U.S. News

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.