Scene: A psychiatrist’s office
Time period: Today
Location: Anywhere in North America

Patient: I keep having the same nightmare, doctor. I design and plan my energy-efficient appliance rebate programs, then I see all these customers hacking my e-mail to find out when my programs will start so they can use my rebates! And they’re laughing at me, mocking me, because they would have bought those appliances or done those retrofits anyway, and they know I can’t count them as part of my program savings. (Gasps and tears) Doctor, help me!

Doctor: So tell me, how long have you had this problem?

Patient: For a long time now … at least back into the 1990s.

Does this scenario resemble your current situation (or one you’ll soon find yourself in)? Many program managers have serious issues with attribution. It’s the bête noire of efficiency—the bane of many a demand-side management (DSM) program manager’s existence. Nearly every conference I’ve attended or heard about over the past two years has included at least one session highlighting ...

What do MELs, VRFs, and PCMs have in common? Not much and quite a lot—though mostly they’re all topics that energy-efficiency aficionados spend lots of time thinking and talking about. So much information is available at the 2012 ACEEE Summer Study on Energy Efficiency in Buildings that I thought I’d share a quick “brain dump” of key takeaways from some of the sessions I’ve been attending.

In How Much Energy Do MELs Really Consume? Why This Answer Is So Hard to Get: Results from Metering a Sample of Buildings by Jim Dirks of the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), I learned:

• As building HVAC and envelope efficiency continues to improve, miscellaneous electric loads (MELs) begin to represent a larger and growing segment of both commercial and residential energy demand.
• The current magnitude of MELs is not empirically known. The U.S. Energy Information Administration’sAnnual Energy Outlook 2012 estimates that MELs represent 50 percent of commercial-sector primary energy consumption.
• PNNL’s proof-of-concept study for metering, monitoring, and analyzing commercial MELs revealed that ...

I’m lucky to have Jenny as my marketing partner-in-crime. She brings so much passion, energy, and commitment to the company, and I love her goofiness. She once challenged our CEO to a moonwalking competition down the hallway … and she won! A graduate of the Leeds School of Business (they even did a spotlight on her and another classmate), Jenny has a personal interest in sustainability, which makes her a perfect fit for E Source—yet another amazing member of our team!

Nickname: Field, Fields, JFo

Hometown: Houston, Texas

What you do at E Source: I’m the marketing manager, focused on E Source conference marketing, lead generation, online marketing, advertising, and social media.

Why you like working at E Source: There’s never a dull moment at E Source! I work with smart, passionate people who make coming to work each day fun and interesting.

Something most people don’t know about you: I lived in Argentina briefly before my senior year of high school and fell in love with the country’s culture.

Check out this video of Jenny ...

Far too often, utilities orchestrate changes to their systems, processes, and program offerings in a vacuum, forgetting to consult the customers they serve. It’s not unusual for organizations to assume they know what their customers want and implement changes based on those (often incorrect) assumptions—then wonder why they’re not successful. It’s not about what you think, it’s about what your customers think. Not surprisingly, there’s often a large gap between what organizations think their customers want and what those customers actually want. We’re all aware that customer expectations are on the rise, and obtaining input from your customers helps ensure that you’re making investments that are meaningful to your customers and profitable for your utility.

Obtaining feedback and input from customers can take many forms—a post-call survey, a website intercept survey, or a focus group. Ideally, utilities should focus on compiling, analyzing, and acting on customer feedback that’s gathered from contact channels as well as feedback from customers who haven’t recently contacted the utility. It’s also not ...

My most startling observation from the 2012 ACEEE Summer Study on Energy Efficiency in Buildings is that no matter with whom I strike up a conversation here at Asilomar, whether in the dining hall, walking the grounds, in a session, or even in the bathroom (yes, even there), that person is interested in energy efficiency. I feel like I’ve been transported to a planet of like-minded people—my tribe—and it’s energizing.

Today’s big win:

In Making the Most of Energy Data: A Handbook for Facility Managers, Owners, and Operators (PDF), Jessica Granderson of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Commercial Buildings System Group unveiled the handbook that she and her team have been working on for more than a year. The confluence of data from energy management systems (EMSs) and utility interval meters with advanced analytic methods offers enormous opportunity to improve building energy efficiency and reduce costs. That opportunity is often muted by the fact that most facility managers and operators have very little experience in analysis.

The handbook was designed to help people from diverse backgrounds with little prior ...

