This toolkit supplies evaluators doing energy efficiency evaluations in California with the latest versions of the key documents, rulings, and tools, that define, inform or control their evaluation efforts.
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This report presents the impact evaluation results of the Marin Clean Energy (MCE) Home Utility Reports (HUR) program for 2015.
This summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call emphasizes the health benefits of upgrades to make your program relevant to potential partners and audiences. Speakers include the City of Fort Collins, Colorado and Green & Healthy Homes Initiative Greater Syracuse, Home Headquarters.
This summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call focused on unique challenges for energy efficiency and weatherization programs serving lower income residents in single-family and multifamily housing. Speakers include American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, Elevate Energy, and Energy Outreach Colorado.
This summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call focused on behavior change program design and design thinking to increase program reach. It features speakers from See Change Institute, Efficiency Vermont, and Navitas Partners, Inc.
This summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call focused on best practices on upgrades for zero energy ready homes. Speakers include Florida Solar Energy Center and BIRAenergy.
This report presents findings from an impact evaluation of the Universal Audit Tool (UAT). UAT programs provide residential customers with advice on energy efficiency, insight into areas of high energy use, and tips and suggestions for saving both energy and money based on responses to an online survey regarding household appliances, occupancy, and other dwelling characteristics.
This summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call focused on getting multifamily property owners on board with energy efficiency upgrades.
Utilities and regulators increasingly rely on behavior change programs as essential parts of their demand side management (DSM) portfolios. This report evaluates the effectiveness of currently available programs, focusing on programs that have been assessed for energy savings. This report focuses on behavior change programs that primarily rely on social-science-based strategies instead of traditional approaches such as incentives, rebates, pricing, or legal and policy strategies. The objective is to help program administrators choose effective behavior change programs for their specific purposes.
This summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call focused on ensuring contractor networks work for both energy efficiency programs and participating contractors.
This summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call focused on changing homeowner behaviors to reduce energy demands. It featured speakers from City of Fort Collins Utilities, American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, and the Rocky Mountain Institute.
This presentation covers the public process to encourage stakeholder participation and input in developing the criteria for a comparative assessment of energy efficiency financing programs.
This summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call focused on communicating non-energy benefits that homeowners and building owners are most interested in. Speakers include Elevate Energy, Green & Healthy Homes Initiative, and Skumatz Economic Research Associates, Inc.
This report presents the process evaluation results on the statewide Home Upgrade Program and includes findings on program operations, participant engagement, non-energy impacts, contractor characteristics, and contractor-customer interactions.
This summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call focused on the intersection between solar and residential energy efficiency. Speakers include Ecolibrium3 and Local Energy Alliance Program (LEAP).
This summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call focused on the ACEEE Summer Study, which brought together experts to discuss the technological basis for, and practical implementation of, actions to reduce energy use and the climate impacts associated with buildings.
This summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call focused on approaches organizations can use for moving homeowners from HVAC or other individual improvements to whole home upgrades and encouraging homeowners to undertake upgrades over time.
Achieving energy savings goals and improving customer and contractor satisfaction while staying cost-effective makes managing home energy upgrade programs challenging. DOE's Home Upgrade Program Accelerator is working with program administrators to identify strategies that overcome challenges and achieve better results. The Arizona Home Performance with ENERGY STAR program completed process improvements that improved contractor satisfaction and deceased quality assurance labor. Build It Green implemented software improvements to their utility program's online rebate applications portal to accelerate data processing.
This document features lessons learned shared by Better Buildings Residential Network members during Peer Exchange Calls held during Fall 2015.
This document features lessons learned shared by Better Buildings Residential Network members during Peer Exchange Calls held in Winter 2016.
This report for the Connecticut Energy Efficiency Board documents the difficulties that evaluators and programs in Connecticut faced in conducting evaluation studies and makes recommendations for improving data quality and consistency.
Setting Baselines for Planning and Evaluation of Efficiency Programs
The key challenge with quantifying savings from end-use efficiency activities is the identification of an accurate baseline from which to determine the savings. Regardless of the protocol or procedure applied, all savings values are determined by estimating likely energy use in the absence of the program or project (the “counterfactual” scenario, or baseline). This webcast provides an introduction to considerations and common practices for defining baselines, the relationship between baselines and savings attribution, and examples of how different jurisdictions are addressing market baseline studies, setting baselines for retrofit measures, and market transformation program baselines.
