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.