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Sep 03
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Strategic Energy Management is Elvis

By Energy Rant No Comments
You’ve been there – on the phone trying to get some help from a car dealership, appliance store, online retailer. The menu choices are unclear, especially for auto stores (hit zero). It makes me cringe when I hear my Mom say she called Dell for help with her computer. Yikes, Mom. This isn’t the plumber on Main Street. Maybe Dell isn’t bad, but hearing my Mom say she was on the line “with them” for two hours, I have my conceptions. I would expect no help from an organization like that. Any help would be above and beyond. So what’s…
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Aug 13
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Modern Efficiency and the Disappearing Clapping Seals

By Energy Rant One Comment
A couple of weeks ago I was directed to an article in AESP’s magazine discussing ways to improve efficiency program cost-effectiveness.  Although it wasn’t about avoided-cost and benefit-cost tests, it provides good stuff for elaborating in this blog. “Cost effective” in the context of the article means lowering the cost per unit of energy or demand saved.  Certainly, this helps to improve benefit-cost ratios, for most of the convoluted tests, that must have been concocted by graduate students under the influence of mind-altering chemicals.  Boy, do I wish we could dial back forty years so we could simply compare the…
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Apr 30
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Guest Post: I Get So Emotional, Baby

By Energy Rant One Comment
Sorry, it’s not Whitney Houston, or Jeff Ihnen, writing this week’s Rant. It’s Kristin Laursen filling in while Jeff puts his feet up, sips martinis, and listens to 90s love songs (at least two of the three of those are true). Last week in Jeff’s Rant, he told us that consumers rule and drive everything, and that we’re “notoriously bad at math and buy for emotional and other reasons.” I can personally attest to the bad at math part, but the buying based on emotions can be explained through behavioral economics. Behavioral economics gives us insight into human behavior to…
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Feb 26
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Powering Lives at Lowest, Convenient Cost

By Energy Rant No Comments
I spent last week at the Association of Energy Services Professionals (AESP) National Conference in New Orleans. Our industry is in transition once again. Substantial changes are on the horizon. Let’s recap some highlights and lowlights in the utility and demand side management industries the past few decades. As nuclear power was going to be too cheap to meter in the 1970s, the oil embargo, Jimmy Carter sweater speech, and the Three Mile Island nuclear accident resulted in a radically different direction for our energy future. On the heels of the above, and the global cooling threat (check out the…
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Sep 05
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Gozer the Disruptor: Replace or Be Replaced

By Energy Rant One Comment
This Rant post is propelled by AESP goers. Several colleagues and I attended AESP’s summer conference for technology in Toronto last week. We landed numerous positive comments about this blog; some from people I don’t know or never met. I greatly appreciate these comments. They keep me fueled to keep pumping these out. These comments, along with the opening plenary, Embracing Disruptive Innovation, and my participation on AESP’s Board of Directors, pour the foundation for this post. But first, the antitrust clause: the following nutty views reflect those of the author only, and not those of AESP, Michaels Energy, or…
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Feb 13
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Groupthink and the Yes Man

By Energy Rant One Comment
When this post launches, I will be sitting in a critical thinking course as part of AESP’s National Conference. As luck would have it, I also stumbled onto a couple interesting articles while eating my curds and whey last week. The first covers echo chambers from Inc. Magazine, and the second was referenced in that article: How to Defeat Groupthink, from Fortune Magazine. The Fortune article points out instances such as investment clubs, where robust debate leads to better results. In other words, avoiding echo chambers and groupthink is good and results in greater productivity. In case you haven’t noticed,…
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Jan 03
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And the 2017 Oscar Goes to… AESP!

By Energy Rant One Comment
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 than money to the organization. Otherwise, it is indeed a waste of money. The Association of Energy Services Professionals (AESP) is an organization I’ve been involved with since 2010. That was the year I attended the big shindig, the National Conference, for the first time. Since…
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Nov 09
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Strategic Energy Management – Try Not, Do or Do Not

By Energy Rant 3 Comments
A couple months ago, I co-authored an AESP Strategies article with Diana Husmann from Nexant and Teri Lutz from Tetra Tech. The subject was non-residential behavior programs. One of the undercurrents that was revealed to me in that process is that strategic energy management, SEM, seems to get pigeonholed as a “behavior program”. First, to digress a bit, every program is a behavior program. ACEEE summarizes these nicely in their Field Guide to Behavior Programs. A super summary of behavior elements are as follows, taken directly from that paper. Cognition programs focus on delivering information to consumers. Categories include general and targeted communication…
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Aug 31
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Distributed Energy; Batteries and Bread Machines

By Energy Efficiency, Energy Rant 3 Comments
The Association of Energy Services Professionals (AESP) Summer Conference included interesting bookend plenary discussions for this post.  The opening plenary featured motivational speaker, Murray Banks; not to be confused with Matt Foley: “eating a steady diet of government cheese and living in a van down by the river”.  Actually, if triathlons and mountaineering were auto racing, the Banks family would be the Andrettis. The closing plenary featured representatives from SolarCity, Opus One Solutions, and Enbridge, Inc.  SolarCity is the Elon Musk-owned photovoltaic manufacturer/installer.  Opus One is a smart grid software company with ties to Tesla as well.  Enbridge is a…
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We talk a lot about energy – from the serious to the satirical.

All things energy. That’s our jam.

We talk a lot about energy – from the serious to the satirical.

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