by Jessica Wagner | Dec 22, 2021 | The Big Why
A major theme of the Big Why of Evaluation is that evaluations always involve balancing accuracy and costs due to time and budget constraints as well as the pesky issue of dealing with counterfactuals. The eternal question of “how good is good enough” drives one of...
by Jessica Wagner | Nov 23, 2021 | The Big Why
Every now and then, we are asked to evaluate an energy efficiency project completed at a business that has since closed. This poses some tricky questions: how much savings should a program claim for these measures and how much savings will actually occur? As the...
by Jessica Wagner | Oct 27, 2021 | The Big Why
Last month’s post discussed the need for proper accounting of energy sources to accurately quantify carbon[1] emissions. With that as a background, we can now dive into the importance of the timing of energy use and savings. The carbon content of electricity is both...
by Jessica Wagner | Sep 29, 2021 | The Big Why
As our industry’s goals shift from simply using less energy to reducing carbon emissions, the evaluation, measurement, and verification (EM&V) of these savings can become a whole lot more complex. Both sites and utilities need to understand how much carbon...
by Jessica Wagner | Sep 1, 2021 | The Big Why
Welcome to another installment of the Challenges of Estimating NTG, where we explore the challenges of assigning a numeric counterfactual value to a complex decision-making process. This post will explore some ideas beyond the traditional survey self-report approach...
by Jessica Wagner | Aug 4, 2021 | The Big Why
Sometimes in the course of evaluating energy efficiency projects, we come across projects with negative savings. In other words, participating in an energy efficiency program resulted in an increase in overall energy usage. Given the program theory of most energy...
