Great Home Energy Magazine HPwES article.

Great article.  I think Courtney Moriarta may be one of the brilliant original designers of Comprehensive Home Performance:

Home Energy Magazine - Home Performance with Energy Star :: Home Pe...

Hopefully the current obsession with "cost effectiveness" will soon be replaced with focus on Comprehensive again.

I love John Tooley's comment: "I envision a day when customer success will be valued higher than what we think they need."

I wish "quality modelling and quality design" would become standard part of our lexicon. Its painfully missing in Mike Roger's comment: "...what an audit, quality installation, test-out, and quality inspection look like.).

When an important piece of a pie goes repeatedly unacknowledged, those who know better can forget and those who don't know never learn its importance.  It seems missed opportunity to wait until 100's of contractors (and 1000's more homeowners) jobs are shown to be failures, then performing failure analysis, to arrive at the obvious conclusion that these two parts of the process are significant.

I suspect lack of emphasis on accurate modeling and thoughtful comprehensive design (combined with incentive to exaggerate with no accountability counterbalance) are primary cause for the tragically poor ability of NY HPwES to deliver on promise thus far:

http://bit.ly/2007NYSERDAhpwesresults - (the most recent report I could find has program realization at .38, see appendix page 13)

Rick Gerardi's contractor registry, once built, will teach us a lot about good and bad practices, and which contractors can and can't deliver on savings promises.

http://bit.ly/gerardihpregistry

I predict dismissing the importance of accurate modeling and thoughtful design will prove to be very important piece missing for those shown as unable to deliver.  Seems a shame not to correct course NOW in anticipation of the day technology will provide results transparency, rather than wait until the day of the parade to realize it's abundantly clear the emperor suit is thin air.