Impact of Energy Efficiency Programs

Hi Kimberly. With spending patterns, you can customize/edit the pattern to meet your specific information. As you stated, you can remove coefficients that you know will not change given the cost savings associated with the energy efficient program. However, to help us provide you with better input to your Forum Post, can you tell us a little more about the Energy Efficiency Incentive Program. For example, the types of programs and savings associated with each program for both residents and non-residents. Do non-resident customers include both public and private sector customers and if so, do you have estimates of savings to them as well. We appreciate you being patient as we work to answer your question

Thanks for getting back to me. When you talk of spending patterns, is that for households? The programs are broken out by residential and non-residential customers. Unfortunately, I don't have any more information than that on who they are. However it could be a law firm putting in a programmable thermostat, a restaurant putting in more efficient equipment or a laundromat, etc. I don't know a breakdown of public/private participants. I was wondering about taking a broad approach and look at the largest consumers of the utilities based on cost from the commodity data. Then I could allocate the total energy savings based on their share of use assuming that the largest users would be participating in the most programs. If I portion out the energy savings this way, can I put the amount into the corresponding sector as a direct impact and run it that way? For example, if hospital spending on natural gas is 10% of the total spending on natural gas, I would assume that 10% of the total energy savings as a result of these programs would also be in hospitals. Can I run that amount as an impact in that sector? It seems straightforward, but I worry that I'm missing something. Appreciate your help. Kimberly

Hi Kimberly. We want to first address your question in your last Forum Post. The IMPLAN Model has spending patterns for households, industries, industries, and other specialized patterns for construction, investment and others. You ask can the spending patterns be manually adjusted -- so if I wanted to remove spending on real estate I could? Yes. That is a strength of using a spending pattern is if you have information on the types of energy efficient purchases, you could edit the appropriate spending pattern to remove things that do relate to a particular program or purchase and customize it to meet your program. As far breaking out your projected energy savings for residential customers, modeling change in household disposable income through the household spending pattern is a commonly used technique that we have encouraged. Non-residential users (Industrial and commercial) change in income is much trickier as Input-Output treats corporate profits as a leakage as residence of the owners of the stock is unknown, and how much of the profits are retained, dividended or re-invested (and where) is not normally known. You could just discuss in your report the projected amount of savings that likely occurred among non-residential users and not attempt to model their impacts. Also, we suspect that with your program there were installation expenditures and actual appliances, equipment, and material expenditures as well. These are real costs that could be model if you have the data. Here, if your energy efficient program paid some portion of the purchase and installation expenses, then it would be appropriate to consider in terms of impact. For installation, probably most of the expenses will is just be labor and you would run that as a Labor Income Change. You would then enter the installation expenditure as the event value (use the Employee Compensation 'sector'). You can gain access to the Labor Income Change Activity type by navigating to Setup> New Activity>. Finally, your example suggestions for modeling the hospital cost savings seems reasonable. We hope this helps.