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Energy Efficiency

Updated January 28, 2019

The New Efficiency: New York initiative calls upon New York’s utilities to achieve significantly more, in both scale and innovation, in their energy efficiency activities, including ensuring that a substantial portion of new activities in energy efficiency benefit New Yorkers with low-to-moderate incomes.

REV Connect is facilitating innovative ideas and business models in partnership with utilities that will transform the mix of utility energy efficiency investments to drive greater impact, while leveraging public dollars with multiples of private dollars to deliver more savings. Possible utility partnership opportunities could include:

  • Advancing shared savings models leveraging third-party capital
  • Advancing multi-measure EE services addressing measures that include but move beyond the dominance of lighting in portfolios.  Measures that integrate with other distributed energy resources (DERs) will also become important.
  • Leveraging data and customer/asset information to reduce soft costs.
  • EE deployment strategies that deliver grid value, both through NWA/NPA procurements and through other partnership approaches that can be responsive to system needs on an ongoing basis.
  • Offering solutions that complement other innovation opportunities listed on REV Connect, including customer acquisition, energy marketplace 2.0, and solutions for low-to-moderate income (LMI) customers

INNOVATIVE ENERGY EFFICIENCY SPRINT

REV Connect Innovation Sprints focus attention on timely and specific utility needs for innovative energy partnerships.

The Innovative Energy Efficiency Sprint was completed in August 2018 and described below. Subscribe to our mailing list to stay informed about upcoming activities.

Objectives

  • Identify innovative business models that can help New York meet its ambitious energy efficiency goals, as expressed in New Efficiency: New York white paper
  • Focus on market-based approaches designed to reduce the cost of EE, animate third-party business models, and increase private sector investment

Outcomes

The New York utilities and New York State presented their interests within this Innovation Sprint during the kick-off webinar on June 12, 2018. Among the interests, top objectives included:

Utility-Specific Interests

Utility Propose Ideas Via Interests
Central Hudson REV Connect Seeking to identify innovative ways to achieve natural gas savings in order to meet or exceed energy efficiency savings targets.
Con Edison REV Connect Seeking scalable solutions to improve the efficiency of building envelopes in the Company’s service territory. Target-customers may include single-family residential, multifamily residential, and/or commercial customers. Will consider a variety of building envelope program designs, including those that are comprehensive as well as those focused on specific technologies, however solutions must address one or more components of the building envelope. Inclusion of third-party capital and/or shared savings approaches will be considered advantageous.
National Grid REV Connect Seeking to identify potential partners to launch new program delivery models to integrate with its current energy efficiency portfolio. Interested in delivering customer value beyond energy savings, deploying efficiency without traditional customer incentives, generating PSRs, more effectively achieving EAMs, integrating DER with energy efficiency, and providing offerings for LMI customers. In particular, partners with submissions that may support the upcoming Pay-for-Performance (P4P) pilot program are of interest.
NYPA REV Connect Fact-finding to inform the development of new programs and services, as well as inform future solicitations in the Energy Efficiency space.
NYSEG and RG&E REV Connect Seeking innovative ideas to cost-effectively integrate energy efficiency with smart grid innovation and DER for value-added services with measurable, data-driven results and information exchange with ‘behind the meter’ end-uses. Interested in offerings which leverage/build upon LED and advanced controls to also yield non-lighting end-use savings. Shared risk/reward (e.g., pay for performance, efficiency as a service) and private capital financing are desirable.
O&R REV Connect No specific interests for the sprint, but interested in seeing what the market is offering in this space.
PSEG-LI REV Connect Fact-finding to inform the development of new programs and services, as well as inform future solicitations in the Energy Efficiency space.

 

REV Context

On Earth Day, New York State announced an ambitious new energy efficiency target of 185 trillion Btus (British thermal units) of site energy savings below the 2025 energy-use forecast — equivalent to saving the energy consumed by 1.8 million New York homes.

Alongside this new target, New York State is catalyzing the innovation needed to bring energy efficiency into homes and businesses. The New Efficiency: New York report recommends a comprehensive mix of strategies.

All New York utilities currently have energy efficiency portfolios in place and are looking for innovative ways to integrate new solutions, including market-based approaches to increase energy efficiency adoption. Utility programs are also augmented by multiple initiatives run through NYSERDA, other state entities, and non-profits.

Utilities can receive shareholder performance incentives—known as earnings adjustment mechanisms (EAMs)—for spurring increases in energy efficiency adoption. The energy efficiency EAM considers both programmatic performance-based metrics (e.g., megawatt hour (MWh) reduction or peak capacity (MW) reduction) and outcome-based metrics (e.g., energy intensity reduction across the utility’s territory).

 

Resources

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