The Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) takes an active role in measuring and evaluating its projects and programs. One focus of these activities is to assess whether planned technical goals were met and commercialization and market results achieved. Another is to identify opportunities to make continuous improvements in programs in order to effectively and efficiently manage public investments.
Program evaluations include:
- Merit review of proposals
- Systematic studies, conducted periodically, to assess how well a program is achieving its intended outcome goals
- Periodic reviews of a program's progress
- Special-purpose assessments of realized research and development (R&D) knowledge impacts and market impacts and cost effectiveness of R&D and deployment activities
See types of evaluation for a description of the program evaluations used in EERE to quantify impacts, assess progress, and promote improvement.
This website provides EERE office leadership and their staff responsible for managing evaluation activities with resources and tools to make evaluations more useful and cost effective. It aims to help facilitate organization-wide quality improvements and coordination of evaluation activity. The website also promotes public transparency by making available the annual inventory of EERE planned and completed evaluations.
This site is not intended to make the user an expert in designing and performing evaluations. Primarily, the information provided here is designed to give program staff and other users a strong, practical background on the purposes and processes of program evaluation, to help them define and clarify their evaluation needs, to allow users to converse knowledgeably with the evaluation professionals they might employ to carry out an evaluation of their programs, and to ensure that high quality and useful evaluations are completed.
This website is organized into three major sections:
- Why, What and When to Evaluate – Provides you with information on "Why" it is useful to conduct program evaluations and describes some of the important considerations for determining "What" and "When" to evaluate. Additionally, this section provides access to information on the types of evaluation most-applicable to you.
- Planning and Conducting Evaluations – Outlines "how-to" steps for planning and conducting evaluations for peer reviews, general program evaluations, and benefit-cost impact evaluations.
- Evaluation Information Resources – Provides relevant resources that will help you prepare and manage a program evaluation. This section includes reports, evaluation examples, guides, links, forms, and other information that will help you in the process.