Participants

• Regulated Market: Washington, DC
• Incentive Provider: DC DOEE 
• Matched Incentive Program(s): (1) Stormwater Retention Credit Program SRC (2) Riverwise Credit Program
• Property Location: 1336 Bladensburg Ave. Washington, DC 20002
• Property Owner (Host):   Yellow Enterprises, LLC
• Aggregator (Producer):  Greening Urban

Results

• Qualification and approval of the property and property owner for enrollment in (3) DC incentive programs for stormwater management.
•  $310K parking lot upgrade at no cost to the property owner.
• Financial incentives and utility savings to the property owner.
•  Installation of green infrastructure that treats and retains ~40K gallons of stormwater each rainfall.

Overview

Rain is the single largest cause of water pollution, flooding, and property damage impacting over 200 million people in the US today. This has led to federal mandates that put pressure on local governments and private property owners.  Local governments only have access to 20% of the land use in a given urban market, requiring them to come up with ways to incentivize private property owners to retrofit their properties.  While incentive programs exist they are hard to find, complicated, and time-consuming which leads to extremely low utilization rates.  

Using Rainplan, Yellow Enterprises located at 1336 Bladensburg Ave Washington, DC 20002 was able to benefit from local incentives available to property owners within the City to upgrade their parking lot with a bio-retention “rain garden” facility that treats approximately 39K gallons of water per the first inch of rain. Rainplan matched Yellow Enterprises with (2) incentive programs for a total value of $115+K.  Yellow Enterprise’s participation didn’t require any out-of-pocket expenditures or construction delivery risk.  The only requirement of Yellow Enterprises as the “Host” for the green infrastructure improvement was to allow property access for the installation and long-term maintenance of the installed rain garden. 

Greening Urban is a local, DC-based, design, engineering, and construction management firm led by Chris Early that was matched by Rainplan to this project as the “Producer.”  As the Producer, Greening Urban is responsible for the installation, certification, and maintenance of the installed green infrastructure device to ensure it is within compliance and functionality of the local incentive programs requirements.  Through the Rainplan platform, Greening Urban was successful in sourcing the upfront funding to proceed with the installation and management of the installed infrastructure. 

Approach

There’s a general proactive lack of participation with stormwater management by private property owners and a need for digitization of available incentive programs offered by incentive providers. Private Property Owners are unaware of the incentives, value, and benefits of optimal stormwater management on their properties.

The lack of awareness around available incentives, and the impact of stormwater compliance on private property ownership involves highly complicated technologies, non-digitized incentive application processes, and  180 day incentive payout periods that are significant barriers to increasing private property owners’ participation with local stormwater retrofits. 

Rainplan’s objective is to digitize the available incentive programs into one single consolidated platform and match those incentives to the private properties to create high impact stormwater projects that increase value for private property owners, increase the utilization of available incentive programs, and ultimately improve the local water quality and flooding impacts in highly urban communities.

Conclusion

Rainplan is an incentive-matching marketplace that unlocks the full environmental and economic value of stormwater on private property. Our goal is to have all property owners and/or owner agents utilize Rainplan to optimize their stormwater planning to achieve the maximum economic value for property owners balanced with the maximum environmental ROI for incentive providers, all while streamlining the process for engineering and construction professionals to add more value to their clients and increasing their volume of local stormwater projects.