Residents of Kingman Hall at U. California-Berkeley will be coming home to cleaner, greener digs in the fall after the co-op undergoes an eco-friendly makeover this summer.

The Berkeley Student Cooperative will soon begin sprucing up Kingman with energy-efficient upgrades that will reduce the building’s greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent. The renovations will put the co-op in compliance with Measure G – a city ballot initiative passed in November 2006 that requires the city to create a plan to reduce total greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent below 2000 emission levels by 2050.

The retrofits – part of the cooperative’s effort to make all 20 of their buildings more energy efficient by the end of the decade – will include replacing the current heating and air conditioning system with high-efficiency furnaces, adding insulation, retrofitting the windows in the common area and installing thermostat-controlled showerheads.

The upgrades will be funded with the cooperative’s own money, though the Berkeley City Council recommended on June 1 that the cooperative be granted an additional $30,000 to retrofit another cooperative building.

Though Kingman Hall will not be closing down, Jan Stokley, the cooperative’s executive director, said the co-op is “substantially vacant.”

“There are six people who have chosen to stay, and they have the option at any point to transfer to another co-op,” Stokley said.

She added that the retrofitting will not result in fee increases for residents, but hopes instead that they can raise the money solely through energy savings and alumni donations.

“We’re not going to fund this through fee hikes,” Stokley said. “We’re trying our best to keep these (co-ops) as affordable as possible because of tuition hikes.”

Stokley said there is a lot of enthusiasm among co-op residents for the renovations.

“People really turned out for the City Council meeting on Tuesday night,” she said. “They spoke to the need to do this and really showed that this is doable and that we all need to start doing it now.”

Though UC Berkeley will not be involved in the Kingman Hall renovation, Christine Shaff, communications director of the Department of Facilities Services, said the campus would oversee any future retrofit of the two buildings on land leased to the cooperative by the university.

The City Council will vote on June 22 whether to include $30,000 in the budget for the cooperatives’ proposed second retrofit. Stokley said it has not yet been decided which co-op would receive this funding.

She added that the cooperative hopes to fund future retrofits in part with money saved through the “greener” renovations.

In order for the organization to remain in compliance with Measure G, it will have to renovate all 20 co-ops within the next 10 years. The first interim short-term target for Measure G is to reduce city emissions by 33 percent by 2020. The cooperative has committed to retrofitting one building per year, but at this rate, half of the residential units will fail to meet the 2020 emissions reduction goal, according to Councilmember Kriss Worthington.

But even if the BSC does not manage to finish all 20 buildings by 2020, there will not be any negative consequences.

“There’s no penalty if you fail,” Worthington said. “People from the co-op are saying ‘we want to do our part, we want to make sure we meet or surpass the goal’ … (The $30,000 grant) would be a big carrot to help them – no, it’s like a one year supply of carrot juice, it’s way bigger than a carrot.”

Stokely said she is confident all co-ops will be retrofitted by 2020 and predicts more sustainability projects in the future.

“I’m sure that even after we’ve accomplished what we know now we need to do, there will be something new on the horizon,” she said. “Our commitment to sustainability is long term.”