Editorial policy

Last updated 2026-08-08

Sourcing

Every article carries three to five links to primary sources, visible at the foot of the page and functional. A primary source here means the body that produced the information: a federal agency, a national laboratory, a standards organization, a regulator, or a utility's own filed tariff.

Three rules follow from that:

1. No blogs citing blogs. If the only support for a claim is a marketing article that cites another marketing article, the claim does not appear.
2. If a figure has no linkable source, the sentence is rewritten without the figure. Not hedged, not attributed to "industry estimates" — removed. A sentence that needs an invented number to work was not worth writing.
3. The link goes to the document, not to a summary of it. Where a regulator publishes both, the article links the regulator.

The recurring sources across this library are the Department of Energy, the Energy Information Administration, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, ENERGY STAR, ASHRAE, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the state utility commissions, the regional transmission organizations and the Internal Revenue Service.

Publication dates

This is a small point that a lot of sites get wrong, so it is written down.

Dates on this site are real. The published date on an article is the date that article was first deployed. Nothing is backdated. Nothing is staggered across previous months to simulate a publishing history that did not happen.

The launch batch was published on a single day, which is what happens when a new site launches, and every article in it carries that date. An updated date appears only when an article has genuinely been revised, and it can never precede publication. The dates in the structured data are the same dates shown on the page — generated from one source, so they cannot drift apart.

After launch the cadence is at most three new articles a week, with true dates.

What is in every article

• A single element of original value: a comparison table, a fully worked calculation, an explanatory diagram, a checklist or a cost model. Not a rewrite of a definition.
• Three to five outbound links to primary sources.
• Three to six links to other articles here, so that no piece is a dead end and nothing is orphaned.
• A frequently-asked-questions section where the questions are ones readers actually arrive with.
• A named author with a stated role and a stated competence.

What the author is qualified to say

Stated plainly on the about page, and repeated here because it matters: the author's background is administration and finance — cost analysis, TCO and ROI modeling, and reading primary regulation and tariffs directly. The author does not operate industrial plant and holds no electrical license.

No field experience is invented. There are no anecdotes about a plant that does not exist, no "in my years on the floor", no fabricated client. Where a piece describes equipment behavior it is sourced to engineering references and it says so. Where the right answer depends on a specific site, the article says that rather than manufacturing a general rule.

What is not published, at any price

• Sponsored articles, paid placements or advertorial of any kind.
• Paid links, link exchanges or guest posts. Unsolicited drafts are deleted unread.
• Content generated to fill a keyword rather than to answer a question.
• Comparative claims about a named product that the author cannot support from a document.
• Invented statistics, invented case studies, invented quotes.

Advertising is display advertising, sold by a network, clearly labeled, and with no influence over any word on the site. The full position is in the advertising disclosure.

Corrections

When a factual claim here is wrong, it is corrected rather than quietly deleted.

Report an error to [email protected] with the page, the sentence and the source that contradicts it.

Independence

No advertiser, affiliate partner, vendor or agency sees an article before publication or has any right to. If an affiliate relationship exists for a product category discussed on this site, the advertising disclosure says so, and the article says so at the point of the recommendation.

Language and scope

American English, United States market, dollars, kilowatts and kilowatt-hours, and the United States regulatory framework. European tariff structures work differently enough that describing both in one article would produce something wrong in both markets, so this site does not try.

Accessibility

Pages are built to be readable without JavaScript. Content is never hidden by CSS alone — animations are armed by script and only for elements below the fold, so a blocked or broken script costs a fade, never an article. Color is never the only carrier of meaning in a diagram, and every image that conveys information carries a text alternative.