Frequently Asked Questions

Any of the criteria can be met to be eligible. The projects do not have to meet all of them.

Yes. The non-equity portion of the multifamily program will be available statewide while incentive funds are available. Multifamily projects can qualify for the equity portion of the budget if they meet one of the equity definition criteria listed above.

Each row of the TECH Working Data Set describes a project in which a heat pump water heater ("HPWH") or heat pump heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning ("HP HVAC") system was installed. TECH Clean California only pays incentives for installations in existing homes (as opposed to new construction). Heat pump installations in existing buildings are also known as heat pump retrofit projects.

Please find the Data Dictionary and Read Me file for the TECH Working Data Set you wish to use on the Download Data page. You’ll find links to download the Data Dictionaries just above the survey you can use to download the Working Data Sets.

We use the Cal Enviroscreen 4.0 definition of a disadvantaged community or "DAC". Cal Enviroscreen defines a set of DAC census tracts in California. If a TECH project occurred in one of these census tracts, it is considered to have happened in a DAC. In the TECH Working Datasets, each TECH project is labeled via the “Disadvantaged Community” column as either TRUE or FALSE. Visit the California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment (OEHHA)'s CalEnviroScreen page to learn more: https://oehha.ca.gov/calenviroscreen

TECH Clean California has committed to directing both time and resources to supporting specifically underserved and disadvantaged communities throughout California. You can learn more about our plans and progress on the Equity Budget and Spending page.

Total Project Cost is reported by the contractor performing the heat pump retrofit when they submit an application for a TECH Clean California incentive. Contractors are instructed on the TECH incentive application to include all costs for equipment and installation related to the installed HPWH/HP HVAC system, including material, labor, permitting, etc. The Total Project Cost therefore can include elements of the project beyond just the installation of the heat pump system itself. These other cost elements could include an electrical panel upgrade or a smart thermostat installation.

The Total Project Cost reported by the contractor does not include any discount the customer receives as a result of the contractor receiving incentives like the TECH Clean California incentive. Thus, the Total Project Cost field captures what the contractor would have charged the customer for the heat pump installation project in total, had the contractor not received any incentives. TECH contractors are required to disclose the value of the incentive they expect to receive to the customer at the time of payment.

The TECH Working Dataset is typically opened in Microsoft Excel. Excel displays dates as integers unless you change the format of the cell to "Short Date." You can highlight whole columns and change the format of the column to be shown as a date by following these instructions: https://support.microsoft.com/en-au/office/format-a-date-the-way-you-want-8e10019e-d5d8-47a1-ba95-db95123d273e#:~:text=what%20you%20want.-,Select%20the%20cells%20you%20want%20to%20format.,format%20you%20want%20in%20Type.

Residential addresses and personal contact information for occupants of homes where TECH-funded projects occurred are considered Personally Identifiable Information ("PII") and cannot be shared publicly.

However, the TECH Working Data Set includes several other data points in order to help users understand the location of each TECH-funded installation, including the County, utility service territory, California Climate Zone, and Disadvantaged Community status.

We do not report the ZIP code in which each project occurred in the TECH Working Data Set. We do this in order to avoid revealing information about the individuals or homes where TECH-funded equipment is installed. For example, in some rural ZIP codes there are very few residents, so it would be possible to reidentify the home in which a TECH project happened simply by knowing the ZIP code and a few of the project details listed in the TECH Working Data Set.

However, the TECH Working Data Set includes several other data points in order to help users understand the location of each TECH-funded installation, including the County, utility service territory, California Climate Zone, and Disadvantaged Community status.

In order to minimize the re-identification risk for homes in which TECH-funded equipment was installed, we only publish the name of the specific city in which a TECH-funded project occurred in the TECH Working Data Set if at least 100 TECH-funded projects have occurred in that city.

Yes, we use county assessor data to determine the true age of homes where TECH-funded equipment was installed. This data is not available for every home and is generally more available for Single-Family homes than for Multifamily residences. There are multiple data fields included in the TECH Working Data Set_Single-Family that provide information about the home in which the equipment was installed, including Building Type, Home Square Footage, Year Built, Living Size (SqFt), Number of Bedrooms, and Panel Capacity (related to the electrical panel).

Many data validation steps are taken during the application process in order to ensure that useful and correct data is submitted by the contractor applying for a TECH incentive. However, some data cleaning inevitably must happen after the application process. The Data Dictionaries available for download alongside the TECH Working Data Sets notes the Quality Assurance ("QA") steps taken to remove erroneous data from each data field prior to publishing. Data points that are removed from the TECH Working Data Sets are replaced with the text "Removed during QA".

Data on the Download Data, Project Data Visualizations, Contractor Data, and Equity Budget and Spending pages is updated once each month. Data on the Evaluation Studies page is updated as new reports are published by the TECH Clean California Program Evaluator, Opinion Dynamics.

The TECH Working Data Set does not include contractor names, but you can find the names of contractors who have installed a heat pump and received a TECH Clean California incentive in the Contractor Data webpage under Public Data.

The source data cannot be downloaded directly from the Tableau dashboards on the Project Data Visualization page, but these dashboards show the same data that is available in the TECH Working Data Sets. Please go to the Download Data webpage to download these data sets.

Energy usage before and after an intervention is modeled using the OpenEEmeter daily and hourly methods and disaggregated into temperature-dependent loads, baseload, and discretionary load. The OpenEEMEter daily model defines a building’s energy consumption based on a linear relationship with outdoor weather conditions and the interaction between the building’s temperature dependence, the occupancy status and the time of week. The OpenEEMEter methods are based on industry guidelines established by The American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers ("ASHRAE") and the Uniform Methods Project: Chapter 8 - Whole Building Methods and meet all International Performance Measurement and Verification Protocol ("IPMVP Option C") requirements. OpenEEMeter also specifies rigorous steps for data cleaning and organization and weather station selection, among other technical factors. A combination of daily and hourly models is used to disaggregate metered usage.

Disaggregated usage categories are defined as follows:

Temperature-dependent usage is energy consumption that increases or decreases with temperature, with warm-weather dependent usage defined as space cooling, and cool-weather-dependent usage defined as space heating.

Average baseload (always on) consumption is computed by first finding days where the CalTRACK daily model does not detect temperature-dependent usage. For these days hours are ranked from lowest to highest according to kWh usage. The average usage of hours ranked 2 - 4 are then averaged across the year and extrapolated to 8,760 hours. This would capture always-on end uses such as refrigeration and “vampire” loads from electronic devices in standby mode.

Discretionary usage is an estimate of a customer's non-temperature dependent, non-baseload usage that is independent of temperature. For example, cooking on an electric stove or using an electric clothes or hair dryer would be examples of discretionary usage.