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 Michaels Energy’s core values of “intuitive analysis.” The key to impact evaluations is managing uncertainty. Often, this is measured in terms of confidence and precision related to sampling error (i.e., the industry standard 90% confidence/10% precision threshold), but there are many other types of error that we need to account for that cannot be…
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“Baseline” is an incredibly important term in energy efficiency evaluation. It is thrown around often in many different contexts. So what does it mean? Michaels Energy is currently conducting several baseline studies, but when describing these studies to others, I realized that baselines and their related research can have many different meanings, each with important distinctions. Let’s jump into the deep end of energy efficiency wonkiness. At the most basic level, baselines represent the status quo against which interventions (e.g., new equipment, new policies, etc.) are measured. In energy efficiency, any discussion about baselines begins with whether we are talking…
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