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Gotta catch 'em all – catches to evaluating heterogeneous energy efficiency programmes

Panel: 4. Monitoring and evaluation for greater impact

This is a peer-reviewed paper.

Author:
Fabian Voswinkel, Fraunhofer Institute for Systems and Innovation Research, Germany

Abstract

Think about policies! When do you consider policies successful? Ideally, successful polices strive to take influence in an efficient and effective manner to reach a defined goal. However, when it comes to asking about the efficiency and effectiveness of policies, one challenge is well known: How to verify whether these conditions are met? The answer is good evaluation practice.

The German Energy Efficiency Fund, a special budget of the Federal Ministry of Economic Affairs and Energy (BMWi), finances more than twenty national programmes to support energy efficiency in businesses, households and the public sector. The heterogeneity of the programmes ranging from energy savings check-ups for households to large-scale financial support programmes for energy efficient technologies in industry makes evaluation even more challenging. For evaluating the Fund in its entirety, a way had to be found to catch them all and present them in a harmonised way. Therefore, an evaluation system, which encompasses a definition of indicators, savings metrics, effects and additional assumptions was developed and applied.

This paper provides an introduction to the evaluation methodology. It focuses on practical catches for adequately covering the wide range of programmes. A major catch that lies within a uniform methodology for heterogeneous programmes is the interpretation of results. While using indicators to compare evaluation results between different programmes sounds appealingly simple, direct conclusions are often misleading. The success of a programme is very individual and an equal value of e.g. savings per Euro of funding does not necessarily mean that two programmes are equally successful. Detailed examples for such catches from the up-do-date evaluation of the Fund are presented in this paper and suggestions are made for avoiding premature conclusions from multi-programme evaluations.

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