This report represents NEEP’s annual assessment of the major policy developments of 2014, as well as its look into the immediate future, where NEEP gauge states’ progress toward capturing cost-effective energy efficiency as a first-order resource. While looking at the region as a whole, NEEP also provides summary and analysis of some of the biggest building energy efficiency successes and setbacks from Maine to Maryland — including significant energy efficiency legislation and regulations and changes in funding levels for energy efficiency programs.
This document summarizes top marketing and outreach takeaways shared by Better Buildings Residential Network members during spring 2015 Peer Exchange Calls.
This study examined consumer awareness and opinions concerning the New Jersey Clean Energy Program (NJCEP). Research areas included New Jersey homeowners' awareness of NJCEP, an assessment of attitudes towards energy efficiency, the main benefits associated with energy efficiency, key drivers associated with purchasing energy efficient products, the best methods for increasing consumers awareness of NJCEP, and obstacles to implementing energy efficiency measures in the home.
This summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call focused on approaches to improve and sustain quality customer service for residential energy efficiency work.
Among the many benefits ascribed to energy efficiency is the fact that it can help create jobs. Although this is often used to motivate investments in efficiency programs, verifying job creation benefits is more complicated than it might seem at first. This paper identifies some of the issues that contribute to a lack of consistency in attempts to verify efficiency-related job creation. It then proposes an analytically rigorous and tractable framework for program evaluators to use in future assessments.
This paper describes existing barriers to integrating energy efficiency data into real estate markets, and illustrates recent efforts to address them. National cross-industry collaborations have resulted in standard data collection and transfer tools that allow home performance data to be shared across industries. Real estate markets in some regions have begun including these data into multiple listing services (MLS), making them visible during real estate transactions.
This report details findings from the evaluation of the Colorado energy efficiency financing program.
The California investor-owned utilities -- Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E), Southern California Edison (SCE), Southern California Gas (SoCalGas), and San Diego Gas & Electric (SDG&E), referred to collectively as the IOUs or Joint Utilities -- are designing seven energy efficiency financing pilot programs at the California Public Utilities Commission’s (CPUC's) direction. To help inform the pilot design process and subsequent evaluation efforts, this report summarizes a comprehensive review of 15 existing financing programs representing noteworthy program models across the United States and around the globe.
This summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call focused on methods, reactions and legal considerations of contractor rating and feedback systems.
Energy Efficiency Cost-Effectiveness Testing
This webcast provides an introduction to cost-effectiveness testing for energy efficiency programs. It also covers key drivers in the cost-effectiveness results and cost-effectiveness tools developed for the U.S. Department of Energy.
This evaluation and research plan sets out a proposed process for establishing and executing a detailed evaluation and research plan for New Jersey's Clean Energy Program.
This memo provides a review of the New Jersey Comfort Partners Energy Saving Protocols, recommends changes to the calculations and additional calculation protocols for measures not included, and calculates engineering estimates for those proposed energy savings formulas.
Overview of lessons learned from EnergySmart Colorado's energy advisor model.
This report presents the impact evaluation conducted of the 13 programs in the Southeast Consortium Better Buildings Neighborhood Program (BBNP).
This report presents the phase 1 process evaluation conducted of the 13 programs in the Southeast Consortium Better Buildings Neighborhood Program (BBNP).
This report presents the phase 2 process evaluation conducted of the 13 programs in the Southeast Consortium Better Buildings Neighborhood Program (BBNP).
This paper first details industry best practices for contest administration, including tips for developing an overall contest plan and timeline, product sponsor recruitment, building a dynamic informational website, maximizing customer participation, selecting the winning home, seamless installation management, capturing and documenting project results, conducting a high profile media open house and facilitating customer workshops that educate homeowners and strengthen trade ally relationships. This paper then presents results and key lessons learned from more than 20 contests supported with funds from local community sustainability programs, utility energy efficiency programs, and U.S. Recovery and Reinvestment Act funds between 2008 and 2012.
This report contains information on the market for home performance upgrades and the opportunities that exist for new home performance contractors; start-up needs and costs for firms entering the home performance contracting industry; home performance business approaches; and how established home performance contractors attract customers. It also contains detailed profiles of eight successful home performance firms across the United States.
