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Mar 04
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Unmasking the Randomized Control Trial

By Energy Rant One Comment
This week, we are continuing our dive into attribution, which is the impact an intervention or program has on a population – in our case, efficiency programs in a service territory or state. Last week, I used the term comparison group rather than control group. They can be used interchangeably and sometimes erroneously. A comparison group is a baseline to observe what happens in absence of intervention. It avoids guessing counterfactuals and unobservables altogether. The Unobservable My example of a comparison group was Fox Cities, WI to observe the impacts of a pizza-promotion intervention in La Crosse, WI. For purposes…
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Sep 10
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Tooling Pay for Performance

By Energy Rant 3 Comments
A blog post from OpenEE with a title M&V Adjustments Create a Bias Towards Savings Inflation is a good troll for a guy like me – a cynic who can’t stop writing the Rant even when I tried to quit a dozen times.Anyone with a pulse needs a relief valve, and the Rant does the job for me. Products designed to reduce stress, like stress balls or foam bricks, would never work. For instance, if I want to get even with a computer, do I want to grab one of these things and start squeezing? No. I want to take…
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Jul 02
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Excess Power

Electricity Storage by the Other NWA; Chum v Beluga

By Energy Rant No Comments
Energy storage is easy and cheap. Grid-grade electricity storage is complex and expensive. Definitions of energy storage vary. Some consider hot water, chilled water, or ice to be stored energy. It’s really storing the benefits of energy consumption. For phenomenal refreshers and mental strolls down memory lane, see Storing Energy v Storing Benefits and Something Old, Something Old. Why is grid-scale electricity storage so expensive? To answer this question, let’s consider the forms of storage and the hurdles that must be overcome to make it cost effective. Electricity Storage Challenge #1 = Inefficiency First, we have the storage of potential…
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May 29
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Tele-Phoney Nincompoops; Efficiency Pros – Your Jobs are Safe

By Energy Rant 2 Comments
There is more computing power in your pocket than we used to put a man on the moon. Have you heard this lately? I heard it last week at the closing plenary for AESP’s spring conference. Doesn’t it sound grand? Aren’t we smart? Not really, and not so much. Do Smart Phones Make us Dumb? Do smartphones and their apps make us dumb? Maybe not, but unlike the fairy tale that coffee stunted our growth as children, the drones do stunt cerebral, intellectual, and social growth for sure. For example, people consult with their bestie drones 80 times per day…
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May 14
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Utilities – We all Un-Bundle

By Energy Rant One Comment
Our theme the last few weeks has covered technological change, consumer emotions, and irrational ways of thinking. The regulated monopoly and its cost-of-service model will not last forever. Someday it will be replaced. What might that look like? Right after last week’s post, From Crazy to Rational went up, I read Why Electric Utilities Should Replace Electric Rate Base in Fortnightly. Wow. How fortuitous! Cost-of-Service The cost-of-service model (COS) described in last week’s post, and verified by the Fortnightly article, motivates utilities to provide slightly more business efficiency than government. The COS model sets revenue requirements for utilities by capitalizing…
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Mar 19
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AMI – Good for Consumers; Good for Utilities

By Energy Rant No Comments
AMI, or advanced metering infrastructure, is rolling out across the land. This opens the door to a lot of cool things, including time of use rates, and it is a great enabler of electrification technologies. I’ve heard from utility executives or people involved with some portion of demand-side management departments within utilities that smart meters are a waste of money. Wow. They are going to be standing at the depot while the electrification train is barreling forward. I will save that topic for another day. Stay tuned. For background, here is a primer on AMI and here is a discussion…
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Dec 04
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Rooftop Units – Yesteryear’s Pool Brat Punks

By Energy Rant One Comment
Last week several of us at Michaels bemoaned the hazards of operations and maintenance (O&M), controls, and behavioral programs. The specific discussion was about the ubiquitous rooftop unit, like those shown on the box-store roof below. The discussion could have been about anything other than light bulbs. Measures in a portfolio come with a spectrum of savings risk from baselines, to hours of use, to risks associated with operation once deployed. Next week I think I’ll analyze an entire portfolio of risks and give those risks relative scores. For instance, many measures depend on the baseline – not necessarily the…
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Sep 11
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Hey, Hey, Hey, Buggy Whip Bites the Dust

By Energy Rant One Comment
A couple weeks ago in Driving Ms. Free Rider Daisy, I wrote about free-riding new construction and lighting programs – that to make a difference we need a change in outdated rules for energy efficiency programs. One reader responded, “Good points that have been around since the word negawatt. Any program ideas, besides stop paying for LEDs, that helps us obtain negawatts beyond the free rider ones?” It is your lucky day. Another Buggy Whip to Walk the Plank You can spend a fortune on personal trainers, dieticians, doctors, and a personal chef to lose weight. Or you can spend…
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Aug 28
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Driving Ms. Free Rider Daisy

By Energy Rant 3 Comments
Sitting on high levels of energy efficiency program design and evaluation provides a wonderful perspective and results in some astonishing epiphanies. Warning – data-backed bluster straight ahead. New Construction Programs We study the performance of new buildings all the time, whether it is for evaluation or looking for great retro-commissioning opportunities. Nothing provides a better opportunity for retro-commissioning than a stock of new buildings, whether they filtered through a new construction program or not. The chart below features energy performance of new buildings that went through a new construction program. We implement, and we evaluate projects nationwide (don’t bother guessing…
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Apr 10
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Benchmarking Flaws and Best Practices; Pot Growers Discover Sunshine

By Energy Rant No Comments
The City of Chicago recently issued its annual report on commercial building benchmarking. I pick on Chicago because (1) its upper-Midwest location has a climate like that of many of our readers, and (2) because it uses ENERGY STAR® Portfolio Manager, which I addressed several times before. With Portfolio Manager, everybody seems to get a trophy, and results are troublesome to me. Also, for reference, I published this post last fall, pointing out the failures of energy codes to move the energy intensity needle. Using data from the Energy Information Administration, that post showed that buildings built in the past…
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All things energy. That’s our jam.

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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