Claremont Graduate University is hosting the
Claremont Evaluation Center Webinar Series.
of FREE webinars on evaluation topics. These are late in the day, so you can finish your work first. The series runs from March 12 through April 25.
On the surface, the coverage is philosophical/theoretical rather than applied, but the speakers are well known. A great way to hear from these leaders at no cost.
If you are like me, you are always on the lookout for new ways to learn about products and services to check to see if they meet conditions to make you happy. A simple [read: nonscientific] poll of my friends and family members shows that people have different combinations of preferences with regard to social welfare, environmental protection, and human health effects.
For example, I have a friend who only buys organic coffee, but doesn’t care about the social welfare effects (okay, she may care, but did not indicate that it ways important), and I have another friend who must see that her coffee is fair trade certified.
These outlooks represent different preferences that we all make to get product that brings us the highest utility. [warning: nerdy economist speak ->; by 'utility' I mean welfare...roughly translated as happiness. People use money to get things that bring them utility.] If we all were endowed with unlimited funds, we might still have difficulty finding products that are produced, traded, and ultimately sold to us in ways that uphold all of our social, environmental, and resource constraints.
Anyways, I’ve found four applications that can be used to investigate products: GoodGuide, Seafood Watch, InRFood, and Fooducate.
Sustainability Apps
You’ve just started a new energy efficiency program evaluation. What do you do? Well, after all of the paperwork and meetings, you sit down to write your evaluation plan. After some experience with the programs and evaluation, you know most of the key considerations. Hopefully, you’ve discussed goals and objectives for the evaluation with the client. As part of your due diligence, you check the most recent evaluations in the field for similar programs to ensure that your work stays on the cutting edge and incorporates the most appropriate practices (to the extent that they are evident). All good.
We, in energy efficiency program evaluation have not had a common repository of evaluations (although NEEP’s EM&V Forum Library and CALMAC have been essential resources to fill this void. There are as many methods for some types of programs as there are evaluators. In the past few years, there has been some movement towards documenting the methods that are appearing successful in the field – an effort that benefits both the evaluators (yay, us!) and the evaluated (yay, clients!). For example, there is the “Model Energy Efficiency Impact Evaluation Guide” – just updated. There is also a more interactive, open process, sponsored by DOE called the Uniform Methods Project.
Excited yet? Go ahead and click on over to the Uniform Methods Project Forum. You will end up here:
From there, you can click on Complete Protocols and download a PDF of the protocols as they were drafted in August of 2012. Or, you can click on specific sections (or the archive at the bottom) to get right to the draft appropriate for your work. Each protocol describes the methodology for what is considered a “model” practice by someone who has years of experience in this field. Most also describe options for when the “model” practice is not cost-effective or impractical for other reasons. Newer drafts are available for comments – check those out in the Sector specific areas. You will have to register before you can comment; registration takes less than 1 minute.
Be vocal if you have suggestions to improve the methods that are suggested in these protocols. We are a community of evaluators of energy efficiency programs. Improvements to research methods helps the entire field provide better service to our clients.
Update (Jan 11): Micheals Energy Blog::Energy Rant on the Hamburger Helper approach to evaluation motivated me to add this note. We, as evaluators, are responsible for remembering that each program and client has unique needs and concerns. The “model” practice can present an absurd approach if the parameters are not well met. We can take these protocols as a snapshot of where the field is, and use our judgment to design the appropriate evaluation.
It is a New Year, and we are going to do great things this year!
One of my resolutions this year was to do a better job of ensuring a healthy work/life balance. In order to do that, I’ve got to figure out when I’m most productive and how I can shift activities around to get more done in the same amount of time. Perhaps you are working on the same thing–we can be planning/organizing/wrenching our lives back buddies. 
I’ve created a time log to help us.
I already track my work time, using Stone Hill Time Card. It is one of several applications that I noted before in Tracking Time — Necessary Evil/Good/Evil. However, I do this on the fly. As in, I open the little app, type in what I am doing, and then it runs in the background until I tell it that I have stopped doing that, or I type in a new thing that I am doing. This is perfect for project billing. However, it is not good for determining what exactly I am doing.
For all of those people who stand up right now and say that there are applications that will record which file you have in the front of you, I say “bah!” I’ve tried those, and they are imperfect at best because they do not deal well with dynamic environments; for example, they do not know when you are on the phone and left that Excel file open, or when you are moving things between several files, or when you are using a real paper notebook to do something else.
