Since 2009, the MIT's Energy Efficiency Strategy Project (EESP) has supported student-led research on energy efficiency as a resource strategy and its potential to create societal, economic, and carbon benefits.

As part of this project, students have collectively addressed, through research and thesis, new approaches to increasing energy efficiency. Project funds have also supported energy efficiency classes which focus on strategy innovation of utility, community, and smart grid-enabled efficiency deployment models.

An EESP objective has been to examine new efficiency program models that partner with cities and towns - methods to engage communities to save energy in their public buildings, as well as support campaigns for homes and businesses.

A focus in the last year has been on pathways to greater scale in multifamily housing, with potential community partner strategies. With NU support, a pilot program design was developed for potential implementation in the City of Cambridge, with an innovative model for non-low income, tenant occupied, smaller multifamily buildings - a large but hard-to-reach segment for efficiency.

Also, to demonstrate an extension of the US DOE/White House Green Button initiative, technology approaches were examined to evaluate a city-scale Residential Energy Map, which would apply energy data along with available other data to catalyze energy efficiency through remote energy assessments and improved data access.

Other areas of student research have included:

• Smart grid and pricing options that increase the penetration of energy efficiency
• Efficiency program designs that apply the coming Internet of Things to broaden the variety of energy efficiency program offerings.
• Campus energy efficiency strategies, including some of the elements applied to the MIT Efficiency Forward program, as well as ideas for applying a similar model to communities for their public buildings.
• Office district utility/building/office worker energy efficiency collaboration models.
• Microgrid analysis of city and utility roles in their development.
• A competition encouraging students to develop applications, providing prizes, conferences, and advisory support. climatecolab.org
• Another annual competition encourages student-led energy efficiency business ventures through a specific track of the MIT Clean Energy Prize.
• The White House/DOE Better Buildings Case Competition has been won by MIT student teams in all six cases where they have competed over the three years of the competition.