October 2025 | Revisiting Classical Tunes for Energy Awareness Month!
“Humor me” I said. “If you had to choose your favorite, all-time classic EE measure what would it be?”
The responses ranged from the old school behavior changes to very specific controls and a range of everything in between. There’s a persistent affection for building envelope measures, which makes sense with the crowd we run with. While I do love all forms of insulation, especially in Climate Zone 13, I have to say trees.
The point is, in a time where too many claim energy efficiency is dead we continue to have certain measures that stand the test of time. Not because they’re currently available in a rebate catalog, but because we know they make a significant impact. And that’s because energy efficiency is still the most cost-effective form of energy and remains king in the California loading order. Even as we move to focus on decarbonization and electrification I return to what was so eloquently hammered home on our PODEE inaugural HappEE Hour, “Electrification is energy efficiency!” We can expand our reach, but we can never let go of energy efficiency.
The problem we’re running into is there’s plenty of measures, but very few are actually viable measures. When we look at the landscape of measures that can perform well under the current cost effectiveness test—the Total Resource Cost (TRC) test—we have limited options that align to market demand. But that doesn’t mean these aren’t good measures that still have opportunity across the sectors, throughout the State—just that energy efficiency programs have limited ability to promote them. We’ve come to a point as an industry we have to ask, “Is TRC still the right test?” and overwhelmingly the answer is no. It’s possible it never really was. When we use a test that includes additional participant costs but fails to account for any of the benefits that participating customers get from the action, we miss the mark. If we want to ensure that energy efficiency does what it is supposed to do, we need to reconsider our options. We know Total System Benefit (TSB) has entered the chat to replace net first year kWh, kW and Therms, but we’re conveniently ignoring that the Program Administrator Cost (PAC) test is a one-to-one substitution option to TRC. The PAC test is pretty direct and in its most simplistic form measures program administration/implementation costs over program benefit. In theory, every dollar invested should generate one or more dollars of benefit. And while this change won’t bring back all the measures we love due to other regulatory constraints, it would be a meaningful move in the right direction.
Cost effectiveness tests are always harder on rural spaces and when we consider rural spaces (and at the SJVCEO we always consider rural spaces) the TRC and Societal Cost Test (SCT) are particularly harsh in their output. Rural participants typically pay more for the installations which negatively impacts TRC. Whether because contractors must bear the burden of higher cost to mobilize or shoulder higher costs of products in rural spaces, the costs go up with no additional participant benefit added. Our rural communities will always be harder to serve, but we can show their value to the system better than we have been. Whether it be through legislation or through the regulatory process, the time has come to adjust the way in which California measures cost effectiveness in energy efficiency programming.
We have access to solutions to bring valuable and viable measures back into the mix. We have implementers eager to install them. And we have stakeholders ready to protect the position of energy efficiency so that it’s able to remain king in the loading order, if not the queen of our hearts.
When I reached out across my texts, I loved the responses that came in—incredibly quickly I might add—proving that 1) I keep good company and 2) there’s plenty of options that we can offer today that we offered 12 years ago, because energy efficiency never dies! (*we’ll just call those LED outliers nostalgic 😉)
