EVALUATION OVERSIGHT

Our overarching philosophy toward evaluation strategy and support is that we want to make life easier for program administrator and commission staff by being a helpful, flexible resource and support making evaluation studies more strategic, high quality and valuable for utilities and their stakeholders.

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COLLABORATION

We believe evaluation support is best approached from a collaborative, rather than an adversarial, perspective. When we read evaluation plans and reports we do so to improve the quality of work and value, not with the explicit purpose of finding mistakes and errors to justify our work. We understand the important need for this quality review.

 

QUALITY ASSURANCE

We also have staff who have worked internally at utilities and understand the myriad ways that evaluation staff are pulled into internal efforts, reducing their time available to focus on reviewing thousands of pages of evaluation plans and reports.  One of the important aspects in evaluation support, therefore, is for us to serve in a quality assurance role and support utilities in ensuring evaluation research is valuable and high quality.

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TRAINING

We want to help train, educate, and professionally develop evaluation staff. We want to be available to answer staff questions regarding specific evaluation studies, provide strategic advice and generally support wherever possible with industry knowledge of other relevant topics. Our goal is to, when relevant, support evaluation staff growth in terms of knowledge, expertise, and confidence.

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ENERGY EFFICIENCY POLICIES

The Apex team has played a pivotal role in establishing and ensuring the latest developments and best practices are reflected in state and national energy efficiency policies. For example, we have written testimony in support of prospective vs. retrospective application of evaluation results.

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PROTOCOL DEVELOPMENT

Apex staff are the lead authors for the Uniform Methods Project Residential Lighting Evaluation Protocols, and have served as authors for gross and NTG protocols for technical reference manuals in Arkansas, Illinois, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania.