Letter to the Region:
The alliance made significant progress throughout 2023 in its continued efforts to help Northwest communities tackle energy challenges and build a more resilient future. Key milestones included a new federal water-heating efficiency standard, completing a regionwide residential data collection study, and advancing greater adoption of energy-efficient products in the region. The culmination of these efforts highlight the ways that NEEA’s Market Transformation approach provides long-lasting benefits to Northwest utility customers.
As we look back on 2023, we also look ahead to an energy future of ongoing changes, complex challenges and valuable opportunities. In 2023, NEEA’s Board completed a strategic and business planning process for 2025-2029. The plans highlight the continuing value of energy efficiency Market Transformation in our region and point to evolving opportunities for the alliance. And though our future is one of evolution, our core principles of collaboration and innovation will remain the same. In the years to come, our strong and regionally diverse alliance will be more important than ever as we continue working together to find unique solutions for all Northwest utility customers.
To successfully and affordably achieve Oregon’s climate and energy goals we must all work together. Finding innovative and affordable ways to save energy will be critical to meeting our goals. We're grateful to the Northwest Energy Efficiency Alliance for convening the region to advance cost-effective energy-efficient technologies and practices that benefit communities in Oregon and across the entire Northwest.
- Janine Benner
Director, Oregon Department of Energy
Regional Collaboration Provides Local Benefits
The alliance works to create lasting market changes that reduce energy use across the Northwest. By engaging individuals, businesses, and supply chain representatives in each of the four states, the alliance ensures that the benefits of energy efficiency and Market Transformation provide value throughout the region. The map below highlights a few examples from around the region in 2023:
Energy efficiency is an essential, affordable resource to help the Northwest’s homes and businesses navigate a more resilient future. The alliance is committed to delivering Market Transformation that meets future demand, addresses capacity and policy needs, and delivers comfort and efficiency to communities all across the region.
- Becca Yates
Executive Director, Northwest Energy Efficiency Alliance
Strategic Interventions to Deliver Permanent Value
Throughout 2023, NEEA built upon nearly three decades of work to create lasting change through strategic market interventions, collecting and sharing critical data, and influencing the advancement of codes and standards. The alliance’s holistic approach to Market Transformation helps overcome barriers to create the market conditions required to accelerate and sustain the adoption of more efficient products and services that provide continuing value to the region.
Spanning a variety of technologies, intervention strategies and strategic partnerships, the alliance’s work in 2023 achieved substantial gains in its efforts to transform the market for energy efficiency to the benefit of all Northwest consumers.
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Four-State Study Offers Regionwide Insight
To inform the Northwest’s energy resource forecasting and planning for many years to come, NEEA conducts the Residential Building Stock Assessment (RBSA), a long-term regional study that collects up-to-date residential energy data and insights across all four states. With granular data collected at more than 2,000 single-family and multifamily residences throughout the region, the scope of the RBSA requires the alliance’s unique ability to convene diverse organizations and pool regional resources.
The latest RBSA data and associated findings are now available, equipping Northwest utilities and energy efficiency organizations with deep and detailed insight into regional trends, including the ways in which consumers use energy.
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National Influence Brings Northwest Value
For more than 25 years, NEEA has supported the U.S. Department of Energy (U.S. DOE) with technical guidance and Northwest data to represent the specific needs of the region’s consumers. With this perspective in hand, the U.S. DOE is equipped to consider elevations to federal standards that raise the country’s efficiency baseline in ways that benefit all Northwest customers.
In 2023, NEEA’s long-term work serving as the dependable and impartial voice of the Northwest paid off with significant achievements. The year’s tangible results included elevated electric motor efficiency standards that have the potential to save enough energy to power more than 1 million homes per year for 30 years, and a permanent elevation to federal water heating standards that honors the Northwest perspective.
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Differing Fuel Types Center on Common Goals
As a collaborative of natural gas and electric utilities across the Northwest, NEEA stands in a unique position to create dual-fuel strategies that enhance the efficiency of the region's integrated gas and electric energy systems. In an era of ambitious decarbonization goals, these dual-fuel solutions are crucial for forging a resilient and reliable energy future, while offering all Northwest consumers efficient choices and cost savings.
By advancing energy efficiency for both electricity and natural gas products and technologies, NEEA is not only paving multiple routes to a sustainable and robust energy future but also expanding consumer access to efficient solutions. NEEA's natural gas Market Transformation endeavors foster affordable and reliable advancements in energy efficiency, which in turn bolster regional decarbonization and resource adequacy efforts.
