I can't help but feel that this article is burying the lede. According to FERC, Home Depot sold 'Environmental Attributes' to America Efficient, not mere sales data. 'Environmental Attributes' are intrinsic to the energy saving device, and it should not be possible to sell them separately without a contract with the consumers. Therefore, Home Depot themselves would appear to be heavily implicated - but the possibility is not discussed.
The energy savings were sold by HD twice - once to the customer (who pays a premium for less energy usage, and may also have claimed federal tax credits), and once more to America Efficient (who sold them to the state / grid operator non-profits).
It's an interesting kind of subsidy arbitrage - since businesses can benefit from subsidies that consumers cannot, it creates an incentive to carve out the subsidy-granting-essence from consumers sales and sell them on in aggregate.
The article didn't do a good job of explaining why the agreement between Home Depot and America Efficient is dubious. The business model does seem very suspicious, but also so does the whole market they are engaged in. Why is my utility company wasting money on auctioned efficiency data? Why don't the manufacturers share this with the utility companies for the common good of everyone? Why doesn't Home Depot make an offer to sell this data directly to the utility company? Why would anyone want to bid on this data? Why create that middle man?
The whole thing sounds like late-stage capitalist hogwash. This all seems very inconsequential except to make a bunch of rich people richer.
> Why is my utility company wasting money on auctioned efficiency data?
If you lower the energy demand on the grid then you lower the price that the grid needs to pay by a lot.
Grids tend to take in bids from power companies of Volume + Price and then pick enough Volume (at the lowest Price first) until they get to the expected Volume and then payout to those winning bidders the Price of the last needed Volume. If you can decrease the Volume then the total price paid by the grid goes down.
If sharing some of that energy savings with another entity it's still a win-win because you're overall paying less.
It's like hiring a tax account where they get paid 50% of whatever taxes they save you. It's a win-win until they start committing tax fraud.
The energy savings were sold by HD twice - once to the customer (who pays a premium for less energy usage, and may also have claimed federal tax credits), and once more to America Efficient (who sold them to the state / grid operator non-profits).
It's an interesting kind of subsidy arbitrage - since businesses can benefit from subsidies that consumers cannot, it creates an incentive to carve out the subsidy-granting-essence from consumers sales and sell them on in aggregate.