One of the main themes of the BAAEC project’s implementation phase has been the compounding challenges associated with the attempting to implement a set of advanced fuel-substitution and distributed energy resource measure packages within low-income, disadvantaged community households. This is in part because these households face a myriad of structural challenges to not only their participation in complex programs but also to their physical capacity to receive these types of technologically advanced systems. Generally, households like those which were targeted for participation in the AH program have a low tolerance for:

• Bearing any additional costs associated with required site remediation work
• Taking time to host multiple in-person site visits for property inspections for system design work and program eligibility verification
• Accommodating uncertainties in the long term bill impacts (e.g. risking cost increases) from installed measures

Added to these challenges facing the program’s eligible participants were other challenges facing program implementation partners seeking to deploy new technologies or implement fundamentally new business models. A detailed narrative discussion around the interplay of these forces over the course of the AH program’s implementation period is provided in the project’s Case Study report. However, it is perhaps sufficient to say here that the net effects were significant delays in the implementation of certain program measures - most specifically for the BESS - as well as reductions in the number of homes who were able to be enrolled in the program relative to levels that had initially been targeted in its conception. Both of these outcomes played important roles in our ability to derive concrete, statistically significant, findings within the scope of this EM&V analysis.

Finally, in order to better accommodate the specific needs, as well as structural barriers, facing eligible AH program participant households, the decision was taken to design the program as a suite of optional measures. While this decision was useful in accommodating potential participant households, it created fundamental comparability challenges for this type of EM&V analysis - as an already small cohort of participant households (34 total) would need to be further subdivided according to seven distinct measures packages in order to make direct, apples to apples, comparisons.