Energy Use in Buildings
Advanced Thermostat Evaluation (Cal-EPE HUB Project)
With few rigorous product evaluations to inform purchasing decisions, large commercial and institutional customers face enormous uncertainty and high costs associated with purchasing advanced energy efficiency, renewable distributed energy generation and energy storage products (collectively defined as distributed energy resource (DER) products).
The Energy and Efficiency Institute at UC Davis is developing the Empower Procurement Product Evaluation Hub to evaluate selected DER products in a rigorous and transparent manner, and to disseminate widely evaluation results to large commercial and institutional customers that use a formal procurement process.
Existing third-party resources do not typically provide information on specific products, nor do they allow for side-by-side comparisons of similar products or provide all of the information consumers need to make informed buying decisions. Relying on manufacturers’ studies is also problematic given the potential biases in such studies. There is little incentive for market actors to fill this gap, which hinders the diffusion of promising DER products on a large scale.
