Building Decarb Committee

Join us for a special meeting of USGBC-CA’s Building Decarb committee April 7th 2026, 12 noon to 1pm celebrating California Heat Pump Week! The California Heat Pump Partnership, which is a project of the Building Decarbonization Coalition, is hosting this special week April 11-19, 2026, and encouraging organizations to host 100 events statewide. This coincides with Earth Month and LA Climate Week, so we’re celebrating a trifecta!

This meeting is special in another way, highlighting the value that USGBC California delivers. Three of our four panelists are current participants or recent alumni from USGBC-CA’s Net Zero Accelerator, a unique program that leverages the insights, expertise, and relationships of our marquee partners and community members to speed the development and commercialization of sustainable innovations. NZA has supported over a hundred early stage companies in 11 cohorts since 2019. Our participants and alumni are entrepreneurial founders bringing to market innovative solutions for net zero carbon, building decarbonization both operational and embodied, energy, water and waste, occupant wellness, sustainable infrastructure, and clean construction.

Our fourth panelist shifts the discussion from product innovations that advance the capability of heat pumps to address more and more edge cases to the perspective of an engineer working to deploy heat pumps across hundreds of buildings on 23 campuses in their statewide enterprise: the California State University system.

Panelists for this discussion are:

• Samantha Lamos of Gradient Comfort, which won a New York City design competition to enable affordable retrofits in high rise multifamily housing. Their 120 volt window heat pumps install in under 30 minutes.
• Jane Melia of Harvest Thermal, an air to water heat pump which stores hot water in a tank that is used for both potable domestic hot water as well as space heating and cooling.
• Jordan Sotudeh of Venaera, which targets retrofits for larger buildings with package units. Venaera’s independent, swappable modules increase flexibility of installation, and simplify maintenance.
• Rachel Patterson, University Engineer for the California State University Chancellor’ Office, will talk about deploying heat pumps at scale across an enterprise.