Market Transformation: A Special Issue of energy Services Journal

At some point in the early 1990s, a change began to occur in the way many demand-side management professionals thought about how to achieve greater energy efficiency in society. Instead of focusing on encouraging individual utility customers to adopt energy efficient measures, they began to see their ultimate objective as permanently removing the market barriers impeding measure adoption, and thus improving the fundamental structure and functioning of energy efficiency markets. Over the course of several years, this basic change in perspective came to be known as market transformation. This issue of the Energy Services Journal reviews the current thinking and experience in the area of market transformation by canvassing the past experience of utilities and government agencies in attempting to transform energy efficiency markets; reviewing a number of important new initiatives; and exploring some of the planning and evaluation issues raised by this new policy objective.