Abstract
Rising energy use and energy-related global greenhouse gas emissions are encouraging new national energy efficiency policies and long-term international cooperative agreements. These require on-going studies to monitor their progress; thus, substantial effort must be directed toward developing reliable evaluation methodologies. One proposed methodology that is gaining in popularity involves energy efficiency indexes. The purpose of this paper is to show that there is a fundamental shortcoming in this approach that makes it unsuitable for estimating policy impacts. This is done in two ways: first, by comparing the calculation of a percent change in energy efficiency indexes to a conventional calculation of a percent change in the level of energy use and, second, by using a Monte Carlo experiment to estimate the probability that policy impacts estimated via an energy efficiency index, even one that has been adjusted, will contain a high degree of error.
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Acknowledgment
This research was funded by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The author would like to thank Barry Brent for his analytical contributions and helpful suggestions. The author takes sole responsiblity for all errors and opinions found within.
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Horowitz, M.J. The trouble with energy efficiency indexes: la aritmetic non e opinione. Energy Efficiency 1, 199–210 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12053-008-9015-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12053-008-9015-9