RTF January 2019 Meeting Recap

The first RTF meeting of the year has come and gone with great turn out, lively discussions, and important decisions made. We were excited to welcome the new cohort of 2019-2021 members. All the new faces and fresh energy really made for an exciting kick off to the year. If you couldn’t make the meeting, here’s what you missed.

Ductless Heat Pumps for Zonal Heat in Single Family and Manufactured Homes were on the docket for the January meeting. Staff provided updates based on newly available billing data from Bonneville and Energy Trust of Oregon. The sunset date was extended in anticipation of forthcoming data and the anticipated effect of the SEEM calibration currently underway. In the meantime, the RTF has set the DHP measure to Under Review in light of a staff review of preliminary data that raised some questions regarding savings for manufactured homes and single-family homes in heating zones 2 and 3. The RTF is looking forward to data coming from ETO, BPA, and PNNL about DHPs in existing zonal homes, especially focusing on manufactured homes and under-represented heating zones.    

The meeting also held much excitement concerning non-residential lighting. The RTF updated the Non-Residential Lighting Retrofits Standard Protocol and set a new sunset date of January 2021. These were primarily updates to assumptions around the current practice baseline and, for the most part, only applied to savings in the post-remaining useful life period. The most discussion was around the methodology for determining current practice watts. This is a challenging assumption, as the RTF is determining what the building owner would have installed after the existing lighting system failed, which is completely unknown. After much discussion, the group concluded that taking an average of the pre-condition implied watts (assuming they would have installed what is there) and the efficient case implied watts (assuming they would have changed the lighting levels anyway) was the most apt, which was captured in the update.

Even with engaging subjects such as these, the RTF still found time to update the savings costs for Residential Refrigerators and Freezers UES measure and set a new sunset date in light of new market data from NEEA’s retail products portfolio work. They also had time to extend the sunset date for a number of Manufactured Home Air Source Heat Pump measures and report on the contract analysts team’s ongoing work to update Climate Zone Mapping Methodology.   

The next RTF meeting (February 20, 2019) will be similarly packed with stimulating topics to hash out and important decision to make.  You can look forward to an updated UES for residential and commercial shower heads and thermostatic restriction valves, an entirely new UES for residential Level 2 Electric Vehicle Chargers as well as the RTF’s first foray into demand response estimates for both EV Chargers and Non-Residential Lighting Controls.  The day will round out with an exciting presentation on a new Whole Building Modeling Draft White Paper.  We hope to see you there!