Energy-Efficiency Program Evaluations: Opportunities for Learning and Inputs to Incentive Mechanisms

Noah Kaufman and Karen Palmer

RFF Working Paper Series from Resources for the Future

Abstract: We analyze the evaluations of California energy-efficiency programs to assess the effectiveness of these evaluations in: 1) improving our understanding of their performance and 2) providing a check on utility incentives to overstate energy savings. We find that third-party evaluations are useful tools to achieve both ends because the programs largely did not meet their energy-savings projections, and the utility-reported savings estimates are systematically higher than the evaluated savings estimates. We also find evidence that the choice of the third-party evaluator was influential in determining the estimate of evaluated savings.

Keywords: energy efficiency; third-party evaluation; energy-savings measurement (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L51 L94 L95 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010-04-14
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ene
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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