This update to the Technical Reference Manual is the outcome of a NEEP technical assistance project sponsored by Maryland, Delaware and the District of Columbia. The intent of the project was to develop and document in detail common assumptions for significant prescriptive residential and commercial/industrial electric energy efficiency measures savings. Measures were chosen by consensus of the subcommittee and project team. For each measure, the TRM includes either specific deemed values or algorithms for calculating:
- Gross annual electric energy savings;
- Gross electric summer coincident peak demand savings;
- Gross annual fossil fuel energy savings (for electric efficiency measures that also save fossil fuels, and for certain measures that can save electricity or fossil fuels);
- Other resource savings if appropriate (e.g. water savings, O&M impacts);
- Incremental costs; and
- Measure lives.
The TRM is intended to be easy to use and to serve a wide range of important users and functions, including:
- Utilities and efficiency Program Administrators – for cost-effectiveness screening and program planning, tracking, and reporting.
- Regulatory entities, independent program evaluators, and other parties – for evaluating the performance of efficiency programs relative to statutory goals and facilitating planning and portfolio review; and
- Markets, such as PJM’s Reliability Pricing Model (its wholesale capacity market) and future carbon markets – for valuing efficiency resources.
The TRM is intended to be a flexible and living document. To that end, NEEP, the project sponsors and the TRM authors work together to update it annually with additional measures, modifications to characterizations of existing measures and even removal of some measures when they are no longer relevant to regional efficiency programs.