California Center for Sustainable Energy

BetterBuildings Neighborhood Program In support of Energy Upgrade California

What is the BetterBuildings Neighborhood Program?

The BetterBuildings Neighborhood Program is a marketing-focused program in support of Energy Upgrade California. It encourages communities, state and local governments, private-sector companies, and non-profit organizations to work together on pioneering programs that deliver energy efficiency improvements across neighborhoods throughout the United States.

The BetterBuildings Neighborhood program combines the efforts of the U.S. Department of Energy ( DOE) and 35 states, local governments, and organizations that received $486 million in American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funding to ramp-up energy efficiency building retrofits in their communities. The BetterBuildings Neighborhood projects are the competitive portion of DOE's Energy Efficiency and Conservation Block Grant Program and are part of the overall $80 billion Recovery Act investment in clean energy and energy efficiency. In addition to the Recovery Act investment, the 35 projects will leverage an estimated $2.8 billion from other sources over the next three years to retrofit hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses across the country.

Goals

The Department of Energy will use the lessons learned from these pilot programs to develop and share best practices for comprehensive energy efficiency retrofit programs that can be adopted and implemented by other communities and program administrators.

The BetterBuildings Neighborhood Program in San Diego

A consortium of California jurisdictions, led by Los Angeles County, received an award through the BetterBuildings Neighborhood program to test innovative strategies to drive demand for energy efficiency retrofits. The California Center for Sustainable Energy ( CCSE) will run four pilot programs, targeting single-family residences, in the San Diego region between June 2010 and May 2013:

Retailer Partnership

Training and Outreach Program for HVAC Contractors

The Energy Upgrade California Community Savings Initiative

Community Based Social Marketing (CBSM) Campaign