REALIZE - Rocky Mountain Institute

REALIZE aims to bring the clean industrial revolution to America’s homes by catalyzing the development of a speedy and scalable process for zero-carbon residential retrofits. Together, we’ll make better performing, safer, and more comfortable homes accessible to millions of families.

What Is REALIZE?

REALIZE is adapting an innovative model from the Netherlands, known as Energiesprong, to catalyze mass-customizable, net-zero retrofits nationwide. Energiesprong, a public-private partnership, has implemented zero energy retrofits to the tune of almost 4,000 units over the past five years, with another 100,000 planned across European. This model employs a process that combines aggregation of demand, coordinated with the supply chain to deploy prefabricated mass-scale retrofits. Think of it like an IKEA© net-zero retrofit!

Why It Matters

Existing residential buildings account for roughly 20% of U.S. emissions. To prevent runaway climate change, our existing homes needs to become carbon neutral over the next few decades. This can be accomplished with deep energy retrofits combined with clean-energy supply. But only a tiny fraction of homes have been retrofitted. A root cause of the low rate of adoption is the disaggregation of both the supply side and demand side, with no entity demanding or selling energy efficiency at scale. This means every retrofit is a custom job, resulting in greater time, complexity, and cost and therefore, slow adoption.

Who’s Involved?

We are working with leading partners and innovators on the supply and demand sides of multifamily home retrofits, including municipalities and government housing agencies, building owners and developers, manufacturers, and financiers.

What We're Doing

Retrofit Package Demonstrations

Supported by awards from the U.S. Department of Energy and the California Energy Commission, REALIZE is launching several pilots to demonstrate Energiesprong like retrofit packages. These projects seek to test the efficacy of these solutions while organizing the supply chain to develop more integrated retrofit systems for deployment across the multifamily housing market.

Market Facilitation

Supported by a California Energy Commission award, REALIZE will organize the market in California to provide zero-net-energy retrofits at scale for disadvantaged communities across the state. The team will look to streamline everything from the financing, to the permitting, to the installation process for sets of turnkey net zero retrofit solutions.

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Manufacturers Consortium

RetrofitNY, an Energiesprong program in the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, and REALIZE are collaborating to work with manufacturers to accelerate the development of a robust supply chain for net zero retrofit packages. The team is especially focused on bundled solutions consisting of components such as envelope panelization systems and modular, prefabricated, integrated mechanical system units. These pre-designed and prefabricated packages will result in enhanced quality assurance, and will streamline production and installation, making high performance building design and construction more efficient and cost competitive.