
The Big Why of Evaluation
Dig into the purpose, process, and impact of energy program evaluation. The Big Why of Evaluation explores how measurement, verification, and evaluation drive smarter program design, better outcomes, and accountability across the energy landscape.

Impact Evaluations – How Good is Good Enough?
A major theme of the Big Why of Evaluation is that evaluations always involve balancing accuracy and costs due to ...

How to Claim Savings from a Closed Business
Every now and then, we are asked to evaluate an energy efficiency project completed at a business that has since ...

Timing is Everything
Last month’s post discussed the need for proper accounting of energy sources to accurately quantify ...

Converting Energy: Site v. Source Energy and Carbon
As our industry’s goals shift from simply using less energy to reducing carbon emissions, the evaluation, ...

Did the Program Actually Cause That?
Welcome to another installment of the Challenges of Estimating NTG, where we explore the challenges of assigning a ...

Negative Savings?! That’s Not Supposed to Happen!
Sometimes in the course of evaluating energy efficiency projects, we come across projects with negative savings. ...

Are We Underestimating Cooling Savings in an Era of Climate Change?
As global average temperatures continue to rise due to climate change caused by humans, the amount of energy used ...

How Long Will the Savings Last? Exploring Persistence and the Rebound Effect
Last month’s post focused on how to best treat future energy or carbon savings and how this decision can affect ...

Discount Rates, Carbon, and the Ministry for the Future
I recently read The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson. It’s a science fiction novel about climate ...

Cascading Effects and Market Transformation
Like many, I was transfixed in late March by the huge container ship stuck in the Suez Canal. And also, like many, ...

Why Evaluators Need Whiteboards: Avoiding Double-Counting in Evaluation
I love explaining things with diagrams. One thing I have really missed working from home over the past year is not ...

Pies, Nice Dinners, and Broken Windows – Attribution, Causality, and NTG
Welcome back to the Challenges of Estimating NTG, where we explore the challenges of assigning a numeric ...
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