Minnesota Municipal Utilities Association

Energy Efficiency and Renewables Information

Bob Jagusch is MMUA’s Director of Energy Services. Jagusch has a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering and a master’s degree in nuclear engineering.

Among his duties as MMUA Director of Energy Services, Jagusch will serve as an additional liaison for municipal electric and gas utilities to state government; educate municipal utilities on energy efficiency requirements and related issues; and assist municipal utilities in compliance and development of effective energy efficiency programs.

Jagusch recently represented municipal utilities on the Minnesota Climate Change Action Group and the Midwest Governor’s Association climate change task force.

Jagusch was formerly the Director of Public Utilities in Mora.

Prior to beginning his career with municipal utilities, Jagusch served in the U.S. Navy from 1980 to 2001. He held numerous positions during his Navy career, and was a Qualified Submarine Warfare Officer, a Qualified Surface Warfare Officer, a Certified Reactor Plant Engineering Officer, a Certified Radiation Safety Officer and a Nuclear Engineering Officer.

“We are pleased and excited to have a person of Bob’s caliber join the MMUA team,” said MMUA Executive Director Jack Kegel. “Bob has the experience, technical skills, and leadership ability to help our public power systems develop and implement first rate energy efficiency and conservation programs.”

Jagusch’s work promises to save millions of dollars

Little legislative ground has been fought over more in the last 18 years than Minnesota’s energy Conservation Improvement Program (CIP).

From a 1991 law which required electric utility spending of one percent of gross annual revenues to today’s aggressive energy savings requirement, municipal utilities have often struggled to reach the ever-changing and increasingly stringent mandate.

In 2007, after being outgunned for years in an increasingly significant legislative and regulatory arms race, MMUA hired Bob Jagusch, formerly manager of Mora Municipal Utilities. Along with utility experience, Jagusch brought to the job a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering and a master’s in nuclear engineering and over 20 years of experience in the U.S. Navy.

One immediate difficulty was trying to determine which hole in the dike needed plugging first. An obvious area of involvement came in the state’s effort to develop an energy “deemed savings database.”

MMUA’s efforts to correct mistakes in this database “promise to save municipal utility customers millions of dollars each year,” said MMUA Executive Director Jack Kegel.

How is that?

Like most government programs, CIP requires reporting. Only this reporting is especially complicated—various utilities around the state were using their own calculations on expected energy savings from various conservation projects.

A number of states have developed databases, to organize measures for evaluation purposes. New York, for instance, tracks 457 energy efficiency measures and assigns ‘deemed values’ for kWh, kW (summer peak), MMBtu and water savings to each one. New York also quantifies the expected life of various efficiency measures and assigns incremental cost values. Energy savings assumptions are based on this data

In Minnesota, policymakers, regulators and utilities all agreed the CIP reporting process would be simplified by development of the deemed savings database. In calculating energy savings for future reporting, all utilities will be required to use this database, which would bring order to formerly conflicting and uneven savings values attributed to identical measures.

Regulators in the Minnesota Office of Energy Security want the database to support utility program evaluation reviews. Utilities want the database to support their program implementation staff.

“This was an obvious project to get involved with,” Jagusch said. “Energy services people from the utilities won’t have to go into these depths. This will be the data behind their programs. We’re doing this stuff behind the scenes so they can manage their programs locally.”

All parties agree that the deemed savings values should be integrated into program tracking databases to ensure consistency.

As with many good ideas, turning this desire into reality has proven to be more difficult than anticipated.

Minnesota’ database effort started several years ago when the OES, as part of a regulatory docket (No. E, G999/CIP-06-1591) convened a number of meetings to discuss the database with stakeholders and various consultants. Eventually, the state hired a contractor to supply a database.

So far, so good, until utility representatives, including MMUA’s Jagusch, peered into the inner workings of the database.

“Much of the data used was borrowed from other parts of the country and would severely understate the savings available in Minnesota, in some cases by as much as two-thirds,” said Jagusch.

This was pointed out to OES staff.

“They wisely said, let’s sit down and talk about it,” Jagusch said.

Out of those discussions came the informal appointment of about a dozen people, including Jagusch, to go through the database topic by topic. The review process started in December. It has proven more difficult than most people anticipated.

“I really don’t know when we’ll be done,” Jagusch said. “I thought we would be done with lighting by now, but there are just more and more and more questions.”

More difficult issues lie ahead.

The deemed savings database deals with gross impacts only and includes no deemed “free ridership” or market effects factors. There has been a commitment from legislators to consider such savings in the future, however. Inclusion of these very real but hard to quantify savings could go a long way toward showing progress toward meeting energy savings goals.

Also, once the database is complete, plug and play reports could be developed to simplify utility reporting requirements. An effort to develop these reports is underway.

When this day comes, and a municipal utility keys in its program data into the state database, they will have had a representative involved in setting the data behind the numbers.

MMUA and Jagusch have already played a part in several significant CIP victories. One allows a utility to carry forward energy savings in excess of 1.5 percent a year to the succeeding three calendar years.

The law also now provides that savings from electric utility infrastructure projects may be carried forward for five years.

“These savings carryover provisions can save municipal utilities a lot of money over the years,” pointed out MMUA Executive Director Jack Kegel. “Having a credible expert on staff that can provide solid data in support of our arguments for change has been the real key to our success.”


	Minnesota Municipal Utilities Association 3025 Harbor Lane North, Suite 400 - Plymouth, MN 55447-5142 Tel: 763-551-1230 - Fax: 763-551-0459