Utilities

From rate structures and customer engagement efforts to infrastructure investments and sourcing decisions, utilities play an important role in helping today’s buildings be more efficient. Additionally, energy efficiency provides a valuable role in meeting needs across communities by serving as a cost-effective alternate to expensive transmission and distribution upgrades as well as by improving local energy resilience. IMT connects customers—be they building owners or managers or city governments—with utilities in ways that foster more frequent and open dialogue and create partnerships that improve utility service delivery and increase efficiency investment for all involved. Our resources exploring these collaborations are below.

The Latest

Creating Alignment between Cities and Utility Energy Efficiency Programs

Cities are increasingly acting as market catalysts to encourage and require building owners to improve energy performance. However, cities implementing building performance policies that require actions like audits or re-tuning may experience conflicts with their regulated utilities’ efficiency programs, which depend on energy savings being additional—not attributable to market adoption or preexisting laws. These utility … Continued

Use Case: Distribution Grid Performance

This use case focuses on distribution grid performance, which helps local governments identify opportunities to improve local reliability and resilience, to improve emergency planning and response, and to encourage targeted investments in distributed energy resources (DERs) for health, safety, and cost reasons.

Use Case: Community-Wide Energy Usage Data

This use case focuses on community-wide energy usage data, which helps local governments calculate carbon emissions, set policy goals, track program progress over time, and identify opportunities for more targeted outreach around priorities like building efficiency.

Use Case: Anonomyzed Energy Usage Profile Data

This use case focuses on anonomyzed energy usage profile data, which helps local governments understand energy usage trends within the community that may inform the development of energy policies and programs.

Use Case: Whole-Building Energy Data

This use case focuses on whole-building energy data, which helps building owners understand and improve building energy performance.

Use Case: Energy Efficiency Program Savings and Participation

This use case focuses on energy efficiency program savings and participation data, which helps local governments understand trends in energy efficiency program uptake, identify under-represented neighborhoods that could benefit from efficiency, and assess trends in costs related to the implementation of particular measures, which may make them more or less likely to be acted upon by building owners.

Rethinking Energy Data Access: Conquering Barriers to Achieve Local Climate Goals

Local governments across the U.S. are leading the charge on a variety of complex objectives, which include developing plans to meet long-term climate goals, improving public health, increasing access to energy-saving programs, and enhancing local resilience to extreme weather. Utilities play an invaluable role in these efforts by collecting and sharing energy consumption and program … Continued

Rethinking Energy Data Access: Executive Summary

This executive summary of Rethinking Energy Data Access: Conquering Barriers to Achieve Local Climate Goals provides an easy-to-digest summary of the report’s top findings and recommendations for local government sustainability staff, utilities, and utility regulators on how to reform the ways in which data is requested, protected, and shared in order to advance critical goals for each party.