Applying the Total Resource Cost Test to Conservation and Demand Management Initiatives of Local Electricity Distribution Companies in Ontario: Assessment and Recommendations for Reform
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study has its origins in my participation in the Ontario Power Authority’s Conservation and Demand Management Program Development Advisory Committee in 2006 and 2007 while serving as a Program Director with the Pembina Institute. In discussions with local electricity distribution company (LDC) staff involved in conservation and demand management (CDM) activities that served on the committee, one of the issues raised was the role of the Total Resource Cost (TRC) test in the evaluation of proposed CDM initiatives. It became apparent that the test was perceived as a significant barrier to CDM program innovation, development and delivery. \n \nThe opportunity to investigate the role of the TRC test in local utility electricity conservation and demand management activities more formally arose as a result of discussions between the Electricity Distributors Association (EDA), the York University Foundation and the Faculty of Environmental Studies. Through the LDC Future Fund the EDA kindly provided a grant for a study of the impact of the TRC test on local utility CDM initiatives. \n \nThe resulting study, presented here, recognizes the value of the TRC test in program design and evaluation. At the same time, the study identifies a number of areas where specific modifications and adjustments to the TRC test as currently applied by the Ontario Power Authority (OPA) and Ontario Energy Board (OEB) to LDC proposals for CDM initiatives could be made to encourage and facilitate such activities. More broadly, the study concludes that the most important barriers to LDC-led CDM initiatives do not lie with the TRC test and its application by the OEB and OPA per se. Rather the study finds that the most significant barriers relate to the wider regulatory and institutional framework for electricity CDM within which LDC initiatives occur and the test is applied. These types of barriers are the focus of the recommendations made here.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.015 | 0.053 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".