Therese Peffer, associate director of the CITRIS Climate initiative and the California Institute for Energy and Environment (CIEE), and colleagues at the UC Berkeley Center for the Built Environment (CBE), have been awarded two major grants to advance research on commercial building decarbonization.

The two awards, totaling approximately $8 million, are part of a nearly $20 million investment by the California Energy Commission (CEC) to fund decarbonization solutions for heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) systems in large commercial buildings.

The larger grant, totaling roughly $6 million and led by Paul Raftery with Peffer as co-primary investigator (PI), aims to demonstrate how hospitals can reduce carbon emissions through heat recovery chiller retrofits. The second grant, totaling roughly $2 million and led by Peffer with co-PI Hui Zhang, will advance the widespread adoption of personal comfort devices (PCDs) in commercial buildings to improve indoor comfort.

“These awards offer the opportunity to accelerate the decarbonization of large commercial buildings in very different ways,” said Peffer. “I am excited to work with talented, multidisciplinary teams to advance California’s climate goals.”

Read more from CIEE.

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ACTIVATE, a public-private initiative that works to bridge telehealth technology gaps in California’s Central Valley, has placed third in the Prime Health Innovation Challenge in California.

The competition, a collaboration between national nonprofit Prime Health and the California Health Care Foundation, featured 29 companies from around the globe. These innovators showcased their health solutions for a chance to partner with a California provider organization and receive pilot funding, with seven finalists participating in a live pitch event in July. 

ACTIVATE, which is short for Accountability, Coordination, and Telehealth In the Valley to Achieve Transformation and Equity, is led by Health Tequity, a digital health startup committed to equitable health solutions, in association with CITRIS Health, MITRE Corp., UC Davis and UC Merced.

Read more from Prime Health.

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Therese Peffer, associate director of CITRIS Climate and the California Institute for Energy and Environment (CIEE), is the principal investigator of the Oakland EcoBlock, a pilot project to retrofit an older neighborhood block in East Oakland with shared water- and energy-efficient technologies. 

Beginning in 2019, the EcoBlock team has charted a long journey from choosing a location to weathering the restrictions imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic.

How has the EcoBlock project progressed? As Peffer writes, “Four and a half years later, we’ve seen team members come and go, babies being born on the block, and more EVs driving around Oakland. We’ve learned a great deal about working with an amazing community and new technologies, and look forward to sharing our lessons learned!”

She shares some of the latest milestones in a recent update in the EcoBlock blog.

Read more from the Oakland EcoBlock website.

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