You may have seen the report put out by Deutsche Bank and Living Cities on multi family retrofitting highlighted an issue that is endemic to our industry.  We get it wrong, by a lot, and often.  

In this case, this study showed that "While fuel savings projections ranged from 25% to 50% across about two-thirds of the buildings, most projects actually saved 10% to 40%."

Although the retrofits saved energy, post-retrofit savings generally fell short of auditors’ projections. In Figure 14 at the left, the 1:1 line represents a realization rate of 100%, indicating post-retrofit savings that were exactly as predicted by the auditor. A majority of the buildings in the study fell below this 1:1 line, indicating they achieved realization rates below 100%. Across all projects, the fuel realization rate was 61% with a 90% confidence interval of ±14%.

The study goes on to suggest that as a way to deal with this over prediction bias, which it acknowledges is due to a variety of issues, not just modeling, projected savings should be downgraded not to exceed a linear relationship between actual savings and pre retrofit fuel use intensity.  While this capping certainly reduces overprediction, it also has a number of other unintended consequences.

This essentially creates a penalty for deeper retrofits  or those that spend the extra time and investment to actually achieve deeper savings.  It essentially says you cannot get credit for investing in deep savings or quality work.  This model has the consequence of creating an incentive to stay shallow, and keep it cheap.

Rather than just enforce and arbitrary cap, we think instead, using the standards such as those prescribed in the EDF Investor Confidence Project, we can create the dataset necessary to differentiate on the many influences of project performance, and avoid this serious unintended result.

The report states that "A variety of factors influence the ultimate accuracy of savings projections, including how much of the associated scope of work was implemented, equipment specifications, the quality of construction and ongoing facility management, and the quality of the energy audit. Nonetheless, there is no systematic means of quantifying the relative influence of each of these key factors individually across the DB/LC dataset."

Our focus should be on solving this issue and building the kind of dataset necessary to drive deeper and higher quality results.  The eventual outcome of this kind of thinking is a system the encourages exactly the type of cream skimming that has prevented us from getting to the deep cost effective resource of energy savings.

Read the entire report at:  https://www.db.com/usa/img/DBLC_Recognizing_the_Benefits_of_Energy_Efficiency_01_12.pdf

I was lucky enough to go the ACEEE Summer Study this year, and among the many interesting conversations and very engaging sessions I attended was a presentation on the DOE Home Energy Score.

In this session there was one slide in particular that peaked my interested and got me thinking about use cases.  Just how good is good enough?

The following slide in particular raised some questions for me.  If the these various tools have the degree of variance that the stud presents (HES wrong by greater than 25%, 39% of the time, Rem/Rate wrong by greater than 50%, 25% of the time), what is the use case for these labels?  

While many tools seem to be doing well on predicting how pools of homes function, individual homes are a different story with wide variance.  If you are one of the homeowner that receives a label that says your house is 50% worse than it is (which will include potentially millions of American homeowners if we roll any of these systems out), you probably don't really care that the label is right on average.

My question is simple.  How should we use any score that has the potential, on a given house, to be wrong by such a large degree?  

At a hearing last week at the CEC there was a comment and commendation related to calling Energy Audits, Energy Assessments.  This branding decision was made by the EUC marketing consultants early on, and has been core to the EUC branding effort (at least $30M spent to date).

So the question is... What are homeowners thinking about?  Assessments or Audits?

Here is a live embed from google that shows what people in California are searching for:

This has been an ongoing debate.  I tend to agree that the term audit has some potentially negative connotations.  However, I also think that rebranding a term that is widely understood and in the public mind is very costly.  In CA we just spent the most money we may ever have to rebrand Energy Audits as Energy Assessments... and based on google statistics, we don't seem to have moved the vernacular needle.

Is it time to go back to "energy audit" as the term of art for what we do, and instead of rebranding the name as an Assessment - which does not apear to be catching on.  Perhaps we should own the Energy Audit and make sure when people hear the term they stop thinking of the IRS and instead think of being in a cozy, healthy, and efficient home.

CEC holds first AB758 Hearings in Sacramento on Oct 8th and 9th.  This is big stuff, AB758 gives the CEC the authority to regulate energy in existing buildings.  The outcomes of this process will shape California's energy future.

Find out more:  http://www.energy.ca.gov/ab758/notices/2012-10-08-and-09_Staff_Workshop.pdf

AB758 Basics:
In 2009, AB 758 was enacted, authorizing the first program in the country to address the energy efficiency of existing buildings at the statewide level. The California Energy Commission, a long-time world leader in energy efficiency standards, is now poised to address the substantial opportunity to conserve energy present in California’s existing building stock.

The Energy Commission is conducting a two-day workshop to solicit input and gain insight from stakeholders on where the greatest market barriers and opportunities exist. You are invited to contribute to the foundation of these new comprehensive programs for existing buildings. The workshop will address the questions in the agenda. Please be prepared to discuss your comments on these questions.

Background documents may be found on the Energy Commission’s website:
http://www.energy.ca.gov/ab758/documents/index.html

The Energy Commission invites you to subscribe to the Existing Buildings (AB 758 Comprehensive Energy Efficiency Program for Existing Buildings) List Serve to get the most up to date information about this program:
www.energy.ca.gov/efficiency/listservers.html