Michael Giberson
UC-Berkeley economist Catherine Wolfram has an op-ed in the Sacramento Bee advocating the state use controlled experimentation to discover with energy efficiency programs work best. As she explains, retailers are increasingly using experimentation and advanced data analysis to discover how to increase sales. Surely, she suggests, when planning to spend nearly half a billion tax dollars annually on energy efficiency California ought to devote a bit of effort into separating programs that sound good and work well from those that merely sound good.