Performance evaluation of selected US utility commercial lighting demand-side management programs

This article selects 18 commercial lighting demand-side management programs of electric utilities in the United States and evaluates their performance. It first uses four conventional measures, i.e., rate impact measurement, total resource cost, total utility cost, and total customer cost, to analyze the costs and benefits of each program. Although all programs achieve good benefit to cost ratios under each measure, the rankings are not always consistent, i.e., a program's ranking in one measure is not always the same as in another measure. To provide a unified basis for comparison, we use a mathematical programming model-the data envelopment analysis (DEA) model-to integrate the results of these four conventional measures far each program. Based on the DEA results, programs of Southern California Edison, New York State Electric & Gas, and Potomac Electric Power produce the best overall performance, followed by Central Maine Power, Pacific Gas & Electric, and Central Vermont Public Service. Finally, this article discusses the implications of the DEA results, which can serve as an effective means for performance benchmarking.