US Energy Department ending appliance efficiency standards
energy.gov
energy.gov
Arthur Rosenfeld was the driving force behind California and US energy conservation regulations in the 1970's and early 1980's. His direct personal impact on energy cost savings in the US is unbelievable, even before you inflation convert it to modern dollars.
Disassembling an old refrigerator from before the days of those yellow stickers is a mind blowing experience. Refrigerators commonly had heater wires attached to their outer panels. Why? It was cheaper to manufacture refrigerators that had heaters on their outer panels than refrigerators that had adequate insulation (the heaters prevented the outside of the refrigerator from getting cold enough to cause water to condense on the outside of the refrigerator). It was cheaper to make them with heater wires, but unbelievably more expensive to run them that way. Consumers paid a huge price for that tiny reduction in manufacturing cost, and had no way of knowing that was happening. Those yellow stickers changed that.
Cutting waste, fraud, and abuse? Show me another individual who has come anywhere close to the direct financial savings that Rosenfeld, a PhD Physicist, delivered.
The article below primarily talks about his impact on reducing California's spending on energy, in large part because it's easier to quantify, but his impact nationally is undoubtedly much higher.
[0]https://newscenter.lbl.gov/2017/01/27/art-rosenfeld-californ...
China cannot believe its good fortune.
You can be sure China is strategizing on how to fill the leadership vacuum the US is leaving in its wake -- this just being one of many.
Standards are amazing. Blowing them up merely creates permission for bad.
“The people, not the government, should be choosing the home appliances and products they want at prices they can afford.” - you still get to choose which appliance you have in your home, but the government is there to help ensure that appliance is reliable and efficient.
I suspect that many people have the opposite experience and blame the government for inefficient and unreliable products. I most often experience and hear others complain about water efficient washing machines.
Examples I've personally experienced is that many/most driers now available require multiple attempts to get clothes actually try. Then there was the debacle of fedora enabling aggressive power saving in a difficult to disable way in updates, claiming it was mandated-- resulting in nonsense like remote hands incidents to unsuspend servers and users using TV as monitors perpetually needing to turn the TV on and off every use because TV's won't wake and the power saving functionality wasn't disclosed (if you could even figure out that this was WHY the screen kept failing-- and did so without sending a display to the landfill first).
Energy efficiency when it comes at no impact to functionality is good (at least if it pays for its own landfill burden-- many home devices have more embodied energy in their manufacture than they'll ever use) but when it has a usability impact it really ought to have a good justification or even just not happen at all because people are capable of choosing more efficient devices when it actually makes sense to do so.
(like the efficiency impact of a device run for 10 minutes a month is very very different from something that runs 24/7 and usually only the owner of the device knows the usage).
Intrusive requirements also set back environmental causes by enlisting opposition by members of the public that are harmed by them-- which could easily have a greater long term impact than the benefit of the standard. (and if it's argued that these changes have gone too far, then I'd say it's likely an example of exactly that).
Intrusive regulation makes environmental concerns into people's enemy.
Because stuff costs money everyone already has an incentive to conserve. We can enhance that though lower impact methods like disclosure, monitoring, optional eco modes that can easily be disabled.
I suspect that considering the long term impact if there is virtually any public backlash these efforts are ultimately net negative.
Meanwhile the original rules were the low-hanging fruit. Originally some products were only 50% efficient, but the modern products are 90% efficient. Energy consumption fell from 300 W to 167 W. If you ask them to trim off another 133 watts, that's a violation of the laws of physics. If you ask them for the last 17 watts that are theoretically physically possible, that's not really a thing either. At best you can trim off another 5 W by making some onerous design trade offs that aren't worth five watts.
But what are they going to do if their job is to make new rules?
You used so many heat pump dryers? They are fairly new. It sounds like you're generalising. A Indesit we had was crappy, our current Bosch 6 is fine but harder to clean the heat exchanger which had been improved in newer versions.
Consolation might be if I sell the abomination, some deranged (pun unintended) person may overpay for the nostalgia.
As for the alternative, PG&E more than doubled my electric rates, though I did get a stovetop Wolf oven, never having had an oven that was accurate. My former Breville quit one day after the warranty expired. I believe the cause was a 29 cent inline fuse buried between panels past about 30 screws holding the back on. I never found the fuse.
Can't win.
The list of specifications developed during the last administration have encouraged the sale of bathroom and kitchen faucets, residential toilets and sprinkler nozzles that just don’t work well.
I think that's been a problem since before the last administration...
Related:
There's a tradeoff here between price and quality, and the different political parties have different preferences for what should be allowed.
