How It Works

The Energy Opportunity Zone

Energize Fresno created an “Energy Opportunity Zone” (EOZ), a geographic focus area in the City of Fresno, that aims to meet the needs of community members by concentrating project efforts at a neighborhood scale. The focus area is approximately five square miles and includes the Blackstone Avenue Corridor and Downtown Fresno, two priority redevelopment areas identified in the City of Fresno’s 2014 General Plan. Through the EOZ, Energize Fresno will promote infill, and aims to help Fresno achieve energy, monetary, and other resource savings in accordance with the California Energy Commission’s Advanced Energy Community principles.

Concentrating AEC project efforts within the EOZ provides a tangible and scalable pilot that addresses a wide range of community member needs. Packaging the planning efforts in this way allows the program to propose a range of clean energy deployment and management solutions, leverage the city’s existing planning infrastructure, connect the program with relevant stakeholder groups, and tie the program to market conditions as a basis to implement more sustainability-focused projects. The EOZ will thus serve as a replicable and scalable template with which communities across California can deploy advanced energy technologies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, increase energy efficiency, localize the economic benefits of development, and provide improved safety and reliability for community members.

Why Downtown Fresno and the Blackstone Corridor?

Many of the city’s regional planning initiatives strongly suggest focusing innovation and investment in clean energy and resource efficiency in the downtown area and along the Blackstone Corridor. In addition, the California High Speed Rail Authority (HSRA) has established plans to build a station in downtown Fresno, making the downtown a major transit hub and future EcoDistrict. The Energize Fresno team thus established these two planning areas to be the EOZ project area, with the goal of increasing resource savings from new development and redevelopment projects, and aligning with long-term planning priorities.

By focusing on this defined project area, projects, programs, and initiatives are clustered, enabling Energize Fresno to take advantage of targeted outreach and technical assistance across highly varied neighborhoods and socioeconomic groups, thereby realizing a real-world application of the California Energy Commission’s AEC principles and the benefits of an AEC.

Integrated Community Resource Market

Currently, there is a lack of integrated approaches to help communities identify, select, and implement high-quality, cost-effective projects that meet the principles of an AEC and contribute to community prosperity. Energize Fresno designed a development platform, the Integrated Community Resource Market (ICRM), to provide this integrated approach. The platform aims to help the City of Fresno, and communities across the state, raise the visibility of energy, water, and transportation investment opportunities in their communities, and take the steps towards becoming an AEC.

The project team undertook the following technical tasks to develop the ICRM platform.

Master Community Design

The Master Community Design describes projects and processes for how Fresno might move towards becoming the kind of Advanced Energy Community (AEC) needed to confront the economic and environmental challenges facing California. Such an outline is a critical resource for community leaders, planners, and stakeholders who are working to take Fresno from where it is today to where it can be in the future.

The Master Community Design aims to respond to the city’s challenges of economic hardship and rising electricity demand while leveraging the city’s considerable momentum in reducing overall energy consumption and expanding its renewable energy infrastructure each year. It is intended to provide a community focused roadmap for mobilizing development of high performance buildings, improve the security of Fresno’s energy systems, and support reduced energy cost burdens for some of the most vulnerable populations in the state. Ultimately, the Master Community Design will serve as an enduring resource for stakeholders by providing a transparent description of the processes and tools used to identify, select, and analyze projects as well as funding to continue to optimize the value of future projects.

Energize Fresno Project Portfolio

The Master Community Design integrates the California Energy Commission’s principles of an AEC by putting forward a portfolio of projects and programs that contribute to grid reliability and resiliency, increase energy efficiency and renewable energy, and deploy smart grid and zero net energy technologies. Implementation of this portfolio involves commercial and residential projects across a range of building types and residential neighborhoods.

The portfolio of 13 development sites, two activity centers, two program enhancements, and two electric vehicle charging proposals is estimated to cost $30.8 million in capital expenditure and save participants $4.6 million annually net of financing costs, and generate approximately $1 million annually in positive cash flow. Capital expenditures apply towards the incremental costs associated with the sustainability measure analyzed as it allows the team to model financial performance of loans and funding towards the additional costs associated with sustainable design.

To present the final analysis results of the portfolio to project owners and developers, the Energize Fresno team developed a community level dashboard, or Power BI Dashboard, for the City of Fresno. The Power BI provides detailed analysis results and savings of each project by market sector, funding source, and resource type that is aggregated at the community level.

Total Capital Expenditure

$35.1 million

Total Annual Emissions Reduction

7,340 metric tons of CO₂e*

_{*Equivalent to GHG emissions from over 1,570 conventional vehicles driven in one year}

Total Annual Energy Cost Savings

$4.6 million

Total Annual Electricity Savings

& On-Site Generation

26.6 GWh*

_{*Equivalent to over 2,900 homes’ electricity use for one year}

Project Portfolio Design

The EPIC Challenge: Phase II

At the close of the EPIC Challenge planning phase, Energize Fresno will apply for an additional $14 million in grant funding from the California Energy Commission to implement the Master Community Design (click the “Master Community Design” tab to learn more) and take the first steps toward creating a thriving district that models resource-efficient living and working in the City of Fresno. We invite you to share in this vision for a more resilient and prosperous future for Fresno.