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For decades, our work ensuring that low-income communities can access affordable and clean energy has been led by BlueHub Energy President DeWitt (Dick) Jones, who retired in February 2025. Join us in looking back at what we’ve accomplished so far and where we go from here.
Many older affordable housing developments suffer from high and volatile energy costs, substandard ventilation and air conditioning, and expensive and inefficient mechanical equipment. While clean technology offers ways to address these issues, we saw a range of barriers that were leaving behind the communities we serve. At BlueHub, we believe that good policy emerges from practice. So, we launched programs to demonstrate how green investments can create better, more cost-effective housing that is sustainable, durable and healthy for the residents.
The Green Building Production Network was the first step. A forum for collaboration and shared resources, it brought together Boston-area community development corporations. Together, we worked with affordable housing developments and their residents to understand how their buildings could better serve their needs. We identified two initial opportunities, and then we acted.
First, to lower costly and volatile utility, affordable housing developments needed a better way to understand and manage their utility usage. BlueHub Energy developed a low-cost approach to monitoring energy consumption and expense: an online analytics platform called WegoWise. The platform requires neither upfront capital investment nor on-site installation and allows properties to track their utility use, benchmark it against similar buildings, specify reductions from investments and monitor actual and ongoing performance of those investments. Today, it is the largest database of multi-family energy use in the world.
Second, affordable housing developments needed stable and lower-cost electricity. Solar energy had the potential to provide both, but solar policies created barriers for affordable housing developments and low-income residents. For properties with roofs that were appropriate for solar, BlueHub Energy pioneered a “third party”solar program that installed, owned and managed the solar. The program lowered its costs by creating a financial structure to capture tax credits that were previously unavailable to nonprofits, and then sold the electricity at a discount to the properties. For properties and residents who could not put solar on their own roofs, we pioneered community solar projects that provided meaningful savings on those customers’ electric bills.
As we hone expertise in an area, policy makers turn to us for insights. For both rooftop and community solar projects, our policy recommendations have been adopted, allowing these programs to scale. Now, having grown as an organization, we are able to take on larger and more complex issues. We are asking, “What’s the model of a healthy neighborhood?” And we are considering ways for new technologies — like electric vehicles and their batteries — to address longstanding issues such as the price of power and community health.
In our next chapter, this work will be fully integrated into BlueHub Loan Fund’s lending, as we look for new ways to partner with borrowers to deliver clean, affordable energy to buildings that promote health, resiliency and security.
For decades, our work ensuring that low-income communities can access affordable and clean energy has been led by BlueHub Energy President DeWitt (Dick) Jones, who retired in February 2025. Join us in looking back at what we’ve accomplished so far and where we go from here.
Many older affordable housing developments suffer from high and volatile energy costs, substandard ventilation and air conditioning, and expensive and inefficient mechanical equipment. While clean technology offers ways to address these issues, we saw a range of barriers that were leaving behind the communities we serve. At BlueHub, we believe that good policy emerges from practice. So, we launched programs to demonstrate how green investments can create better, more cost-effective housing that is sustainable, durable and healthy for the residents.
The Green Building Production Network was the first step. A forum for collaboration and shared resources, it brought together Boston-area community development corporations. Together, we worked with affordable housing developments and their residents to understand how their buildings could better serve their needs. We identified two initial opportunities, and then we acted.
First, to lower costly and volatile utility, affordable housing developments needed a better way to understand and manage their utility usage. BlueHub Energy developed a low-cost approach to monitoring energy consumption and expense: an online analytics platform called WegoWise. The platform requires neither upfront capital investment nor on-site installation and allows properties to track their utility use, benchmark it against similar buildings, specify reductions from investments and monitor actual and ongoing performance of those investments. Today, it is the largest database of multi-family energy use in the world.
Second, affordable housing developments needed stable and lower-cost electricity. Solar energy had the potential to provide both, but solar policies created barriers for affordable housing developments and low-income residents. For properties with roofs that were appropriate for solar, BlueHub Energy pioneered a “third party”solar program that installed, owned and managed the solar. The program lowered its costs by creating a financial structure to capture tax credits that were previously unavailable to nonprofits, and then sold the electricity at a discount to the properties. For properties and residents who could not put solar on their own roofs, we pioneered community solar projects that provided meaningful savings on those customers’ electric bills.
As we hone expertise in an area, policy makers turn to us for insights. For both rooftop and community solar projects, our policy recommendations have been adopted, allowing these programs to scale. Now, having grown as an organization, we are able to take on larger and more complex issues. We are asking, “What’s the model of a healthy neighborhood?” And we are considering ways for new technologies — like electric vehicles and their batteries — to address longstanding issues such as the price of power and community health.
In our next chapter, this work will be fully integrated into BlueHub Loan Fund’s lending, as we look for new ways to partner with borrowers to deliver clean, affordable energy to buildings that promote health, resiliency and security.
