EnergyStar has nothing to do with "modernizing the grid". It is, however, why any new dishwasher in the US takes like 4 hours to finish a load, unless you put it into non-bureaucratic mode. Meanwhile, we're driving energy consumption into the stratosphere with datacenters full of completely unregulated [1] GPUs that are mining scamcoins and generating incorrect search results.

The usual libertarian point applies here: just because the government stops doing X doesn't mean that you automatically get less X.

Particularly in the case of EnergyStar, I think it's well into the tail of diminishing returns on investment -- manufacturers don't have any incentive to start producing power-guzzling appliances when power costs are increasing. Its the sort of program that sounds good in theory, and maybe made sense at one point, but doesn't hold up to scrutiny.

[1] I'm not arguing for regulation on GPUs...just pointing out that EnergyStar isn't touching the currently important part of the problem.