Every year in the fall, I head to Cape Cod for a last-ditch vacation before the year-end work crunch hits and the New England winter begins to take hold. 2018 was no different. At least as I headed to Provincetown.

Three days before I was supposed to return home, vacation was cut short. While I was at the beach without cell service, my family frantically called and texted. “Turn on the news,” all the messages said. And, just like that, life changed.

For over a decade, utilities have rigorously explored a variety of approaches in their quest to achieve predictable and reliable energy savings data. One approach that combines energy efficiency, behavioral changes, and integrated demand-side management is strategic energy management (SEM). SEM is a holistic approach that continuously examines and manages a customer’s energy usage in pursuit of deeper, long-term savings.

On January 25, 2019, NEEP held its first Massachusetts Achieving Zero Energy (MAZE) stakeholders meeting. As an intern who’d just started that same week, I was excited and curious to hear the subject matter and how people from various professional backgrounds thought of the topic.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal is often credited with bringing an end to the economic catastrophe of the Great Depression by putting various governmental reforms in place to restore prosperity by stabilizing the economy and providing jobs and relief to Americans. For the most part, it seems to have worked. We haven’t had another economic crisis quite like the Great Depression since the 1930s.