Dive Brief:

• The U.S. Department of Energy testified to Congress yesterday in support of a bill that would reverse a 20-year law effectively banning the sale of most incandescent light bulbs on efficiency grounds.
• “Why would we centrally plan which lighting technologies people can use?” Alex Fitzsimmons, associate deputy secretary at the U.S. Department of Energy, said at a Senate Energy and Natural Resources committee hearing Sept. 16. “Yes, in general, we should have more efficient technologies. But our principle has been, if that comes at the expense of regulating a product out of the market that some consumers want, then that we don’t support.”
• Fitzsimmons also said the agency supports the Energy Efficiency Reform Act, S. 5338, introduced in August, that would codify strict limits that DOE has proposed for imposing energy efficiency requirements on commercial and residential appliances. “Its not always the case that a stronger standard is the better standard,” Fitzsimmons said. 

Dive Insight:

President George W. Bush signed the Energy Independence and Security Act into law in 2007, which directed DOE to require general-use lightbulbs meet minimum lumens per watt and greater efficiency standards, effectively eliminating the sale of most common incandescent bulbs over time and paving the way for widespread use of LED bulbs.  

At the hearing, Fitzsimmons said DOE’s policy priority is to balance its authority to impose efficiency standards with preservation of consumer choice. In the case of light bulbs, it supports a bill introduced last year by Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, the “Liberating Incandescent Technology Act,” or LIT Act, S. 1568, that would reverse the efficiency standard on bulbs that the 2007 law mandates.  

“We’ve got these [LED] lights that are a lot more expensive [and] can’t perform all of the same functions that an incandescent light bulb can,” Lee said at the hearing. “So, the debate here is not about whether good things can happen from LED lights. There are. It’s not about whether we should have efficient light bulbs. We should. And we do…. The question is if they’re right for every job, so much so that the federal government should feel confident that we’ve done the right thing by just banning the incandescent light bulb?” Lee is the chair of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee. 

Should the law be reversed, the only manufacturers capable of supplying incandescent bulbs are likely to be outside the United States, Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, D-Nev., said at the hearing.  

“The infrastructure needed to manufacture incandescent light bulbs has been dismantled, repurposed and restarting that production would not make economic sense,” said Cortez Masto, basing her remarks on industry concerns shared with her. “If we don’t have manufacturing here, then where does it come from? Are we getting these from China? Are we opening the door to China manufacturing … while we’re trying to bring manufacturing back here?”

“We support domestic manufacturing as well,” Fitzsimmons said. “If there are unfair trade practices, dumping cheap products in the market, violating trade rules, there are remedies.”

The Appliance Standards Awareness Project, or ASAP, says the 2007 law played a role in the development of low-cost, high-quality LEDs that today use at least 75% less energy than incandescents and last longer. “LEDs quickly pay off any increase in upfront costs and save consumers money,” the energy efficiency advocacy group says in a fact sheet. 

On the Energy Efficiency Reform Act, which Lee introduced to limit DOE’s ability to impose efficiency standards to cases where savings meet a concrete threshold, Fitzsimmons said it would be a trade issue, just as it is with light bulbs, if the law led to a flood of cheap imported appliances. 

Manufacturers and others have argued that any lowering of appliance standards would trigger foreign imports, because U.S. manufacturers have already retooled their processes to meet higher standards.

Resolutions that Congress passed last year to prevent DOE from applying its Energy Star standards to some commercial refrigerators and freezers, for example, put domestic manufacturers at a competitive disadvantage, some manufacturing and energy efficiency groups argued at the time. 

“Some large foreign factories could tweak and redirect products they make today for countries with weak or even non-existent standards to the U.S. market,” Andrew deLaski, ASAP’s executive director, said last year. “Domestic manufacturers could be the ones most disadvantaged.”

At the hearing, Fitzsimmons said these kinds of issues are outside DOE’s area. “Trade issues should be addressed through trade remedies and trade policies that are in the jurisdiction of other agencies, not the appliance standards program,” he said. “The appliance standards program is designed to increase energy efficiency, and also balance consumer choice, so our guiding principle here is consumer choice. So, if these groups are concerned about trade issues, there are other avenues to address the trade aspects.”

The Energy Efficiency Reform Act, if enacted, would codify a proposal from DOE earlier this year that would change how it decides when to impose energy efficiency standards on commercial and residential appliances. In one of the critical changes, it would impose a standard only if it delivers at least 2 quadrillion Btu of full-fuel-cycle energy savings over a period of time or saves at least 10% of the energy that existing versions of the appliances use. Currently, there’s no threshold for when new standards are set. 

Critics say this and other changes will create a structural roadblock to the agency’s ability to impose standards and would have prevented, had they been in effect, many of the energy savings that have been realized over the years. 

A commercial water heater standard that DOE set in 2023 to take effect this year, for example, wouldn’t have been allowed under the proposed changes even though it’s expected to save $149 million annually over 30 years, deLaski told Facilities Dive in July. 

“Many of the energy-efficiency standards on the books today” would not be allowed, he said.

The LIT Act has half a dozen sponsors. The Energy Efficiency Reform Act has no sponsors other than Lee. 

The Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers is among the groups that have released statements in support of the Energy Efficiency Reform Act.

“The natural next step is for Congress to … lock these reforms into statute,” AHAM President and CEO Kelly Mariotti said in July.