I confess, after living in Colorado for over 25 years and preferring to vacation in the high deserts of southern Utah and northern New Mexico, I’m completely smitten with the northern coast of California—at least the part around Monterey. Cool temperatures, a fine mist in the air that doesn’t seem to get your clothes damp, curly hair from all the humidity—awesome! But, I digress. I’m fortunate enough to be attending the 2012 ACEEE Summer Study on Energy Efficiency in Buildings, and I can easily characterize my experience so far: also awesome!

My presentation topic was “Gas-Fired Efficiency Technologies for Commercial Kitchens,” which many of you previewed during our recent Tech Roundup web conference. I was one of three presenters in the first Summer Study session on appliances in the Miscellaneous Plug Loads Panel. Don Fisher, founder of the Food Service Technology Center talked about the efficiency, load-shifting, and demand-response potential of commercial ice machines. We’re looking at a 34 percent efficiency increase by switching to an Energy Star–rated machine as well as the ability to shift ice-making away from ...

How does a call center obtain and use “voice of the customer” feedback? Call centers use a variety of methods to survey their customers. It could be a self-service survey that callers complete when they’re done with their transactions or a mail survey that’s sent out at some point after a contact. Some utilities hire a third-party vendor to perform post-transaction telephone surveys. Or call centers might measure customer experience using a combination of these methods.

When I was a call center supervisor, we had access to customer survey transcripts. By reading actual responses from customer, I was able to get a feel for how they were treated and whether they were satisfied with their interaction. All calls were recorded, so we could use actual recordings of particularly difficult calls to help train our call center reps. Now, many call centers have made reviewing recorded calls an integral part of the quality-assurance process. Hearing actual customer voices provides a more complete picture of the experience. You can hear voice inflections and whether any words or phrases were emphasized. It also gives you the opportunity to coach your reps.

On one level, capturing the “voice of the customer” (VoC) through digital channels is relatively easy compared with doing it with the call center or field employees. Online channels (we’ll keep Voice over IP [VoIP] out of this for now) don’t require transcription or voice analytics to categorize and parse relevant data; however, there are absolutely immense amounts of data to reckon with. The ability to track almost everything makes separating the “must-have,” critical insights from the “nice-to-know” data points extremely difficult, but still essential. An additional layer of complexity is the continuing humanization and personalization of the digital experience (especially via social media, live chat, text messaging, video, etc.). These advances now generate immense amounts of contextual data and potential VoC insights that must be interpreted in real time to simply keep up with the flow of information.

This raises the question, what is the true VoC for utilities in the digital context? I’d say the answer increasingly is everything. The customer is speaking when it takes him seven clicks to get through a desired transaction. ...

Everyone you bump into here at the Asilomar Conference Grounds in Pacific Grove, California, works in some aspect of energy efficiency. The 2012 ACEEE Summer Study session topics are so compelling—it’s almost heartbreaking that I can’t be in five places at once. The intriguing conversations started at Sunday afternoon’s reception and dinner, but I’d like to share two session highlights from Monday.

Segmentation on a Shoestring. Brian Smith of Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) worked with Stanford University under a federal stimulus grant to analyze 2011 summer electric interval usage data from 8,000 residential customers with smart meters in the hot and humid Central Valley of California (California climate zones 12 and 13). The researchers defined six distinct groups based on the regularity and shape of their daily load profile, using k-means clustering: morning peak, daytime peak, afternoon peak, evening peak, night peak (oddly the largest group, demonstrating high loads through the night), and dual peak (daytime usage with morning and afternoon peaks). Some of these are ripe targets for demand-response program participation ...

As I wrote in a June blog post, the potential for distributed generation (DG) to change utilities’ business dynamics continues to evolve. With drivers such as lower natural gas prices for the foreseeable future and increasingly available DG technologies such as combined heat and power (CHP), how long before a robust private market develops and takes off for sectors such as large commercial buildings?

One of the most interesting developments on this front is the move by some regulators to allow CHP applications that meet performance standards to count toward energy-efficiency targets. Activity in this area is early and varies greatly. Some U.S. states are encouraging CHP adoption but not mandating or setting targets for that activity (New York and California). Ohio recently passed legislation qualifying CHP as an energy-efficiency measure, but the state still has to develop the specifics of implementation. There are states that have taken the plunge and qualified CHP for energy-efficiency credits (Rhode Island) and even one state that has set specific energy-efficiency targets for CHP activity (Massachusetts). And because CHP in Massachusetts has been prioritized, ...