San Francisco Public Utilities Commission – Edward Carley – 2015

Goals

The San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (SFPUC) is the power utility that provides electrical service to municipal customers as well as some residential and commercial customers within the City and County of San Francisco. The SFPUC engaged Ed Carley and a team of three additional EDF Climate Corps fellows for the summer to research and analyze the potential of energy efficiency rebate and incentive programs for the organization. Specifically, Carley was asked to develop a series of recommendations for a new energy efficiency rebate program for commercial and industrial electricity customers.

Solutions

Carley and the team of EDF fellows conducted research on energy efficiency best practices, researched rebate offerings from similar publicly owned utilities and conducted interviews with representatives of five California municipal utilities. Informed by this research, Carley developed a financial model demonstrating the triple bottom line impact of energy efficiency programs for the SFPUC. In his final report, Carley described: 1) The measures to be included in the proposed rebate program 2) Key stakeholders for the SFPUC to engage to ensure success 3) Key decisions to be made in the program development process.

Potential Impact

If participation in the program is as modeled, annual energy savings could be over 4 million kilowatt hours, saving customers almost $750,000 dollars on electricity bills in 2020. Although the SFPUC provides its customers with carbon dioxide free hydroelectric power, the program described would avoid annual emissions of over 800 tons of greenhouse gas emissions and over 10,000 tons of GHGs over the lifetime of the program, if the San Francisco regional grid GHG factor was applied to the conserved kilowatt hour savings. At the end of his fellowship, Carley and the team of fellows presented their findings to members of the management team at the SFPUC, as well as consultants from supporting organizations who were participating in the program development efforts at the SFPUC.