2023 Market Transformation Program Highlights
NEEA’s Market Transformation work involves identifying and removing pervasive barriers in the market that prevent Northwest consumers from adopting the most energy-efficient technologies. Here are just a few examples from 2023 that demonstrate how NEEA’s Market Transformation programs have accelerated high-performance solutions that deliver value at local and regional levels.
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Facility Management in a New Light
Across years of Market Transformation work, NEEA has successfully increased the number and availability of Luminaire Level Lighting Controls (LLLC) products for Northwest consumers. In fact, every major manufacturer now carries this once-obscure but game-changing product that allows for precise and automated lighting control to optimize efficiency, comfort and productivity.
With these qualified products now widely available on the market, NEEA has expanded its focus to provide extensive training and education to lighting professionals to build the market’s capability to install LLLC, while also driving awareness and demand among building owners and property managers.
By increasing available products and trained installers, NEEA creates conditions for utility incentives to thrive. This groundwork, combined with utility incentives driving demand, boosts adoption, leading to savings and regional carbon reduction benefits. For example, in 2023, Snohomish PUD worked closely with two of their customers’ maintenance and facility staff, advising them on their lighting projects, helping their customers transform the look, feel and efficiency of their industrial warehouses with LLLC upgrades. These efforts resulted in better lighting, a safer work environment, and virtually no system maintenance.
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Windows of Intervention
Partnering with small affordable-housing builders and a large national builder, NEEA managed three demonstration projects featuring triple-pane windows. For the alliance, projects like these provide insights about the installation process and reveal potential barriers to builders adopting triple-pane windows as their standard offering.
For Northwest utility customers, demonstration projects deliver the immediate value of comfort, sound attenuation, and lower monthly utility bills. In 2023, NEEA partnered with the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde to help bring the many benefits of triple-pane windows to their Creekside elder housing project.
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Big Difference in a Small Town
To accelerate the adoption of the most efficient HVAC equipment and systems, which also provide economic and health benefits to Northwest communities, NEEA provides commercial building market actors with robust, independent data on the most efficient and beneficial products and approaches.
Across a dozen demonstration projects, NEEA has verified and validated an approach to reduce commercial building energy use by an average of 48 percent while maintaining healthy and clean ventilated air throughout the building. This approach, known as a very high efficiency dedicated outside air system (very high efficiency DOAS), requires a high-performance heat or energy recovery ventilator (HRV/ERV) to reach its full potential. Since 2015, NEEA has worked to bring this enabling HRV/ERV to the North American market. As a direct result of these efforts, the list of manufacturers with qualifying HRV/ERVs has grown from one to six, and the available products list ballooned from six to nearly 100 by the end of 2023.
One of NEEA’s very high efficiency DOAS demonstration projects was in Monument, Oregon, a rural town with a population of just under 120 people. NEEA joined BPA and Columbia Power Cooperative to help Monument’s K-12 school make the classrooms more efficient and comfortable with a high-efficiency upgrade of the school’s aging HVAC system. In addition to seeing a 60% reduction in HVAC use and a 35% reduction in total building energy use, the school’s students, teachers and administrators experienced a variety of benefits including reduced energy costs, increased comfort and improved indoor air quality.
Metrics and Investments
Market transformation is a long-term process that delivers permanent market change. The process seeks to find efficient innovations that can leverage the power of market forces to achieve the long-term goal of cost-effective energy efficiency. Alliance programs are designed to specifically address and overcome market barriers to enable accelerated market adoption of energy-efficient products, services and practices. The alliance’s Market Transformation process leverages multiple strategies to build a foundation based on past efforts, knowledge gained, data acquisition and analysis, and consistent third-party evaluation. For nearly thirty years, the alliance has honed and adapted this proven set of strategies and tactics to support the region in providing a strong, cost-effective energy future for today’s consumers and future generations.
As depicted in the metrics below, alliance activities during a business cycle continue to deliver energy savings long after the 5-year investment period has ended. The following graphs and charts show energy savings associated with changes in the markets NEEA is directly intervening in during the current funding cycle (current investments), as well as those that are continuing to deliver value after NEEAs direct intervention has ended (previous investments) as a result of continued market progress and sustained market changes.
2023 Energy Savings Results
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2023 Co-Created Electric Energy Savings
NEEA estimates that the region achieved nearly 39 average megawatts (aMW) of Co-Created energy savings in 2023.
Co-Created energy savings include all savings above an estimated baseline that occur in the market due to the combined efforts of NEEA and its partners.
An aMW is the continuous output of a resource with one megawatt of capacity over a period of one year. This equates to 8,760 (the number of hours in a year) megawatt hours or 8,760,000 kilowatt hours.
