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residential programs

Trade Allies; Care for a Nail, Sir

By Energy Efficiency, Energy Rant 5 Comments
Would you like to hear about the founding of Michaels?  Great!  Jim Michaels, founder and namesake of the company, and Dave Waffenschmidt, current President, had started a flourishing energy efficiency business within a local architect and engineering firm amid the waning days of the Carter administration.  The two of them, and one other fellow, left that firm to start Michaels because they saw an opportunity and focused solely on energy efficiency and improving building performance.  They had a burning passion for these things.  Efficiency and performance were the thing, not a thing, to tinker with as time permitted in an…
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The Ultimate Consumer Behavioral Program?

By Energy Efficiency, Energy Rant No Comments
With a long weekend to prepare this rant, I'm taking a bit of a house cleaning approach and it's fitting because this week I'm talking about residential energy efficiency programs. Residential programs are certainly not something Michaels plans to get into but we do occasionally get involved with some residential program evaluation. If you know anything about residential programs you've heard of Opower. Their flagship product is the home energy report, which includes mailed reports to virtually all residential customers. The report compares participants to neighbors and against themselves last year or the month before. The mailers include energy saving…
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Diet Soda and the Triple Bypass

By Energy Efficiency, Energy Rant No Comments
Last week I took a survey by AESP as they are gathering a pulse on where hacks like me think the trends are heading.  This coincided with last week’s rant regarding the end of lighting, and I essentially gave AESP a special edition rant in the survey, for free!  Unfortunately, I didn’t save my responses so I will just redo them.In my responses, I used parallels between energy efficiency and diet and health.  They are amazingly comparable.  Much of energy efficiency is akin to diet soda and low-fat ice cream.  The masses assume that, like doing a lighting retrofit, consuming diet…
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