Collection Prepared by Northwest Utilities
The existence and growth of SEM programs derives from and is supported by broader energy efficiency (EE) planning and research efforts. The Planning and Market Research collection includes market studies, summaries of SEM program characteristics, analysis of new SEM program opportunities, and other research addressing the potential and efficacy of SEM programs.
This collection will be most relevant for those involved in EE program planning and policy, including program administrators, regulators and policy makers, especially where SEM programs are not yet established or flourishing. SEM program evaluators and implementers may also find useful information in these resources.
Check out the Program Evaluation collection for independent (third-party) impact evaluations and process evaluations for specific SEM programs.
SEM has been an important driver of energy and cost savings for industrial and commercial customers over the past two decades. But SEM programs were originally designed to prioritize "avoided energy consumption,” not to track carbon savings.
Strategic Energy Management is a holistic approach to managing the energy use in commercial and industrial facilities, some of the hardest to reach building types. Given the fact that SEM has been proven to reduce energy usage, the question remains: How can we accelerate the adoption of SEM?
In 2021, a group of NW SEM Collaborative members surveyed SEM program participants in the US and Canada about the effects of the 2020 pandemic and/or natural disasters on their operations. This qualitative research sought to better understand if and how SEM affected the operational resilience of these businesses, and how the crises affected their energy management efforts.
NYSERDA's 2021 Market Evaluation is the fifth study to examine the adoption of energy management practices (EMPs) in New York State’s manufacturing industries. In 2018, NYSERDA expanded its SEM offering to include wastewater treatment facilities; as such, the Team for this Market Evaluation also examined EMP adoption among wastewater facilities.
On behalf of the NASEMC, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and ACEEE jointly analyzed the cost effectiveness and prospective savings persistence of SEM programs across North America, surveying 24 active programs.
The municipal water system provides critical services to communities across the country and consumes a significant amount of energy in doing so. Water Resource Recovery Facilities (WRRFs) and Drinking Water Treatment Plants (DWTPs) can account for approximately 35 percent of a municipal energy budget.
This white paper from the 2015 ACEE Summer Study provides an overview of developments in SEM program design and implementation by reviewing results and approaches from programs.
Canada has set ambitious targets for energy efficiency improvements and greenhouse gas (GHG) reductions. Strategic energy management (SEM) creates a foundation for continual efficiency improvements that can result in incremental and persistent energy savings and emission reductions.
The goal of this guide is to provide SEM professionals with relevant program references and resources for industrial SEM EUL. It focuses on program-level SEM EUL, not the EUL of specific actions to improve efficiency.
This paper begins to address these barriers by outlining the variations in SEM program designs, identifying the challenges to quantifying energy savings, presenting evaluated savings for four SEM programs, proposing strategies for improving the likelihood that savings are quantifiable, and summarizing research in the pipeline.
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