Verdant Associates, LLC is a woman owned and operated California small business providing objective, data-driven analysis and advisory services to utilities, government agencies, and private businesses. Our areas of expertise include distributed energy resource program evaluation, cost-effectiveness analysis, grid modernization, beneficial electrification, and decarbonization strategies. Our mission is to facilitate the transition to a resilient and equitable low carbon future through robust, transparent, actionable, and un-biased analysis.
Verdant staff have provided best-in-class consulting services in the distributed energy resource space for over 20 years. We have designed and managed some of the industry’s largest and most innovative evaluation, planning, and research efforts. We are known for the quality and innovation of our work, along with our ability to direct high-profile studies in challenging stakeholder environments. We choose to work on the world’s most difficult problems that require complex, interdisciplinary analysis. Recent examples of our work include:
- Impact evaluation analysis of the country’s largest solar PV, storage, and distributed energy resource programs including California’s Self-Generation Incentive Program (SGIP), the California Solar Initiative (CSI), and Commonwealth Edison’s energy efficiency programs.
- Verdant analysis of energy storage projects in the SGIP identified the need to restructure the program to encourage behavior that achieves greenhouse gas emission reductions.
- Analysis by Verdant staff determined that customers that installed solar under the CSI increased their electricity use, an important factor in planning for a more resilient grid.
- Outside of California, our team delivers impactful analysis of residential and nonresidential energy efficiency programs for Commonwealth Edison to help better optimize and shape some of their largest energy efficient programs.
- Building bespoke models to quantify the cost-effectiveness and cost of service impacts of net-energy-metering (NEM) tariffs and distributed energy resource programs.
- The California NEM 2.0 Lookback Study Model is a publicly available tool to quantify the utility, customer, and ratepayer benefits of California’s NEM program, along with the impacts of NEM on customer bills and the utility’s cost of service.
- Development of large-scale forecasting and load disaggregation tools to advance grid modernization initiatives.
- We have built tools and methods that allow major utilities to transform their distribution grid into an agile platform better suited to manage both the challenges and opportunities associated with new technologies.
- Market characterization and process evaluation research to uncover key industry trends and ways to improve DER program design.
- Our work on California’s Solar on Multifamily Affordable Solar Housing (SOMAH) program has identified the need to make program changes to bring about broader, equitable, and more diverse program participation.
At Verdant Associates, our people are our strength. We are economists, data scientists, engineers, and social scientists. But more importantly, we are bikers, swimmers, skiers, hikers, and parents. We seek to leave the world a better place than when we found it by working tirelessly to solve the pressing climate change issues that will define this generation.