Obviously they're going to talk about the benefits and not the downsides of a particular choice, but that hardly strikes me as 1984.
Trump wants to bring back incandescent lightbulbs. And burn more coal.
Even if you disagree with that for some reason, it doesn't really affect my point. It's a tradeoff and they want different rules about what options on the tradeoff curve are valid.
It has nothing to do with quality tradeoff curves.
You don't even have to do a lot of critical thinking to get this; Trump has made it pretty clear.
So do you think the claim that it's cheaper to build to looser standards is a lie, or do you think cheaper appliances did not play any role in motivating this order and only came up after the fact?
I'm pretty sure at least one of those has to be true for your claim to be true, and I'm quite skeptical of both.
(If you said it was mostly about climate change spite I'd be a lot more likely to believe you.)
That's not what the government title claimed though. They claim cheaper prices. You likely know, cheaper production prices don't necessarily lead to cheaper consumer prices. Moreover, often reduced quality/efficiency actually results in higher lifetime costs, something which is often difficult to ascertain for consumers (one reason for regulations).
I do think the promise of cheaper appliances in indeed a cover for the primary target: rolling back climate change related regulation. Remember Trump’s first term? He spent a lot of effort trying to undo whatever Obama had done , not because of the benefits but just because. You cannot underestimate how retaliatory Trump is.
But more specifically Trump has repeatedly made clear his disdain for climate change measures and climate science. What do you think “drill baby drill” is all about? Cheaper gas? Petroleum (coming out of the ground) is already about as cheap as it can get to profitable pump.
Check this out from today’s NYT:
> One discipline that has been targeted more specifically is climate science. President Trump has long downplayed the threats from human-caused global warming. At the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, staff members have been ordered to comb their research awards for terms including “climate science,” “climate crisis,” “clean energy” and “pollution.”
Don't get me wrong, being an electrical engineer, doing a lot of DIY repair, and taking note of what goes into appliances I've got zero faith in manufacturers to come up with more efficient solutions on their own. But at a certain point the ever-advancing regulations stopped being productive as well. You can only switch to ECM/brushless motors one time.
(Also a meta issue - if the actions of the Trump administration were limited to only executive branch domestic policies like this, we could at least readjust in four years)
I actually don't think companies will go backwards on improvements they've already adopted. The mechanism I see is a reluctance to spend design time on changing things (ie keep selling the same old shit), rather than pure cost optimization with newer technologies costing more.
I'd say a big cause of the problem here is the handwavey nature of regulations focusing on "high level" goals like efficiency and expecting that engineers can magically find it somewhere [0], rather than more direct things like "all appliance motors that consume more than 5% of the energy used by the appliance must be brushless ECM"
[0] similarly, see the repeated calls for magical encryption backdoors that don't weaken security
> the Department of Energy will postpone the implementation of seven of the Biden-Harris administration’s restrictive mandates on home appliances.
> Today’s actions postpone the efficiency standards for the following home appliance rules:
I honestly don't know if they are suspending new fuel efficiency requirements or all requirements for the given appliances.
Titled when I wrote this comment is: "US Energy Department ending appliance efficiency standards"
All the press release mentions is that they are not moving forward on new standards that Biden was pushing for while he was in office. Existing energy efficiency standards for appliances are still in effect.
From the link: "will postpone the implementation of seven of the Biden-Harris administration’s restrictive mandates on home appliances.'
It doesn't say they're ending "all" standards, which is what you're implying.
So you can drop the "flagging for lying".
The title definitely sounds like they're wholesale removing them.
The title is very deceptive.
The only part of the article that explained what was done states: "Today’s actions postpone the efficiency standards for the following home appliance rules:"
Would a title of "US energy department indefinitely postpones efficiency standards for home appliances" sound less deceptive to you?
This is a very odd take. The title is based on the only part of the article that isn't PR fluff and describes what was done:
> Today’s actions postpone the efficiency standards for the following home appliance rules:
Central Air Conditioners
Clothes Washers and Dryers
General Service Lamps
Walk-In Coolers and Freezers
Gas Instantaneous Water Heaters
Commercial Refrigeration Equipment
Air CompressorsYou wrote "ending appliance efficiency standards". That is a bad title.
I think "new" would make sense and I accidentally conflated them also writing about the EPA rolling back *existing* standards for other appliances in this article.
"Today’s actions postpone the efficiency standards for the following home appliance rules:"
That sure sounds like they are suspending all standards, but it's poorly written so who knows if that's what they actually meant.
No it doesn't. 'Postpone' and 'suspend' are two entirely different things.