Ping-pong, caricatures, scooter tours, s’mores—you can find all of this and more at the 2019 E Source Forum, the premier event for US and Canadian utility professionals. In its 32nd year, the Forum brings together like-minded individuals to learn, collaborate, and network over the course of two and a half action-packed days in beautiful Denver, Colorado.

Have you ever received a home energy report? You know, one of those slips of paper stuffed in with your utility bill that shows you in primary colors how your energy use compares to that of your neighbors? With a smiley face or a little encouragement to save more, these seemingly small reports are making a big difference on customer energy bills and helping utilities reach increasingly aggressive energy-savings goals.

As lighting baselines rise and LED markets transform, program managers are looking for innovative ways to fill the savings gap. So what does the next generation of residential demand-side management (DSM) programs look like?

If done correctly, electrification can reduce carbon, lower rates and costs for consumers, and make the grid run more efficiently. But our industry doesn’t even have a common definition of the term “beneficial electrification,” despite our use of it everywhere. Who’s benefiting from electrification? Are there cross-subsidies? If there are winners, aren’t there losers as well? Is the main driver environmental? And if so, how must we change our frameworks for assessing programs?

We recently revealed the results and rankings from the 2019 E Source Review of North American Electric and Gas Company Residential Websites, also known as the Website Benchmark study. Conducted every other year since 2002, the study got a facelift in 2019. This year, we used an updated, more quantitative methodology that analyzed more data points than ever before.

Do you ever feel like you’re spinning your wheels trying to find new ideas for products and services? Feel like your learning curve has plateaued? Want to hear more directly from customers but don’t have a way to? Bored with your daily work routines? Spice up your life by attending E Design Week, December 10 to 12 at the E Source headquarters in Boulder, Colorado.

E Design Week is our design-thinking workshop focused on creating innovative, customer-facing products and services.

Business customers often ask utility account managers for advice on lowering their monthly energy bills, improving energy efficiency, and updating equipment or technology. There are many resources out there that can help with this—Energy Star, the US Department of Energy, industry associations, and national labs to name a few—but, more often than not, the information the customer needs is spread out across many different websites.

As the demand for natural gas grows, utilities face an increasing need for gas infrastructure. To address constraints on natural gas supply and pipeline availability, utilities are launching gas demand response (DR) initiatives. These programs, however, are still in their infancy—it’s too soon to tell whether gas DR can provide reliability or economic value.

In September 2019, the US Department of Energy (DOE) released two new rules that would roll back lighting efficiency standards under the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 (EISA) that were set to take effect on January 1, 2020. The first action is a final rule that would remove the 2017 definition expanding the EISA standards to include specialty lamps such as candle, globe, candelabra, and reflector bulbs. The second action is a proposed determination that would eliminate the new 45 lumen per watt standards for A-lamps that intended to make LEDs the baseline bulb in 2020.

I first wrote about becoming an EVangelist in my 2016 blog post Become an Electric Vehicle EVangelist! Part 1. Since then, in just a few short years, we have gone from focusing primarily on passenger electric vehicles (EVs) to comprehensive transportation electrification (TE). During this time, utility EV programs and transportation electrification plans have scaled from mainly targeting single-family homes to programs that cater to residential, low-income, multifamily, and commercial customers.