This report contains guidance on issues and policy options related to providing access to customer energy use information that can be used to support and enhance the provision of energy efficiency services while protecting customer privacy.
In this video interview segment, Marty Treadway of Energy Smart Colorado discusses how to avoid contractor frustration by testing data collection tools before deployment.
This report provides information on how access to energy use data can help local governments create policies for benchmarking and disclosing building energy performance for public and private sector buildings.
This report provides information on how supporting access to building benchmarking data can help utilities increase efficiency and drive down energy demand.
This report provides information on how energy use data access can help state governments lead by example through benchmarking and disclosing results and implement benchmarking policies for the private sector.
This progress report provides community members and others interested in EnergySmart with a clear snapshot of its progress. The report also provides a timeline of energy efficiency policies and programs in Boulder County.
This paper explores ways in which program administrators are using social norms to spur behavior change and, as a result, curb energy use. In recent years, home energy reports (HER) programs have applied the concept of social norms to the energy efficiency context. These feedback programs inform customers of how their energy consumption compares to their neighbors' and provide other information about their usage, with the goal of enticing customers to change their energy use behavior to improve their relative neighborhood ranking.
This peer exchange call summary focused on how to receive and evaluate feedback from customers and contractors.
This peer exchange call summary focused on multifamily information technology tools for project information, marketing, assessment, tracking and evaluation.
This peer exchange call summary focused on adapting and adjusting financing strategies after a program was implemented.
This is the first study to provide statistical evidence that, holding other factors constant, a green label on a single-family home in California provides a market premium compared to a comparable home without the label. The research also indicates that the price premium is influenced by local climate and environmental ideology. To reach these conclusions, researchers conducted an economic analysis of 1.6 million homes sold in California between 2007 and 2012, controlling for other variables known to influence home prices in order to isolate the added value of green home labels.
EnergySmart Colorado uses surveys and a customer database to get feedback from homeowners that helps fine-tune program services and operations.
This U.S. Environmental Protection Agency resource is intended to help state and local governments design finance programs for their jurisdiction. It describes financing program options, key components of these programs, and factors to consider as they make decisions about getting started or updating their programs.
Communicating Success: Measuring Improvements, Sharing Results
Financial Program Management for Continuous Improvement
This document constitutes the final report for the 2009-2010 process evaluation of the Low Income Energy Efficiency (LIEE) program operated by the four investor-owned utilities (IOU) of California for the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC). The IOUs include: Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E), Southern California Edison (SCE), Southern California Gas (SCG), and San Diego Gas and Electric (SDG&E). Although the program is now referred to as Energy Savings Assistance Program (ESAP), this report will employ the nomenclature used for the 2009-2010 program cycle.
This report identifies issues associated with developing a national evaluation, measurement, and verification (EM&V) standard for end-use, non-transportation, energy efficiency activities.
This peer exchange call summary focused on the background and features of the PowerSaver loan program.
Presentation providing an overview of financing programs, a strategy for continuous improvement, tools for program management, a risk management strategy, and common risks associated with financing programs.
This report presents the results of a scoping study to assess the need for national databases that can support best practices in energy efficiency program evaluation, measurement, and verification (EM&V).
This report presents results, recommendations, and case studies of energy efficiency financing programs.
This paper, which is based on detailed case studies of nine existing state and local programs, presents recommendations for energy upgrade programs to facilitate industry growth and support contractor business models.
This report provides an overview of evaluation, measurement, and verification approaches used to estimate the load impacts and effectiveness of energy efficiency programs.
This report discusses the five standard tests used to assess the cost-effectiveness of energy efficiency, how states use the tests, and how the tests can determine the cost-effectiveness of efficiency measures.
This report presents the findings of Phase 2 of the California Public Utilities Commission Low Income Needs Assessment Study. The results of the needs assessment suggest that, over time, the programs have effectively targeted and provided services to low-income households that have the greatest need.
This paper presents the results of a comprehensive study of the energy-related needs of California’s low-income population. This study was commissioned to direct future policy regarding the various low-income energy programs offered in the state. These programs include the California Alternate Rate for Energy (CARE) Program, which provides a rate discount to qualified low-income customers, and the Low-Income Energy Efficiency (LIEE) Program, which installs weatherization and energy efficiency measures in qualified dwellings at no charge.