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William Hammer Top Innovator Award for Electrification: Puget Sound Energy

Deck: 

Top Innovators

Byline: 

Gilbert Archuleta

Author Bio: 

Gilbert Archuleta represents the Clean Buildings Accelerator team at Puget Sound Energy.

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PUF’s Lori Burkhart: Describe the innovation that led to winning the William Hammer Award for Electrification, how it works, and its benefits to Puget Sound Energy?

Gilbert Archuleta: PSE has been involved with the Clean Buildings Law since the rulemaking process started in 2019. We quickly realized how much of an impact it was going to have on thousands of our customers, and that the requirements of the law weren’t something that could be understood and implemented after hearing about it once. Our experience with Strategic Energy Management programs allowed us to blend those SEM principles with the requirements of the law in order to create a program to help our customers get on their path to compliance.

PUF: What was your role in the innovation’s development?

Gilbert Archuleta: In 2021, we launched our first Accelerator cohort, and have since built out a team to help spread awareness about the program and support our customers going through the program. We continue to innovate with the program, to speed up the time to get our customers benchmarking, experimenting with sector-based cohorts, and finding ways to bring equity into our recruiting strategies.

PUF: What was most rewarding for you during this project?

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Gilbert Archuleta: The most rewarding part has been the partnerships and leadership role Puget Sound Energy has been able to take. We wanted this law to be successful – so many of us in Energy Efficiency are here because we are trying to help save the planet, and reducing GHGs in buildings is one of the reasons we’re here. As Director of Customer Energy Management, being able to lead ongoing working sessions with other utilities, inviting them to share in our program design, and seeing some of them adopt the Accelerator program model, feels like it is doing the most good across the state.

We’ve also been able to deepen the engagement we have with the Department of Commerce and continue providing the utility’s perspective on how to make this law successful. Finally, we’ve been given the go-ahead to pursue awards like this one, to increase visibility of our program both locally and nationally, especially with the increase in benchmarking and building performance standards across the country. We want to share our experience with others so that folks don’t have to recreate the wheel.

 

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