The Northwest Power and Conservation Council has squarely placed one of their big toes in the water regarding the region’s historical analytical approach to assessing conservation potential. The Council accepted responses until the middle of December from firms interested in helping them assess the following;
“The Council is requesting proposals to assess the level of effort required to adopt an end-use conservation model, describe the related advantages and disadvantages compared with the Council’s current approach to developing conservation supply curves used in the Regional Portfolio Model, and outline the elements and potential resources required to develop such an end-use conservation model.
In the Council’s Seventh Power Plan, the Council committed to exploring the development of an end-use conservation model (ANLYS-3). There were three primary reasons for this action item: 1) An understanding that common practice in conservation potential assessments (CPA) is based on using an end-use model; 2) Better integration between the Council’s end-use load forecasting model and the conservation model; 3) Interest by stakeholders to include more whole-building efficiency measures.”
Does this spell the beginning of the end of classic single measure aggregation as the sum total of conservation potential in the region? Maybe not, but it is an encouraging sign that the Power Council is recognizing the necessity to evolve their approach to sizing the resource. Stay tuned on this one. If a new path isn’t found, steel yourself for more conversations about the “low hanging fruit has been picked” followed shortly by “there are no new measures.”