Scaling Industrialized Zero Emissions Retrofits in California and Beyond
Project Update
In 2025 the project team completed the Advanced Building Construction Collaborative (ABC-C) protion of the project. ABC-C established a vibrant network of stakeholders spanning manufacturers, developers, financiers, workforce groups, and policymakers. Over 750 people participated in the inaugural convening, while five topic-specific working groups held 120 sessions addressing key barriers such as workforce shortages, embodied carbon, codes and permitting, and finance.
This collaborative model created a shared understanding of industry challenges and solutions, resulting in actionable recommendations for scaling advanced construction. Importantly, it built trust and familiarity among market actors who traditionally operate in silos, laying the groundwork for future coordinated action.
Additionally, through commercialization support, ABC-C helped member companies raise an impressive $637 million in funding since 2022, with $363 million directly supported by the Collaborative. Companies like Aeroseal, Module, and Mighty Buildings advanced their technologies toward market readiness, while several were successfully brought to market.
This investment not only accelerates innovation but also stimulates local economic development, creating jobs in manufacturing, design, and installation of energy-efficient technologies.
The Issue
California’s goal to decarbonize the building sector creates a need for emerging technologies. One of the most significant barriers to retrofitting a building is that it is often time-consuming, disruptive, and costly. Heating, ventilation, air-conditioning (HVAC) systems are often difficult to retrofit due to the location of the system components, which are often not easily accessible. Significant advances are needed to scale the market, reduce the cost, and increase the demand for all electric retrofits.
Project Innovation
To scale the uptake of deep energy retrofits, two core activities will be undertaken:
Build a nation-wide collaborative of stakeholders to scale high performance, prefabricated, off-site construction technologies, facilitate demand, and lower costs in the supply chain. This effort will engage California stakeholders and promote California-based manufacturing and expand the statewide pipeline of supply and demand by connecting these stakeholders to the national market.
Develop and design and demonstrate an integrated mechanical pod prototype to provide heating, cooling, ventilation, and grid interactive controls for a retrofit-in place, high performance, and mass-producible product for multi-family buildings. The prefabricated prototype aims to remove many of the time-consuming and costly barriers associated with deep energy retrofits.
Project Goals
Project Benefits
This project provides a detailed analysis to estimate the potential long-term benefits to California IOU ratepayers through technology adoption. The benefits include cost reduction, peak load reduction, infrastructure resilience and reliability, air emission reduction and greenhouse gas reduction.
Affordability
The high efficiency mechanical pods prototypes are expected to reduce energy cost. The prototypes will be manufactured and tested to meet performance and design targets necessary to reduce energy use.
Key Project Members
Subrecipients
Match Partners
