TECH Clean California Announces 2026 Quick Start Grant Recipients

March 11, 2026

TECH Clean California awarded eight Quick Start Grants totaling $1.6 million to support targeted, innovative projects that test solutions to overcome market barriers to heat pump space and water heating adoption. Now in its second phase, the program focuses on refining intervention strategies that can scale statewide. All eight pilots have launched as of March 2026.

The 2026 recipients represent a wide range of organizations and approaches, with an emphasis on serving communities historically underserved by other clean energy programs or with limited incomes. The recipients include:

• City of San Luis Obispo will refine heat pump solutions for mobile and manufactured housing by installing a range of technologies across 15 to 21 households, paired with pre-and post-installation support to ensure participants’ satisfaction.
• Central California Asthma Collaborative will implement a heat pump education and outreach program for non-English speaking households, with goal of assisting 50 households in Central California with installations.
• Community Action Partnership of Orange County will host a stipend-based heat pump technology training program for minority contractors at their weatherization training facility and develop a visual “best practices” field guide for heat pump HVAC installations.
• People Organizing to Demand Environmental and Economic Rights (PODER) will deliver multilingual home electrification education across San Francisco’s Eastern neighborhoods, reaching at least 900 residents and supporting 50 households in installing heat pumps.
• Redeemer Community Partnership will run a heat pump concierge program guiding 15 to 20 low‑income households in Los Angeles’s Exposition Park community through assessment, equipment selection, installation, and rebate applications.
• Rising Sun Center for Opportunity will install 30 window HVAC heat pumps in the Stockton community through their Climate Careers workforce development program, providing installation support, in-language resident education, and follow-up to ensure resident satisfaction.
• San Francisco Environment Department will install 30 heat pump water heaters in residential home childcare centers and partner with the Low Income Investment Fund's Child Care Facilities repair program. Equipment installations include mentorship-based contractor training.
• USGBC California will develop standardized financing templates, funder coordination models, and digital tools for multifamily retrofits, which will be used to support three to five retrofits in disadvantaged communities to become “finance-ready.”

“Each of these projects brings an innovative, practical approach to accelerating heat pump adoption in communities that have too often been left out of clean energy progress,” said Alison Seel, Senior Consultant at VEIC, which administers the Quick Start Grant program as part of the TECH Clean California team. “TECH Clean California is proud to partner with these organizations as they launch their pilots.”

These projects build on TECH Clean California’s first phase of Quick Start Grants which awarded $3.85 million to 19 projects over three years. The program demonstrated the value of targeted, agile funding in advancing equitable electrification and has been recognized as a replicable funding model for energy programs nationwide.

More information and details about the 2026 Quick Start Grant recipients will be available soon at techcleanca.com/quick-start-grants.