Northwest Energy Efficiency Alliance

Creating Long-Term Energy Savings Through Market Innovation

The Northwest Energy Efficiency Alliance (NEEA) brings together more than 100 utilities and energy conservation bodies from the Pacific Northwest. A key goal of NEEA is to guide a transformation of the region’s energy market toward ever increasing efficient and sustainable energy consumption. NEEA influences market transformation by leveraging strong regional partnerships and accelerating the adoption of energy efficient products and creating savings to end-users.

Over a three-year span, NEEA’s staff had nearly doubled in size, creating an entirely new environment, budgeting concerns, service delivery opportunities, and internal organization structure challenges and growing pains. Alongside these new challenges, calculating and measuring the savings, cost benefits and ROIs attributed to energy efficiency initiatives had grown more complicated as a result of energy efficiency as an overall sector becoming more and more complex. With a large number of programs running, NEEA recognized the need to evaluate them relative to one another, and across a wide range of sectors.

Coraggio helped NEEA develop a product lifecycle framework, which allowed NEEA to assess and evaluate new programs’ potential, as well as whether they should invest time and resources into the program. Methodology was developed in order to monitor the program’s performance against internal milestones. In addition to this, NEEA had the ability to view their entire portfolio and its current level of diversification, and in turn gave them the ability to be more diligent with how and where they were investing.

With these new frameworks, methodologies and options came a greater ability to increase the market adoption of efficiencies by accurately identifying barriers and opportunities.

“ Coraggio’s practical approach helped NEEA apply structure to some key internal processes, in a manner that fit both our culture and our timeline. ”

— Susan Hermenet, Director of Technology, Planning & Evaluation