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As an energy program evaluator and a sustainability enthusiast, I am all wrapped up in thinking about energy savings in different ways. But yesterday, I was at the annual meeting of the NEEP EM&V Forum, and a panelist triggered my thinking about this again. There are so many stakeholders involved in energy savings decisions. Each has a different take on them. Warning: I am about to grossly generalize–read with your newspaper eyes.
I have made a conscious decision not to include the utility on this list. While utilities are key stakeholders, their perception has not been uniformly presented. Thus, it is not clear how to present the utility take on energy savings. The utility is in the business of selling kWh; depending on regulatory and legislative structures, current generation mix, capacity needs, attitudes of leading executives, and other constraints, the utility perspective can be characterized in multiple ways. I do not see value in attempting to describe these different perspectives in this format. More detailed research could describe causal models for utility behavior. Interested readers can see my research into policy contexts that shape successful utility run efficiency programs, but it is only a small part of the puzzle.
Keeping up with changes in the public sphere is generally the role of market characterization and potential studies. Thinking about all of these stakeholders, whether or not they have a seat at the table, is important to ensure relevant evaluation findings and recommendations. Programs can be, and usually are, designed to meet the needs of these many stakeholders, however, the needs and attitudes of different stakeholders can change.
This post is a little tongue in cheek. Feel free to shout loudly if you want different straw-men!
I prefer to work with plain text, rather than open a huge word processing program, like Word, for almost all drafting and notes. Since I’m using a mac, and I have to eventually transfer most work into Word, I currently love TextEdit (well, I prefer LaTeX, but we can’t have everything).
Because of its focus on plain text and no features, TextEdit lacks the word count feature of Word. Sometimes, like when you are submitting an abstract; okay, so usually this happens when you are submitting an abstract, you really, really need to be aware of word counts. After much searching around on the web, I encountered a forum where some other folks were lamenting the same thing -> at MacWorld. And, some other super helpful people (specifically mprussell and belleboom) had already written scripts that will overcome this “problem.” Read the rest of this entry »
So, I was doing a fairly customary search for cool Applescript–about every month or so, I go online and search “applescript tricks” in order to see what I can see (like that bear that went over the mountain)–and I came across an idea that I’m sure will transform my life as soon as I figure out how to apply it.
Here goes: If you already use an electronic bibliographic software, you know how much of a lifesaver it is to have your own notes alongside the reference to the document. However, it seems to me that it would be just that much better if I didn’t have to print the document, scrawl out my notes, open my reference software, go through the document page by page and transcribe my notes to the software. What if my markup went directly from the document to the bibliographic software?
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Earlier this month, I got my feathers ruffle by a post arguing against utilities using ratepayer funds to pay for energy efficiency. It turns out that I have my head in the sand. Lots of groups and individuals point to clean energy programs and energy efficiency efforts when rate increases are requested.
The North Carolina Sustainable Energy Association finds that, at least for Progress Energy, the increase in rates for customers is mostly not due to the energy efficiency programs, as some have argued. Jim Kennerly shows that the bulk of rate increases are due to physical plants (real, generating stations). The difference is on the order of 4 fold. In addition, the newest rate increase requested does not capture any costs for clean energy technologies or programs. Read the rest of this entry »
I love to read “The Oil Drum.” One of the things I do, you know, like drink coffee and run.
Anyways, today, Tad Patzek explains some of the interesting increases in “oil production” in the U.S. and around the world. He also reminds us that the data show people using LESS oil. Unfortunately, the “using LESS oil” part has not gotten as much attention as the oil production claims. He says it just isn’t sexy enough. I have to say that I don’t know how sucking thick black goop out of the ground is sexy either. What up, journalists?
Read Dr. Patzek’s post – it is clear and in basic English. It’s great background material to have when reading the news.
In 2009, I published a paper on the “contagious-ness” of Sustainable Energy Portfolio Standards, sometimes called Renewable Portfolio Standards, or Energy Efficiency Portfolio Standards. That research found that states did appear to adopt these portfolio standards even when it did not make sense for them to do so based on internal factors.
Two of the “future research” items that were identified in that research included looking into the most likely adopters and into evaluations of standards. I haven’t had the time to get into the former, and folks are just starting to get into the latter. However, this month, researchers at Beacon Hill/ Suffolk University published a report on the costs associated with a RPS in Missouri.
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