2025-2029 Strategic + Business Plans
NEEA’s 2025-2029 Strategic and Business Plans build on the alliance’s more than 25-year history of Market Transformation success. These plans outline how the alliance will deliver on its draft mission: to catalyze the most efficient use of energy for a thriving Northwest.
Northwest Solutions for Northwest Customers
NEEA aggregates the power of the region to effect both long-term market change and to deliver near-term benefits, like increasing the availability and affordability of energy-efficient products for Northwest customers.
In 2025 – 2029, the alliance will retain its core focus on delivering affordable energy efficiency solutions to Northwest homes and businesses, regardless of fuel choice and where they live in the region.
NEEA’s future efforts will be guided by four strategic goals developed by NEEA's Board that align with the alliance’s proposed core purpose, which is to pool resources and share risks to transform the market for energy efficiency to the benefit of all consumers in the Northwest.
Learn more about alliance efforts
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Offering All the Convenience Without the Waste
Due to their convenient and accessible packaging of heating, cooling and ventilation equipment in a single box, rooftop units (RTUs) have become a common HVAC solution for commercial buildings in the Northwest. Unfortunately, most RTUs use more energy than necessary, and when they die, they are simply replaced by another inefficient RTU.
In 2022, NEEA evaluated a promising technology known as efficient gas RTUs—a solution that combines a variety of energy-saving features to solve the problem of RTU waste without downgrading convenience. Partnering with Montana State University’s Integrated Design Lab, the alliance concluded a nine-month field trial that demonstrated a 40% reduction in small-to-medium-sized commercial building HVAC energy use. With additional field trials currently taking place in Portland, the alliance will continue to evaluate this technology across a variety of building and equipment types to further prove its energy-saving efficacy in northern climates.
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A New Standard, Decades in the Making
In March 2022, the alliance’s decades-long regional collaboration with BPA and Northwest manufactured home builders achieved a major milestone: The first federal standard for manufactured homes in more than twenty-five years.
Largely based on data and experience provided by this longstanding Northwest collaboration, the U.S. Department of Energy’s new energy conservation standard features a two-tier structure that requires substantial improvements to double-wide and larger manufactured homes, along with modest enhancements for single-wide homes. Further, following the introduction of the new standard, ENERGY STAR® elevated its own specification above the federal standard to include a heat pump option, allowing for even greater efficiency. Through years of work building high-performance manufactured homes, evaluating costs and best practices, and validating modeled energy savings, the alliance and its partners have permanently leveled-up manufactured home efficiency.
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Ushering in a New Age of Efficiency
The alliance and its partners share a long and influential history advancing television efficiency for Northwest consumers, and 2022 was a impactful year for this transformational work.
In January 2022, ENERGY STAR® unveiled its final Version 9 TV specification, which introduced a NEEA-developed method for testing television efficiency that is far more accurate than the previous approach. By more precisely reflecting real-life television energy use, the CTA/ANSI-2037C testing method is swiftly moving the needle: As of October 2022, it is required for use by all television manufacturers when evaluating the efficiency of their products, and it has already influenced a new class of efficient televisions that hit Northwest shelves in 2023.
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A Clear View for Northwest Window Solutions
Representing the first major change to the ENERGY STAR® windows specification in more than a decade, the NEEA-influenced Version 7.0 Specification for Residential Windows, Doors and Skylights was finalized in October with lowered U-Factor requirements for the Northern Climate Zone.
This breakthrough follows years of collaboration between NEEA and the Partnership for Advanced Window Solutions (PAWS) to influence the national window-manufacturing market and thus elevate building efficiency and comfort in the Northwest. The newly lowered U-Factor requirements will provide a significant boost to the alliance’s Market Transformation efforts to motivate adoption of triple-pane windows that significantly reduce thermal transfer and reinforce the most vulnerable part of a building’s envelope.
