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Will Conservation Savings Persist Over Time?
by Andrew Ford
April 1992
Introduction
Beginning with the Northwest Power Act of 1981 the Bonneville Power Administration was given the responsibility to provide for the electric power supply needs of Northwest electric utilities. In doing so it had to consider and give priority to energy efficiency and renewable resources as sources of new supply.
The use of energy conservation as a resource posed many new issues for electric utilities at this time. Bonneville had to create new divisions for program design and implementation, as well as planning groups to assess the potential savings and costs, and evaluators to measure program impacts.
By 1992 Bonneville had more than 10 years of experience in conservation program implementation (the "doing" part of learning-by-doing), but it was thought that we still had limitations on our understanding of "how conservation programs worked."
In the project represented here Andy Ford was hired by BPA to work with its program evaluators to try to "model what we knew" from evaluating conservation programs and investigate new areas for research priorities. His report is an excellent example of how a professional system dynamicist researches the topics covered and develops an initial model for testing.
As the researcher experiments with the model one gains insights about what might be happening and new, deeper questions about the system arise. Additional enhancements to the model allow for more sophisticated investigations into related issues.
The issues covered in this study are: (1) relating planning tools to empirical measurements from the evaluations, (2) the presumed conservation "take back" effect, (3) the asserted conservation "free driver" effect, and (4) the possible use of "synthetic data analysis" to investigate the discrepencies in planning assumptions and empirical data.
The "free rider" effect was a hot issue at the time because it would cause less reduction in energy use than system planners expected. The theory was that conservation program participants would increase their energy use because it was effectively cheaper with conservation measures installed, e.g., keeping your house warmer or cooler now that it was insulated.
The "free driver" effect was the theory that non-participants in conservation programs would also install conservation measures on their own when they saw the savings that program participants were experiencing (or saw advertising or other conservation information from their utility). They might be reluctant to sign up for utility programs, but they were willing to save money on their energy bills.
In this activity the original report is provided, as well as the models which were created. The original models have been recreated from the report as best we could, and some discrepencies cause minor differences in some results.
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