A California Program Is Bringing Down the Cost of Heat Pumps by Buying Bulk

In Spain, Higueruela transformed wind farm revenues into municipal investments—funding schools, transportation, senior care, and local jobs—which stabilized the town's declining population and created a sustainable economic model that now provides 40% of its annual budget. A key success factor includes allowing the community to negotiate and reject projects that don't serve local interests.

The Connecticut Green Bank's Solar MAP+ program acts as a "public developer" that bundles, finances, and directly develops solar projects for schools and municipalities that private developers avoid. To date, they've installed nearly 54 megawatts of solar, programmed to save $57 million in energy costs.

Vermont's community-led movement to build a thriving local agriculture economy, through nonprofit infrastructure investments, diversified farming practices, and bipartisan collaboration, has revitalized small farms, boosted food resilience, and offered a viable economic alternative to industrialized agriculture.

The Texas Trees Foundation is bringing thousands of trees to Dallas communities experiencing the worst of the urban heat island effect to help keep them cool. The organization supplies the trees and teaches residents how to care for them.

Vienna’s cool streets provide a safe outdoor space to escape the heat in the summer. The city used a heat map and population data to select streets with high concentrations of residents who are particularly vulnerable to extreme heat, like children and the elderly. At the selected locations, traffic was limited and asphalt was covered with turf, benches, mist machines, and water fountains. When the city challenged the project, a citizen’s initiative in the Ottakring district worked with the local council to keep one cool street open last summer, saving a public safe outdoor space.

Researchers of the Cooling Singapore project are using huge amounts of data to build a detailed digital twin of the city that they can use to test how effective new methods of combatting extreme heat would be. It's a digital representation of Singapore that makes predictions based on data like traffic, weather, electricity demand, and where green spaces are.

Medellín, Colombia, is combating the urban heat island effect by creating green corridors across the city. Over 2.5 million plants and trees were carefully selected to maximize impact and planted on buildings and along roads and waterways.

The Office of Heat Response and Mitigation works to address the urban heat effect caused by intense summer temperatures. The Office has worked on several practices like coating streets and surfaces in light-colored, water-based asphalt treatments that reflect sunlight and absorb less heat than standard pavement. So far, 100 miles of residential roads have been covered in the treatment and roads with the treatment have an average surface temperature that is 10.5 to 12 degrees Fahrenheit lower than traditional asphalt.

As climate change increases flooding in the area, residents of Vermont’s Tri-Park Cooperative mobile home community can relocate to safer locations out of the flood zone without increasing their monthly expenses. The offer is part of a program created by the co-op and the local government that will cover the costs of the new homes and buyouts.

In Lithuania, building owners looking to retrofit to improve energy use, reduce heating costs, and lower carbon emissions, can make use of a lending approach that pairs grants and loans. The grants are intended to offset the expense of the loan and can act as a first-loss guarantee for investors.