Risky Business: Development and Implementation of a Risk Assessment Strategy to Guide Program Evaluation

Hannah Carmalt and Dan Schulte, Energy Market Innovations, Inc.
Eric Brateng, Puget Sound Energy

Keywords

Abstract

Faced with energy efficiency goals that have more than doubled over a four-year period, and a new regulatory climate that included performance incentives and increased focus on program evaluation, Puget Sound Energy undertook a comprehensive program evaluation planning effort. Faced with limited time, funding, and staff resources, a key challenge became the prioritization of the evaluation team's efforts.

To meet this challenge, the team developed a risk assessment process to guide the allocation of limited evaluation resources. The risk assessment process provided a framework, which enabled the team to undertake a systematic inventory of the technical, market, and organizational risks associated with achieving energy savings goals for each of the utility's efficiency programs. The process enabled the utility to identify and better understand important areas of risk and, in particular, identify those areas that should receive priority attention from evaluation staff. These results were then fed into the overall evaluation planning process and coordinated with on-going program planning and implementation efforts.

This paper details the origins of this risk assessment process and describes how the results were used. Significantly, the paper also reviews key findings that were uncovered and lessons learned for future risk assessments.