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2023 Co-Created Natural Gas Savings
NEEA estimates that the alliance achieved more than 805,000 Therms of Co-Created natural gas savings in 2023. The majority of these savings are from residential code advancements.
The alliance’s natural gas portfolio is in development but beginning to realize the foundational work with the Advanced Commercial Gas Water Heater program now in development and the Efficient Rooftop Units program actively executing program strategies.
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*The estimate does not include an additional 44-46 aMW from Strategic Energy Management that were not forecasted at the time it was established.Co-Created Electric Energy Savings
For its Cycle 6 Business Plan (2020-2024), NEEA is expecting to meet its business plan forecast. NEEA estimates that the region will achieve between 130-150* average megawatts (aMW) of Co-Created electric energy savings through the efforts of the alliance’s Market Transformation portfolio. This is equivalent to the amount of energy needed to power more than 100,000 Northwest homes each year.
Co-Created - or shared - energy savings include all savings above the baseline that occur in the market due to the combined efforts of NEEA and its partners.
1 aMW = enough energy to power about 730 Northwest homes per year
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Total Regional Natural Gas Energy Savings
NEEA estimates the region will achieve between 3.3 – 4.4 Million (MM) Therms of Total Regional Savings through the efforts of the alliance’s natural gas Market Transformation portfolio during its Cycle 6 Business Plan (2020-2024). As a result of changes to Washington code favoring electrification and some unexpected delays the advancement of natural gas measures in Oregon code, NEEA is not expecting to meet its business plan forecast for natural gas savings.
Total Regional Savings include all savings calculated above the pre-intervention market starting point due to the combined efforts of NEEA and its partners.
Additional 2023 Metrics
On top of market progress achieved and the resulting energy savings, energy efficiency drives additional value for the region, such as avoided greenhouse gas emissions and reducing load during peak times.
20-year Electric Benefit-Cost Ratio*: 1.99
*Reflects the 20-year value of the regional investment in Market Transformation efforts. The alliance expects all programs to meet a benefit-cost ratio threshold of 1 or better.
2023 Regional Peak Demand Savings: 75 MW winter peak; 60 MW summer peak
*NEEA's analysis uses a regional peak hour definition of 6pm weekdays in December, January and February for winter peak and 6pm weekdays in July and August for summer peak.
2023 Avoided CO2 Emissions:
Electric - 170,000 tons
Natural Gas - 5,300 tons
Additive* Co-Created Savings (aMW): 1997–2023
While NEEA is funded in 5-year increments, market transformation programs play out over a longer period, often not realizing their full potential for 15 years or more. The following chart depicts how NEEA’s early direct intervention investments for each business cycle resulted in permanent market change that led to continued long-term energy savings.
Working together, the region has achieved more than 959 average megawatts (aMW) of Co-Created electric energy savings since 1997 – equivalent to enough energy to power more than 700,000 Northwest homes each year.
*Additive Energy Savings are defined as the sum of new first year savings occurring each year across multiple years.
2023 Investments
$17.6 Million
Electric Market Development & Transformation
$6 Million
Analytics, Research & Evaluation
$6.1 Million
Business Administration
$2 Million
Stakeholder Engagement, Corporate Strategy & Communications
$2.4 Million
Natural Gas Market Development & Transformation
$1.2 Million
End Use Load Research
Balance Sheet
As of December 31, 2023
| Assets | |
| Cash and cash equivalents | $873,405 |
| Short-term investments | $15,055,239 |
| Funder and other receivables | $391,245 |
| Prepaid expenses | $1,085,773 |
| Property and equipment | $1,984,503 |
| Operating lease right-of-use asset | $4,023,480 |
| Total Assets | $23,413,645 |
| Liabilities and net assets | |
| Accounts payable and other liabilities | $4,338,239 |
| Advances from funders | $10,339,385 |
| Operating lease liability | $5,011,126 |
| Total liabilities | $19,688,750 |
| Net Assets | |
| Unrestricted | $3,563,148 |
| Temporarily restricted | $161,747 |
| Total Net Assets | $3,724,895 |
| Total Liabilities and Net Assets | $23,413,645 |
Statement of Activities
Year ending December 31, 2023
| Revenues | |
| Electric contributions | $30,094,161 |
| Natural Gas contributions | $3,065,754 |
| End Use Load Research Contributions | $1,074,586 |
| Special fund contributions | $1,097,095 |
| Interest and other income | $152,023 |
| Total Revenue | $35,483,619 |
| Expenses | |
| Compensation and benefits | $14,140,733 |
| General administration | $3,749,337 |
| Direct project costs | $17,403,125 |
| Total Expenses | $35,293,195 |
| Change in net assets | $190,424 |
