Summary of Council's Tracking of Conservation
In its charter the RTF is tasked with annually surveying the region’s utilities, Bonneville Power Administration, NEEA, and system benefit charge administrators like Energy Trust of Oregon on their efficiency achievements. The RTF supports the compiling of the data into a Regional Conservation Progress (RCP) report, and staff present it to the Council to offer a full picture of the region’s progress against the power plan’s efficiency goals. 2022 was the first year reporting towards the 2021 Power Plan period. The conservation target range in the 2021 Power Plan is 750-1,000 aMW within the six-year plan period.
Expand the ⊕ navigation above for other years' reports.
Cumulative Conservation Achievements and the 2021 Plan
2022 RCP Workbook Presentation Submitted to the Council
As a region, the Northwest has saved 149.8 aMW of energy as a result of energy measures. This total represents utility program savings, NEEA reported savings, and savings from codes and standards with an adjustment for double and under counting. The chart to the right illustrates how the regional savings compare to the Plan targets range using an even annual distribution of the goal and ramped version. As shown in the chart, the first year of tracking puts the region on track to meet the Council's 2021 Power Plan targets to ensure an adequate, efficient, economical, and reliable power supply.
Regional Savings by Sector
As expected, in 2022 the commercial sector is representing half of the regional energy savings as residential program opportunities have decreased with the transformation of LED lighting programs. Residential still continues to represent a major source of savings for the region at almost 25% and there continues to be efficiency opportunities for residential homes with lighting fixtures, envelope upgrades, and other end uses.
Program Savings and Expenditures
Energy efficiency savings is dependent on the size of annual budgets. In 2022, there was a continuation of the trend seen throughout the Seventh Power Plan of program expenditures being on a downward trend, resulting in less savings. To ensure a reliable, adequate and cost-effective system, the region will need to continue its investment at the same rate to meet the 2021 Plan targets.
Other Regional Savings Achieved
Beyond the savings reported toward the 2021 Power Plan targets, the region also provided additional energy savings in 2022 for customers offering non cost effective programs that achieved other goals, such as decarbonization, additional support of rural markets, and weatherizing the remaining leaky homes in the Northwest. Of all the savings reported to the RCP for 2022, these savings only represented 8% of energy efficiency in the region. The majority of these additional benefits, 86%, were provided to the residential sector.
Historical Regional Savings
Energy Efficiency has provided over 7,678 aMW of savings since 1978. It has helped the region avoid more than 24.4 million metric tons of C02 emissions and has saved the equivalent of 6.1 million homes' annual energy consumption. You can see in the chart below, utility efficiency programs have been the key driver of energy savings in the region, with NEEA and their market transformation work emerging in recent years as a significant contributor of regional savings.