Benefits to the Weatherization Assistance Program’s Energy Efficiency Investments Four Times the Costs
The Department of Energy (DOE) has since released 36 documents (here and here), totaling 4,446 pages, evaluating WAP. The boldly stated conclusion of the evaluation is that the benefits of the investments are four times the costs.
https://energyathaas.wordpress.com/2015/10/06/weatherization-assistance-program/
We have spent many hours poring over these opaque documents. Our judgment is that many of the DOE’s conclusions are based on dubious assumptions, invalid extrapolations, the invention of a new formula to measure benefits that does not produce meaningful results, and no effort to evaluate statistical significance. Using the DOE’s findings, we show below that costs exceed energy savings by a significant margin.