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
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