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Aug 12
Love97

Fishing for Savants Who Understand Attribution

By Energy Rant No Comments
This week, I'm reporting on themes presented at the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE) summer camp, also known as the Summer Study for Buildings, from Pacific Grove, California. Here are the themes: Heat pumps (~ 80 papers) Decarbonization (~67 papers) Equity (~75 papers) The end. The ACEEE summer camp covers a stunning number of papers. There are 13 panels or tracks, two sessions per day, each with three papers presented, for five days. Per my math, that's 780 papers. In addition, there are probably 60 posters to make up the total of nearly 850 studies. The papers probably…
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Dec 13
Love6

Demand Management for Good

By Energy Rant No Comments
The last few posts featured an overview and complete report card on load management to get beyond net zero to real zero, a term I discovered last week. As promised, I will describe some permanent peak load reduction opportunities this week. Like many efficiency solutions, blocking and tackling approaches are the most effective. Peak Load Reduction – New Construction I’m going to stick with some big hitters. A person could write forever on this topic. Home Envelope Single-family homes must be super-insulated to minimize heating loads in cool/cold climates. The cartoon below provides a nice example of super-insulated versus code…
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Aug 30
Love2

Champion Elements for Energy and Demand Management Programs

By Energy Rant No Comments
This is the finale of better than best commercial and industrial program practices – including a summary cheat sheet for program administrators. Energy Analyses Utilities want to build efficiency businesses in their service territories, which is very important. However, few service providers, designers, or contractors are proficient with energy calculations, especially for complex measures. Moreover, they don’t live in our goofy world of arbitrary baselines and will likely determine actual savings or some other goalposts to give their project a better shine. If you have reviewed papers, articles, or maybe some reports, you know what I mean when I say,…
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Aug 16
Love2

Better than Best Programs with Market Transformation

By Energy Rant No Comments
Last week I couldn’t resist responding to the ISO New England’s report, 2021 Economic Study: Future Grid Reliability Study Phase 1 because it paralleled what I wrote a couple of weeks earlier in Electrification At Scale. This week, we’re back to better than best practices in efficiency programs. Last time I described how downstream rebates are often wealth transfers because they are downstream of key decision points and barriers. As I replied to a job candidate who asked me how I would approach a utility to try to persuade them of this, I described how our purpose for being in…
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Jul 20
Love0
emerging technology

From Pilot to Mainstream – Barriers and Solutions

By Energy Rant No Comments
“We need some ideas for saving energy. Whaddya got?” Have you ever heard those lines? They are about as common as “Are we there yet? How much further?” Last week I was on a working group call on the subject of emerging technology. They didn’t call it that, but that’s what it was. Specifically, the discussion centered around taking successful pilot work and broadcasting it nationwide to expand it to the mainstream. That is emerging technology or maybe market transformation. From my brain, emerging technologies include proven technologies or approaches that are not yet widely common in the market or…
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Mar 11
Love0

No Penalties for Attribution

By Energy Rant No Comments
This week, we finish the series on attribution studies. First, let me explain, while I beat up attribution assessments, they are necessary. This post will conclude with how I think they should be used. Experimental v Quasi-Experimental Second, I want to make a couple comments about last week’s post. Near the end, I explained randomized control trials (RCTs) for determining attribution. Test samples need to be drawn before the attribution study using the RCT. Correct me if I’m wrong, but this never happens when determining the attribution of an efficiency program. The attribution study always occurs after, or at best,…
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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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