What's Working Well: Lessons from a National Review of Exemplary Energy Efficiency Programs

Utility sector programs have been in place and providing beneficial services to customers for more than 20 years in many states and regions. More recently, the role of energy efficiency as a utility system resource has grown rapidly in response to rising costs of new supply and in response to heightened environmental concerns. Given this background, it can be very useful to identify and examine leading energy efficiency programs. Early in 2007 we initiated a project to identify and profile a selected set of such programs. Our goal was to offer a set of programs that stood out as models of exemplary energy efficiency programs for various customer types and end-use applications. After a national search, we selected a set of 90 programs that span the full range of customer types and end-use technologies. In this paper we present the summary results from this national review. We focus on practical information gleaned from the wide range of program categories and types of programs we selected. We discuss our observations and analysis of these programs as to what makes them exemplary. As the energy efficiency industry seeks to expand and capture greater amounts of energy savings, it will be important to draw upon outstanding program examples for both guidance and inspiration. This paper provides an overview and summary of the lessons learned from our recently completed national review of leading energy efficiency programs.