Blog

Last week, I participated in ACEEE’s Summer Study for Buildings in Pacific Grove. This week’s Rant features themes of our industry’s direction as described by the hundreds of papers presented at the conference. Most of what I’ve been writing about in recent months is happening in many places. Hurray! EISApcolypse?  Bring It! EISA (you sayRead more

I have always found it interesting that “demand-side management,” the term that is generally used synonymously with energy efficiency programs, includes virtually no demand management whatsoever. The term “demand-side” simply means the energy consuming side of the energy transaction, whereas, “demand” is an instantaneous power draw from a device, building, feeder line, substation, power plant,Read more

A couple months ago in Outside the Boxer, we considered efficiency as a resource to be compared with supply-side resources. In May, we challenged minds with We All Un-Bundle, suggesting that utilities get markups for services delivered over their infrastructure. Let’s advance these concepts! Efficiency – A Utility Perspective Utilities are slow to change forRead more

This year ACEEE published a three-part series on why people and companies invest in energy efficiency. First, they provide some guesstimates of energy efficiency investment in the United States. Their researched estimates vary from $60 billion to about $120 billion, annually. Is this a reasonable guesstimate? According to their State Scorecard, program spending on naturalRead more

The Energy Rant is not for the weak-kneed who prefer to live in the land of unicorns, fairy dust, and lollipops. This week is no exception. This Rant is brought to you by the recent ACEEE paper, Recent Developments in Energy Efficiency Evaluation, Measurement and Verification. Burned on the Alter of 90/10 A major objectiveRead more

Happy New Year! I am launching 2017 with this positive, upbeat Rant (my apologies to all my Oscar the Grouch fans). I have a go / no-go test for our company’s involvement with organizations: if we are going to be members of something, we are going to participate in, benefit from, and contribute more thanRead more

Last week I was working on corporate tasks, so I needed to go into my vault of gems for pontification.  The subject that emerged is energy audits and certifications, specifically from the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating, and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE).  The document is the Standard for Commercial Building Energy Audits, Standard 211P.  It wasRead more

It’s Halloween. Hundreds of thousands of people have to figure out a different costume because a clown plague has infected the country. While I don’t consume tabloid news, I did hear that in some cities, the clowns are getting beat up. I thought, now that isn’t a bad idea, but I wouldn’t advise that. WhenRead more

Last week, we explored the state of EM&V 2.0 and its considerable, to say the least, constraints. This week, we look more intensely at fallacious “automated M&V”. Automated M&V is an oversold and over-hyped concept. When something is automated, it takes inputs (data) from various sources, often hundreds of sources, with high frequency, maybe byRead more

Evaluation, Measurement and Verification 2.0, or EM&V 2.0, is a nerdy term coined in 2014, according to this blog by Northeast Energy Efficiency Partnerships (NEEP). The hype of EM&V 2.0, which I will explain later, is that it will automate measurement and verification, putting us engineers out of business. This is not going to happenRead more

Anytime I listen to a net-to-gross (NTG) scrum, the philosophical gears in my brain ramp up to a smooth whir. This is what happened at ACEEE summer camp, also known as the ACEEE Summer Study on Energy Efficiency in Buildings. This post is inspired by a paper titled “Applying Gross Savings and Net Savings inRead more

Energy is a commodity, and like all commodities, it is wise to hedge risk; not go the other way and place bets. Unless you are a certain presidential candidate with privileged information on cattle futures, I would stay away from betting, er investing in, commodities in general, and energy specifically. To digress for a moment,Read more