Decarbosaurus Clomps into Charlotte: Our reflections on the 2025 ACEEE Summer Study on Energy Efficiency in Industry

We always look forward to the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy’s (ACEEE)’s Summer Study on Energy Efficiency in Industry conference, and this year did not disappoint. 

Two weeks ago, a group of Cascade employee-owners attended the biannual conference in Charlotte, North Carolina to learn from other leaders in the industry and to share some of what we’ve been up to since the last conference.  

This year’s theme was Industrial Competitiveness and the Evolving Energy Landscape, and the panel presentations throughout the conference touched on all aspects of this theme – from navigating risk to taking advantage of new opportunities and leaving everyone with a greater network with which to lean on to build a stronger, more efficient industrial sector. 

“The conference was a valuable opportunity to strengthen working relationships with Cascade colleagues and to build new connections with utilities, evaluators, and fellow decarbonization consultants,” said Sierra Landaiche, Cascade SEM Coach II. “I especially appreciated the SEM Summit brainstorming sessions, where we explored both challenges and opportunities in SEM delivery. Cascade also engaged in meaningful conversations with utilities about how implementers and utilities can collaborate more effectively. As always, an SEM gathering wouldn’t be complete without a shared commitment to continuous improvement!” 

Here are some other highlights from our time this year:  

Prior to the formal start of the summer study, the Industrial Heat Pump Alliance hosted an all-day Buyer’s Bootcamp on Wednesday July 16th that featured several speakers, including Cascade’s Steve Koski, Principal Engineer. Steve discussed current real-world applications of industrial heat pumps in America and the factors companies should consider to develop a viable heat pump project of their own. Importantly, he shared, achieving decarbonization through leveraging a heat pump to replace process heating needs requires conducting a holistic assessment of facility energy and emissions and then performing heat integration through using a pinch analysis process to identify the optimal heat exchange opportunities and assess the potential role of a heat pump from there. 

On the first day of the conference, Thursday, July 17th, Cascade’s CEO Dan Brown delivered a plenary speech, shining a light on what we’re hearing from our industrial customers and forecasting how we might leverage those current challenges to achieve the energy efficiency gains needed to create a truly decarbonized industrial sector of the future.  

“I’d like to make a bold claim,” Dan said during his speech. “From our experience running big industrial energy efficiency programs around the country, if we had to double the energy savings we produce in a program, and we had four years to do it, in most places we could. And we could do it cost effectively.” 

How? To put it simply, through collaboration. The primary barriers to industrial decarbonization that we hear from our customers are organizational, cultural, and company-process-driven, not technological. The future of industry will require utilities, service providers like Cascade, regulators, and industrial companies to forge better partnerships with each other to scale progress. 

On Thursday morning, Peter Sharp, a Senior SEM Coach for Cascade, delivered a presentation on “Permanent Peak Load Shifting,” a hot topic in our current environment of unprecedented load growth and grid reliability concerns. Peter shared some case studies from his work delivering an industrial strategic energy management (SEM) program on behalf of Xcel Energy in Colorado. Through the SEM program, Peter builds strong relationships with industrial customers and leverages that trust to provide education on Xcel’s price signals, influencing them to shift their energy use outside of peak hours to save money and support grid reliability. Through this unique program, customers are incentivized for energy savings as well as peak demand reductions, offering a vision of how utility energy efficiency programs can view energy more holistically and support efficiency and demand response under the same umbrella. 

Peter shared the success of one program participant, a metal salvage company, that achieved over 1,300 kW in peak load reduction which saved over $220,000 annually on their energy bills—a 46% reduction. 

Later that day, Joshua Brugeman, Co-founder and Director of Fresh Coast Climate Solutions—the climate and sustainability team within Cascade—spoke to the crowd about transformative technologies that exist today that can drive our progress toward net zero emissions. Josh is in the business of hopeful, bold solutions, and the vision he offered the audience at ACEEE was no different. What do we need to do shift our mindset around industrial decarbonization and face this challenge head on? Three things: 

1. Rather than focusing on the cost of taking an action – through ROI or payback period – let’s ask what is the cost of inaction? What is the cost of keeping our businesses, organizations, economies, and environments resilient? And more so, what is the cost if we don’t do anything? 
2. Organizations like Cascade and Fresh Coast as well as the utilities we partner with to deliver our work need to make sure we are helping industrial companies get to no-regret decisions faster through helping them make sense of their data, engage their suppliers, scale innovation, partner across industries to make a bigger impact, and build for the long term. 
3. Be aware of the technologies available to us today to make this shift. From heat pumps to green hydrogen to micro nuclear reactors, there are technologies available today that can be deployed at scale to overcome the challenge of industrial decarbonization. 

Last but not least, we were thrilled to have the company of our Decarbosaurus at this year’s conference. As we work to mitigate the worst effects of climate change, industrial decarbonization remains a complex but powerful piece of the puzzle. Rather than dancing around the emissions impact of the industrial sector, Decarbosaurus invites us to face the challenge of industrial decarbonization head on and stop ignoring the dinosaur in the room. 

We loved connecting with everyone at the conference and hearing about how you’re driving innovation in the industrial sector.  

Let’s keep going. Reach out to us to see how we can be part of the network that helps you achieve your goals.