RTF April 2019 Meeting Recap

The RTF’s April meeting continued the streak of well attended, engaging meetings where a lot of topics were covered and big decisions were made. If you couldn't attend the meeting, here's what you missed. 

As will be the case with all meetings in the foreseeable future, April’s meeting revisited the topic of SEEM calibration.  This month’s update focused on a proposal to account for multiple unknowns in RBSA II. The contract analysts provided an in-depth exploration of this proposal at a prior subcommittee meeting, but presented a high-level summary of the approach here. Basically, for houses with unknown factors, such as wall insulation levels, the proposal is to develop a set of likely scenarios and a probability for each scenario, which will then be run through a monte carlo analysis to inform the calibration. This SEEM check-in also discussed comparing envelope data between RBSA I and RBSA II and concluded that the two data sources appear fairly compatible when looking at apples-to-apples comparisons though some concerns came up about RBSA I records for unobserved cases.  

Another important topic at this month’s meeting was a presentation of the Council’s quantifiable resource costs and benefits framework.  This framework is used by the Council to ensure consistent treatment of costs and benefits across resources.  It is nothing new, but simply provides an explicit way to capture the Council’s long-standing approach on quantification of resource costs. In its development, staff mapped potential costs to the Power Act to determine whether they meet the definition of system cost, or are otherwise discussed in the Act. For those determined to be in bounds they then identified whether the cost is quantifiable.

Finally, the RTF approved a number of measure updates. Starting with Electronic Thermostats UES, the name was changed to Residential Electronic Line Voltage Thermostats for clarity, a measure identifier for line-voltage connected thermostats was added, RBSA I & II billing data was used  to inform heating loads upon which the percentage savings are applied, and assumptions for number of retrofitted thermostats per home were updated. This measure remains Planning as there is very little data to support savings for any application.

The group also updated two small saver commercial refrigeration measures, Compressor Head Fan Motor Retrofit and ECM for Display Cases. For compressor head fan motors the measure applications were expanded and, consistent with the guidelines, modeling of second stream of savings, post-RUL, was added. ECM for display cases also got a name change to Display Case Fan Motor Retrofit and measure identifiers for different size motors, additional efficient and baseline technologies, and different case temperatures were added. The RTF also voted to update the hours of use to account for defrost cycles in door cases versus open cases. Savings for the measure generally went down, while most applications were cost effective. Lastly, Slab Insulation was deactivated and a brief sunset date extension was approved for Potato/Onion Sheds.

The next RTF meeting (May 21, 2019) will, as always, contain a number of interesting and important new topics.  You can look forward to further discussion of SEEM Calibration, a presentation on an exciting commercial whole building white paper, a new demand response analysis for irrigation pump controls and the return of the EV charger UES.  We hope to see you there!