E4TheFuture supports the National Standard Practice Manual and related resources.
The National Standard Practice Manual is a product of the National Energy Screening Project (NESP), a multi-year project guided by an Advisory Committee and coordinated and funded primarily by E4TheFuture. A focus on energy equity has emerged, as jurisdictions increasingly center equity in their distributed energy resource (DER) programs, affirming the importance of equity in decision-making tools and understanding how BCAs (benefit-cost analyses) address equity.
The NSPM provides a comprehensive framework for cost-effectiveness assessment of DERs. The manual provides a set of policy-neutral, non-biased, and economically-sound principles, concepts, and methodologies to support single- and multi-DER benefit-cost analysis (BCA) for: energy efficiency (EE), demand response (DR), distributed generation (DG), distributed storage (DS), and (building and vehicle) electrification. It is used by jurisdictions to help inform which resources to acquire to meet their specific policy goals and objectives.
The National Standard Practice Manual for Benefit-Cost Analysis of Distributed Energy Resources (NSPM for DERs) has a companion guide, the Methods, Tools and Resources Handbook for Quantifying DER Impacts for Benefit-cost Analysis.
The NESP also develops a range of supporting materials on the NSPM, including case studies and template tools as well as the Database of Screening Practices (DSP) which provides a comparison of current cost-effectiveness practices across the United States.
