamily Energy Efficiency Retrofits: Barriers and Opportunities for Deep Energy Savings report published in 2016.n

This Guide is designed to help state and local policymakers to take full advantage of new policy developments by providing them with a comprehensive set of tools to support launching or accelerating residential energy efficiency programs. The Guide focuses on four categories of policies that have proven particularly effective in providing a framework within which residential energy efficiency programs can thrive: incentives and financing, making the value of energy efficiency visible in the real estate market, data access and standardization, and supporting utility system procurement of energy efficiency.

This guide identifies 12 best practices for policymakers, regulators, and program administrators to help building owners invest to increase the energy efficiency of multifamily affordable housing.

This summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call focused on how energy efficiency initiatives relate to real estate marketing.

This summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call focused on combining solar and home performance energy efficiency.

This paper describes existing barriers to integrating energy efficiency data into real estate markets, and illustrates recent efforts to address them. National cross-industry collaborations have resulted in standard data collection and transfer tools that allow home performance data to be shared across industries. Real estate markets in some regions have begun including these data into multiple listing services (MLS), making them visible during real estate transactions.

In this video interview segment, Yvonne Kraus of Conservation Services Group describes how the program aligned its goal of increasing energy efficiency with the community's goal to avoid building a new electrical substation.

This summary report provides scientific results, lessons learned, and recommendations for driving energy efficiency in existing buildings on an urban scale. It includes program marketing lesson learned, such as: personal outreach and call to action events are critical marketing opportunities.

In this video interview segment, Yvonne Kraus of Conservation Services Group describes how energy advisors were an important strategy for building trust with customers in the community.

This guide is designed to serve as a "how-to" reference for island communities (or small, similarly sized, more isolated communities) that want to develop and implement a residential energy-efficiency and conservation program. The purpose of this guide is to help communities chart a course for successful program development based on the lessons learned during implementation and operation of RePower Bainbridge, an energy-efficiency program on Bainbridge Island, Washington.

This summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call focused on the benefits of community assessments and strategies for gathering information.

RePower helped consumers access aggregated information about financing and rebates by compiling a customer-friendly guide to all utility and non-utility incentives in its service area.

This report provides results, lessons learned and recommendations for driving energy efficiency in existing building on an urban scale based on the second year of the Energize Phoenix energy efficiency program.

Presentation describing the State of Michigan and Michigan Saves programs and tactics used to drive demand and enhance service delivery to make the program simpler for customers.

An example of a detailed and thorough implementation guide written for the Michigan Saves program.

In this video interview segment, Yvonne Kraus of Conservation Services Group describes how program and utility partnerships can co-benefit each other.

The RePower programs in Washington State convened local community leaders, organizations, contractors, and program partners for a planning summit to consider the benefits and challenges of different business models for the post-grant period. Participants considered four models: non-profit organization, utility, county or city government, and private sector.

This presentation describes Washington's RePower program and lessons learned on community engagement as a driver of demand.

Presentation that focuses on grantee program-utility partnership models.

This peer exchange call summary focused on strategies and challenges of working with rental property owners and tenants on multifamily upgrades.

In this video interview segment, Will Ranes of RePower Kitsap discusses the importance of understanding your market, including being able to speak the language of utilities and other key players.

This report provides results, lessons learned and recommendations for driving energy efficiency in existing building on an urban scale based on the first year of the Energize Phoenix energy efficiency program.

This peer exchange call summary focused on what energy efficiency programs are doing to target low- and moderate-income households.

This peer exchange call summary focused on integrating income-qualified programs into neighborhood sweeps.