Priority Solutions for Energy Efficiency

California’s energy system faces a complex set of challenges: improving affordability, ensuring grid safety and reliability in the face of electrification, and achieving ambitious climate goals. Although Energy Efficiency has been prioritized since 2003 and has saved Californians over $100 billion in utility bills since the 1970s, today’s EE portfolio is burdened by administrative barriers that increase costs and slow deployment.

The Cal TF Staff “State of EE in California” assessment examined recent concerning trends and challenges in the CPUC-Regulated EE Portfolio.

In response, the California Technical Forum (Cal TF) convened stakeholders across the energy landscape in 2024—including regulators, utility staff, EE program managers, and market actors—to identify core barriers and develop focused solutions to revitalize EE in California.

The Energy Efficiency (EE) Priorities aim to accelerate and streamline cost-effective deployment of energy efficiency in California to reduce customers’ energy bills, support grid management, improve the affordability of the clean energy transition, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

  1. Clear Rules, Reasonably Applied: Develop a central, public statewide Rulebook Library and ensure rules are clear, up-to-date and applied reasonably, consistently, and prospectively.

  2. Streamline and Standardize EE: Standardize and streamline requirements, processes, and systems that increase costs and time invested without providing commensurate value.

  3. Design for Customer and Market Needs: Establish policies and processes that remove barriers and encourage customers and market actors to deploy more EE projects.

  4. Realign EE Savings Calculations: Report calculated EE savings that are aligned with customer bill savings and that reflect impact on the state’s electric grid or gas system.

  5. Reform Customer Eligibility: Establish simple and objective rules to clarify when customers and projects are eligible for technical and financial support to invest in EE.

Read the full Technical Position Paper (TPP).

Next Steps: Cal TF will continue stakeholder engagement to refine and advance these solutions. Implementation efforts will begin in 2025 in collaboration with key partners including: Regulators, Investor-Owned Utilities (IOUs), Publicly-Owned Utilities (POUs), Community Choice Aggregators (CCAs), Regional Energy Networks (RENs), Market actors and solution providers

Contact: caltf@futee.biz