Metrics

  • Energy per square foot: energy use (often yearly) per area of a building
  • Carbon emissions
  • Energy Spend

We often want these quantities to decrease in energy-efficiency retrofits.

Comparisons

We often are comparing two distributions of values

  • two groups of buildings divided by some characteristic
  • observations of energy use in a building before and after an energy upgrade
  • observations of behavior before and after an energy policy is implemented

Monitoring Concepts

  • monitoring
    • the tracking of the activities within a program
  • evaluation
    • the systematic measurement of the impact of a program
  • impact
    • the difference in outcomes based on a program
  • causality
    • the quality of one event causing another event
  • counterfactual
    • the outcome without the program that we compare to
  • prospective evaluation
    • an evaluation designed at the same time as the program
  • retrospective evaluation
    • an evaluation designed after the program has begun
  • efficacy studies
    • a program evaluation under carefully controlled conditions
  • effectiveness studies
    • a program evaluation under “real-world” conditions
  • cost-benefit analysis
    • a quantification of cost required to deliver a given level of benefits
  • cost-effectiveness analysis
    • compares relative costs of programs with same target outcome

GEP 280 Populations and Samples

Notes on Populations and Samples

GEP 280 Causality

Notes on Causality

Further Reading

Here is a link to the text for this section. It has several more chapters on techniques for estimating counterfactuals.

Gertler et al, Impact Evalutaion in Practice

List of Questions

GEP 374A list of questions