Reimagining Affordable Mixed-Use Development in a Carbon-Constrained Future

Project Result

The project kicked off in June 2022 and the project team began holding detailed project meetings. The design consists of two all-electric, energy efficient, mid-rise buildings (three and four floors each), with a total of 123 affordable housing family units. The team worked with their community team partners – University of Davis Center for Regional Change and California Coalition Rural Housing – to garner input on a baseline for the level of understanding that Yolo County residents have for potential energy efficiency and other green features that were considered in the planning and design work. Community input was received from nearby residents through surveys, interviews, and planned focus groups.

In 2023, the team held a technical advisory committee meeting in January to discuss and receive feedback on the concept design preview, technology suite partners and integration overview, load profile generator modeling tool, and draft performance metrics. Additionally, the team began energy modeling and developed a Load Profile Generator Modeling Tool. However, the team encountered challenges with the software because the most recent CBECC 2022 update forced all multi-family housing modeling to be done in the commercial version. This required the team to build new models in a modeling platform that used a wholly different simulation engine. ConSol adapted by pursuing usage of the EnergyPro software to accurately model the two planned multifamily buildings. Also monitored and evaluated by the project team on an ongoing basis were the CPUC’s recent Net Energy Metering (NEM) 3.0 decisions, which will have direct and as-yet unknown impacts on the energy economics of the community.

ConSol's concept design achieved and exceeded the goals of the project team with a net carbon negative energy design (-336 tons CO2e annually), unlimited Tier 1 critical and Tier 2 priority back-up power to tenant units and common areas, and an average $546 tenant utility bill savings per year. In addition, the combination of incentives and operational cost savings for this design would have paid for all the advanced clean energy and efficiency features in under four (4) years. The 130-unit affordable housing project design provided a viable, scalable, plug-and-play zero-emissions pathway for the mixed-use, all-electric, 100% affordable housing development in the City of Woodland and set a replicable model for communities throughout the State of California. In validation of this approach, the Woodland City Council unanimously approved ConSol’s community design on September 5, 2023.

This project was part of the CEC Next Epic Challenge – Design Phase. The project design was featured at the 2023 Annual CEC EPIC Symposium as viewable here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qKsLCzGfLE&list=PLIcSRKAeCVRjlZYqQRteN…