Colegio Zero Net Energy Village

Self-Help Enterprises and its supporting team have used criteria defined by the California Energy Commission to guide the design approach of Colegio Zero Net Energy Village. In meeting and exceeding these criteria, the team sought to identify and integrate emerging energy technologies that are appropriate for an energy-efficient, grid-interactive, low-carbon affordable housing prototype that can be replicated across communities in California’s Central Valley and beyond. The proposed design represents a low-rise affordable multifamily housing prototype that is all-electric, achieves zero net energy between 4:00 p.m. and 9:00 p.m. daily throughout the year, and features a site-wide microgrid and numerous other grid-interactive peak shedding and shifting strategies. The project integrates passive design strategies, paired with highly efficient heat pumps for heating and cooling, energy recovery ventilators for unit ventilation, heat pump water heaters for domestic hot water, and numerous smart building technologies. Additionally, a 2.6-megawatt battery storage system, a 571-kilowatt photovoltaic solar array provides on-site energy generation and storage. 

Relative to the previous Self-Help Enterprises template design prototype, the project reduces annual operational energy and carbon by 35 percent and 37 percent, respectively, and it reduces the summer and winter peak energy consumption by 15 to 20 percent and 20 to 50 percent, respectively. Additionally, the project reduces the embodied carbon associated with the structure, envelope, interior finishes, and sitework by 25 percent relative to the template design baseline. The project can island in a grid outage event, providing immediate and indefinite, critical shared services that comprise 10 percent of peak load and immediate, critical in-unit services that comprise 25 percent of peak load for up to 72 hours. Through thorough and systematic evaluation and integration of emerging energy technologies, the Colegio Zero Net Energy Village provides a flexible and scalable prototype for future low-rise multifamily affordable housing developments across the state and beyond.