Energy Trust of Oregon
Throughout the COVID pandemic (2020-21), Energy Trust of Oregon continued to help commercial-building owners in Oregon increase energy efficiency. During this period thousands of retrofit projects (upgrades to buildings or equipment) and hundreds of strategic-energy-management (SEM) projects were completed. The latter involve improving building operation-and-maintenance practices.
Energy Trust contracted with Lattice Energy to independently evaluate these projects to determine what portion of the expected savings was achieved. Projects were randomly selected for these evaluations.
The pandemic posed unique challenges to this work. It was much more difficult to recruit building owners/operators to participate in the study. In addition, building operation and energy use were affected by pandemic restrictions and other economic impacts. We had to account for these changes when estimating savings from the sampled projects. We overcame these challenges primarily by creatively and persistently recruiting customers and developing innovative methods for remotely collecting the data needed.