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Total Electricity Savings From Projects Installed by the U.S. ESCO Industry

December 2, 2014

The Electricity Markets and Policy Group, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), has released a new policy brief titled "Estimating Customer Electricity Savings From Projects Installed by the U.S. ESCO Industry."

The U.S. energy service company (ESCO) industry has a well-established track record of delivering substantial energy and dollar savings in the public and institutional facilities sector, typically through the use of energy savings performance contracts (ESPC). To date, there has been little or no research in the public domain to estimate electricity savings for the entire U.S. ESCO industry.

This policy brief introduces a methodology to estimate electricity savings using the LBNL/NAESCO database, which contains over 5,200 projects representing ~$12 billion in aggregate industry investment. The authors estimate that projects installed by the U.S. ESCO industry, which were active in 2012, produced 34 TWh of electricity savings for their customers. They also estimate that 70% of these savings accrued to municipal, local, and state government facilities; universities/colleges; K-12 schools; and healthcare facilities (i.e., the so-called "MUSH" market). They found that two thirds of the savings within the MUSH market were generated by projects that did not utilize utility customer-funded energy efficiency incentives. Finally, they found that financial incentives from utility customer-funded efficiency programs accounted for about 16% of total project costs in ESCO projects implemented between 1990-2012 that target MUSH market customers.

Download the brief at the link below.