The Regulatory Assistance Project (RAP), with support from the Energy Foundation, offered this webinar at no charge to participants as part of a series of training courses on energy efficiency program design and implementation. Please follow this link for a recording of the webinar.
Instructors: Chris Neme, Energy Futures Group
Michael Harrington & Ronny Sandoval,
Con Edison
Length: Approx. 2 hours
Improvements to electric efficiency in homes and businesses provide a variety of benefits to both the customers making the improvements and to the electric system as a whole. The most widely recognized are energy savings and system peak demand savings. A much less widely recognized benefit is the potential to enhance the reliability of the transmission and distribution (T&D) system. Efficiency programs can defer T&D investments either passively or actively. “Passive deferrals” typically occur as a result of system-wide efficiency programs. Though such programs are usually implemented for other reasons – e.g. to meet energy savings targets set by legislation or regulation – they can defer load growth-related investments in the T&D system for at least some period of time. “Active deferrals” are those that result from supplemental efficiency programs that are geographically-targeted for the express purpose of deferring the need for upgrades to specific elements of the T&D infrastructure. This webinar explores both innovations in quantifying passive deferral benefits and the evolution of efforts across the U.S. to pursue active deferrals of T&D investments.
In their presentation, the instructors cover:
• The importance of addressing T&D benefits of efficiency;
• Barriers to capturing those benefits and how they might be overcome;
• How the impacts of passive T&D deferrals can be forecast and quantified; and
• Examples of utility programs actively deferring T&D investments with geographically-targeted efficiency programs.
This presentation is based on the RAP Publication “US Experience with Efficiency as a Transmission and Distribution Resource“.
