A look behind the scenes at EVO-world.org

Hello fellow EVO members,

My name is Nathan Shetterley. I am the Executive Director at ENER21, an energy efficiency management firm based in Québec City, that has based a considerable part of it's business model on M&V and more specifically IPMVP. A little less then a year ago now John Cowan asked me to join the newly formed website committee, I accepted. Now as you may have noticed we are moving forward full speed with some of the change that we have been looking forward to, including this blog.

I thought it would be a good idea to start things off with a post on who we are the users of EVO-world.org, I hope you'll enjoy this bit of behind the scenes information, and hopefully it will help you spread the word about IPMVP, EVO and M&V in your local area.

Most of the statistics and detailed information you find in this post is from Google Analytics, if you run a webpage and don't already use it, I suggest you check it out. You'll notice from the heat map (top right) that most of our visitors to the webpage are coming from Canada and the USA. We'll go into more detail about these to places and why I think that is in a moment. I'd like to first take a look at the partial list of all our visitors around the world. These numbers are from the beginning of 2008 until today. Not to bad if I do say so myself.

Country/Territory.		Visits	Pages/Visit.	% New Visits.
1.	United States	2,254	3.29	75.78%
2.	Canada	1,085	2.98	71.80%
3.	France	286	3.43	69.93%
4.	Thailand	266	9.18	15.41%
5.	Bulgaria	234	5.39	3.42%
6.	India	155	3.41	58.71%
7.	United Kingdom	110	3.02	77.27%
8.	China	92	4.34	67.39%
9.	Brazil	77	3.65	64.94%
10.	Germany	55	4.20	80.00%
11.	Italy	54	4.74	81.48%
12.	Taiwan	52	5.12	57.69%
13.	Croatia	51	2.90	80.39%
14.	Australia	50	2.76	56.00%
15.	Belgium	41	3.39	63.41%
16.	Spain	34	3.62	70.59%
17.	Singapore	34	3.68	91.18%
18.	Hong Kong	32	2.88	71.88%
19.	Malaysia	32	1.56	81.25%
20.	Portugal	30	3.43	60.00%

I am personally proud to have Canada in second place, and I'll show you why.

71.80% of the page hits in Canada are new visitors and most of the page hits coming from Canada are coming from Québec. Toronto and Ottawa aren't far behind.

If we compare that with the best performing state in the US which is California we see that most of the page hits are coming from the San Fransisco area.

Asking my self why these 3 places (Québec, Ontario, and California) seems to be epicenters of EVO-world.org and IPMVP use, I respond with the seeming obvious answer that the people I

work with that are most involved with EVO, including myself (I'm based in Québec City, but travel often to Montréal) are :

• Pierre Langlois, Québec City
• John Cowan, Toronto
• Steve Kromer, Alameda

Minus Pierre, these are the members of the current website committee thus we have a vested interested in talking up the site. As with our website commitee, I believe that these hotbeds of M&V are created by our active member. I would bet that if you map out the other board members you would see a correlation with website use. If you'd like to know what the use in your city is, leave a comment and I'll reply with the results.

It seems that to date our "product" IPMVP is responding more to "old school" marketing then the new wave of the Internet marketing. John, Steve, and I at the website committee are hoping to start moving that trend towards the Internet one website functionality or blog post at a time, yet it seems that being out in the market place doing real projects with IPMVP and knocking on doors has brought us this far.

I'm interested to see what other people are doing around the world with IPMVP. Pierre and I in Québec city have attacked the market in two ways, exposing the provincial government to the protocol and it's advantages while also taking it directly to the market with early adopters including some brave ESCos.

What successes and or difficulties have you experienced with IPMVP in your local market place?

--
Nathan Shettelrey
Website committee member

del.icio.us Tags: EVO,analytics,marketing

Welcome Note from John Cowan

Welcome to the newest tool for discussion within the energy efficiency community. We are a large community but not well formed. Every energy user (who isn’t?) should be part of the EE community.
I'm John and I'll be one of the hosts of this blog. EVO hopes this blog will be a place where the community can raise and discuss issues that arise in the practice of valuing efficiency projects. I am sure intelligence lies out there in the M&V community that can benefit us all. EVO is listening to the community to help EVO chart its course.

So, having been around the world on M&V topics, I have heard many common themes that may be worthy of discussion. They range from the very general to the very specific. Here’s just a sampling:

How did utilities measure the effects of Earth Hour?
How long do you have to measure to report savings that adhere to IPMVP?
How can I use IPMVP in evaluating my area wide utility energy efficiency program?
IPMVP needs to be customized for the situation in my country
Under IPMVP Option B, do I have to continuously measure energy or can I take spot readings.
I don’t have a three year energy history. Can I still use IPMVP Option C?
Is there a less expensive way to ‘measure’ savings than following IPMVP?
How can I be sure the M&V Plan proposed by my ESCO adheres to IPMVP?
What do you have to do to get the LEED New Construction M&V point?
How do I prepare my energy savings report for a carbon trade?
Let’s start with number 1, unless something else is burning you more.

On Saturday, March 29, 2008, Earth Hour invited people around the world to turn off their lights for one hour – from 8:00pm to 9:00pm in their local time zone. On this day, cities around the world, including Copenhagen, Chicago, Melbourne, Dubai and Tel Aviv, held events to acknowledge their commitment to energy conservation. And what a grand global demand response test that voluntary blackout created! Though everyone may be interested in how much was saved, the EVO community is probably more interested in how you measured it. So let us know:

How you chose your reference period.
How you adjusted your reference period for March 29th conditions.
How you measured load over the hour.
What if anything you did about snap back load after 9PM.
Whether you attempted to measure the energy effect as well as the demand - i.e., was load just shifted or did the load just vaporize - not occurring before 8PM or after 9PM?
How you determined how much voluntary curtailment by some simply allowed the servicing of other unmet load during the hour.

 

del.icio.us Tags: Earth Hour,M&V

Welcome to the EVO Blog!

EVO’s online discussion forums, formerly only for EVO Subscribers, have morphed into a blog for the public. We plan regular articles from EVO insiders (and outsiders who meet our editorial guidelines) to inspire discussion on M&V topics. This should generate more and better conversation for the benefit of the M&V community, including Subscribers. Available Soon!