Rethinking Measurement and Verification of Energy Savings

by Sotiris Papadelis HEBES Intelligence, 19/01/2023

This book presents in detail the measurement and verification (M&V) methodology that has been developed by the H2020 project SENSEI - Smart Energy Services to Improve the Energy Efficiency of the European Building Stock.

Renewable energy generation assets are financed based on the value of the energy they will produce. Typically, the owner of a generation asset secures a Power Purchase Agreement (PPA) or an Energy Supply Contract (ESC) for selling the generated energy, and this agreement can be used for attracting investment capital to purchase and install the necessary equipment. Based on this clear value proposition, a series of business model innovations have come to exist and offer solutions for the financing and deployment of renewable energy generation assets, the aggregation of the produced energy, and the securitization of the expected revenues.

In contrast, the energy efficiency services sector is lagging behind renewable energy generation in terms of demand for investments and business models for large-scale deployment. While a lot of work has taken place on measuring energy savings and formally covering risks and uncertainties at the individual project level, scaling energy efficiency up to project portfolio or programme level still faces challenges. One of the main barriers to market growth has been the uncertainty about the magnitude and persistence of the achieved efficiency improvements; renewable energy generation assets produce a measurable outcome, while energy efficiency can only be estimated through counterfactual analysis, which leads to increased uncertainty and potential for disputes. The heterogeneity in building structures, operating schedules and implemented energy efficiency measures (EEMs) only amplifies this uncertainty.

A main argument of the SENSEI project is that advanced M&V, sometimes called M&V 2.0, can lay the foundation for energy efficiency project aggregation schemes and/or energy efficiency support programs by providing the insights that are necessary for all parties involved in up-scaling energy efficiency to correctly quantify and share the generated benefits. The proposed methodology aims to advance the state of play in terms of methods and toolkits for M&V, and offer new ways to frame the M&V task and its fundamental calculations.

A concrete implementation of the methodology is provided by the open source M&V tool eensight. This book explains how eensight can be used, how the proposed methodology has been implemented, and why this methodology is a valid option for M&V.

The contents of this book are licensed for free consumption under the following license: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0).