Dive Brief:

• Businesses would have paid $330 billion more in energy costs over the past decade if federal energy efficiency standards weren’t in place, according to an analysis by the Appliance Standards Awareness Project.
• The energy-efficiency advocacy organization’s analysis looks at the impact of conservation policies enacted from 1987 to 2007. “These standards have kept utility bills far lower than they would have been,” said Joanna Mauer, deputy director of ASAP.
• The group is using its findings to call out efforts by Congress and the Trump administration to roll back the standards that the Department of Energy administers. “Rollbacks are completely misguided, especially at a time when bills are already unaffordable for many people,” said Mauer. 

Dive Insight:

Early energy efficiency standards were established in the Energy Policy and Conservation Act of 1975, which Congress passed during the global energy crisis. In 1987, in an effort to put a floor under the patchwork of efficiency standards for appliances that states were passing at the time, Congress passed the National Appliance Energy Conservation Act. 

The impact of these and the other energy efficiency laws, including the Energy Policy Act of 1992, the Energy Policy Act of 2005 and the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007, are still paying dividends today, the ASAP report says. 

Last year, for example, had the standards not been in place, electricity consumption would have been 14% higher, summer peak energy demand would have been 115 GW higher, an additional 143,000 tons of nitrogen oxides would have been emitted into the air and an additional 1.5 trillion gallons of water would have been used — equivalent to 16% of total residential water use for the year. 

“The benefits of efficiency standards will increase in the years ahead as more appliances and equipment are replaced with models meeting newer standards,” the report says. 

These improvements are at risk, though, says the group. Among other things, Congress is moving a bill through the House of Representatives that would prevent DOE from setting an appliance standard if the additional upfront cost it would impose would not be paid back within three years. It would also prohibit DOE from updating a standard if it would save less than 0.3 quadrillion Btu of energy and reduce energy or water use by less than 10%. And it would eliminate a regular review cycle that DOE uses to update its standards based on technological advances.

These changes “would give President Trump new powers to attack efficiency standards for appliances and equipment [and] set new roadblocks for future administrations trying to update standards,” ASAP says in a critique of the bill.  

DOE is going down its own track to roll back standards. In one of its first initiatives after President Trump took office last year, it proposed revoking 17 appliance standards as part of a broader deregulation push. The agency called it “the first step in the Energy Department’s largest deregulatory effort in history” when it announced the proposed changes.    

Rollback efforts are coming from others as well. The American Gas Association and other groups representing gas interests are trying to stop a standard from taking effect that would effectively ban the sale of non-condensing natural gas furnaces because they’re less efficient than available alternatives. If the standards take effect, that would mean businesses and consumers, when they replace their existing furnace, would either have to retrofit with a condensing gas furnace or switch to an electric system, both of which are more efficient than non-condensing furnaces but would impose costs on property owners. 

The groups last week filed a request with the U.S. Supreme Court to stop the standard from taking effect. The Court hasn’t yet said whether it will hear the case.  

To help make its case that the standards should stay in effect, ASAP in its report breaks down the cost savings from all of DOE’s standards by state. The savings between 2016 and 2025 for businesses in California, for example, was $40.6 billion. In Alaska, it was $1 billion. 

“If the efforts from Congress and the administration to weaken the standards succeed … businesses could see significant increases in costs,” Mauer said.