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This week, we are taking a trip down easy street to explore what I called three years ago in DOE Pumping Standards a nauseating term, “low hanging fruit.” I love charts like the one below. Where can you find stuff like that? Well, the source vanished, except that I posted it in the Rant, itRead more

As the third in a series, we are going to wrap up the normalized metered energy consumption (NMEC) protocol groundwork this week. See the first and second posts to catch up in case you missed those. The first post covered new construction programs for which NMEC doesn’t apply because a baseline of normalized energy use[1]Read more

In theory, normalized metered energy consumption, or NMEC, would allow demand-side resources, whether dispatchable (demand response) or non-dispatchable (efficiency, demand rates, time of use, peak rates, etc.), to be precisely measured with equipment customers have already paid for – smart meters and the advanced metering infrastructure. It would work like this: What does the meterRead more

Normalized metered energy consumption, or NMEC, is another name for the nerdy term, EM&V 2.0[1]. Why the switch? Maybe en-meck spills out of the mouth a little easier. Maybe EM&V 2.0 got the bad rap it deserved as I explained a couple years ago in Whale Bus or Airbus and Automated M&V in Your Dreams.Read more

This blog features dozens of posts regarding the nuances, obscurities, and upside down world of the public utility industry. To wit, every other industry provides things people need or want at the lowest possible price in competition with dozens or even hundreds of competitors or alternatives. Conversely, electric utilities with transmission and distribution systems areRead more

“Casual observers are often wrong.”  Why didn’t I think of this for a tagline?  It is a line inked by utility veteran Charles Bayless in the March issue of Public Utilities Fortnightly.  His article, “Does Storage Increase Carbon?” is the basis of this post.  By the way, many politicians make policy and law without knowingRead more

Show me anything, and I’ll investigate it. This investigation was spurred by an article blurb I reviewed for a potential spot in AESP’s monthly member e-magazine, Strategies. The headline: Connection Between Home Energy Efficiency and Respiratory Health in Low-Income Homes. That sounds fine enough until I got to the reported root cause: too much infiltration;Read more

Four years after I explained why distributed rooftop solar[1] on every home bucks every successful ongoing business trend in existence, Keith Dennis[2] proves it in Public Utilities Fortnightly. His article: NOT Zero Energy. The vehicle for Mr. Dennis’ flatulent beef is zero net energy – or ZNE as it is known in the jargon languageRead more

Texans may need Tabasco, not just for their favorite dish or condiment, but as a deterrent to chewing their fingernails as they ride the cliff of blackouts this summer. Numerous articles, including this most recent one I saw from the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, caution of rolling blackouts as capacity margins are less than 7.5%, whichRead more

This week, we finish the series on attribution studies. First, let me explain, while I beat up attribution assessments, they are necessary. This post will conclude with how I think they should be used. Experimental v Quasi-Experimental Second, I want to make a couple comments about last week’s post. Near the end, I explained randomizedRead more

This week, we are continuing our dive into attribution, which is the impact an intervention or program has on a population – in our case, efficiency programs in a service territory or state. Last week, I used the term comparison group rather than control group. They can be used interchangeably and sometimes erroneously. A comparisonRead more

In the last two Rant posts, we learned that our 40-year-old program evaluation frameworks need to change to capture greater, real impacts. Rather than improving programs and accurately determining impacts, archaic evaluation methodologies are impeding progress toward greater energy savings. It may be like solving the percolating national debt crisis, but I will attack thisRead more