Savings Without Rebates: Moving Toward Claiming Savings from Market Transformation

Glenn Reed, Toben Galvin, and Blair Hamilton, Vermont Energy Investment Corp.

Keywords

Abstract

Claiming savings for market transformation efforts is becoming an increasingly important issue for energy efficiency program administrators. To the extent that strategies focus on upstream market supply chains, or education and training to change standard practice of market actors, appropriate methods of determining savings rely on observation and measurement of market impacts rather than tracking of customer participation or rebates. While regulators historically have been comfortable with relatively easy-to-measure savings associated with tracking installed measures or participating customers, many are hesitant to rely on harder-tomeasure market impacts in evaluating the savings achieved by efficiency program administrators.

Similar issues regarding the accelerated implementation of more stringent building energy codes and equipment efficiency standards also challenge regulators and implementers. As it has been realized that savings from the early adoption of codes and standards can dwarf many other common efficiency program strategies, there is a corresponding challenge to determine the extent to which these savings can be attributed to the efficiency efforts of program administrators.

This paper reviews selected recent experience with some of these issues in the Northeast, Midwest, Northwest, and California. This experience is then used to consider how one state facing these issues might move forward toward greater consideration of savings attributed to market effects.