(As opposed to efficiency/power cost/TCO in general, specifically refusing to buy non-logoed goods)
https://www.tampaelectric.com/residential/saveenergy/energys...
Not sure actively subsidizing recreational novelty uses of electricity is doing anything to save the planet
Energy efficiency is why US electric consumption has been flat for so long (since 2008). Besides lighting, most residential load are appliances (refrigerator, washer, dryer, stove, microwave, pool pumps, TVs, water heater) or HVAC. So, those are the efficiency targets. The cheapest kWh is the one you didn’t have to generate and deliver. Very similar to demand response, where you pay consumers to shed non essential electrical loads (nest thermostat rush house rewards is an example of this) when the grid is at capacity.
Similar incentives exist for heat pumps, water heaters, and dryers, as well as for disposing of an old inefficient fridge you might be hanging on to in your garage as a second unit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_Star
> More than 75 product categories are eligible for the ENERGY STAR label, including appliances, electronics, lighting, heating and cooling systems, and commercial equipment such as food service products. In the United States, the ENERGY STAR label often appears with the EnergyGuide label of eligible appliances to highlight energy-efficient products and compare energy use and operating costs.
> One of the most successful voluntary initiatives introduced by the U.S. government, the program has saved 5 trillion kilowatt-hours of electricity, more than US$500 billion in energy costs, and prevented 4 billion metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions. Elements of the ENERGY STAR program are implemented in Canada, Japan, and Switzerland.
Even if you don't want to use the pool, if the house has a pool the pump needs to run regularly with filtration and chlorination or else you end up with an expensive, putrid mess to clean up.
And of course in most parts of florida you can't drain the pool long term because of how high the water table is. An empty pool is just a concrete shell so without the weight from the water inside it, the pool essentially becomes boyant and tries to float upwards out of the ground, causing potentially thousands to tens of thousands of dollars of damage.
So a lot of people are stuck with pools with the water in them. So they are stuck with the pumps running.
And regardless of how recreational those pools are, that means a lot of pumps running across the state and that translates into a lot of power usage during the day.
So rebates for upgrading to more efficient pumps is an easy way to reduce power usage, reduce costs for people, reduce environmental costs, and reduce unnecessary overall load on the grid.
It's an incentive that just makes sense for everyone involved because it provides benefits across the board.
If that recreational novelty is going to happen regardless, isn’t it better to entice people to do it with lower energy use?
No - your utility used energy star compliance as an easy yes/no for giving you a rebate, but it could still give out rebates without energy star based on a couple of simple specs.
Because of Energy Star that gap has generally shrunk, but that just means it’s working well.
The most obvious difference left is on fridges. The amount of power consumed varies quite a lot and in ways that are not obvious. Small fridges use a shocking amount of power because they use less efficient coolers without compressors.
This is only true of the tiniest fridges, the peltier effect ones that are about the size of a milk crate. Your typical mini fridge has a compressor.
Do you have any examples of such products? I don't believe I've ever seen one.
> it was cheaper to warm the outside of the fridge to avoid condensation
A refrigerator has an evaporator inside the fridge to get cold but it must have a condenser on the outside to discharge heat. The outside of the fridge is going to get warm no matter what you do. The only time I've seen an actual heater used is when a fridge is placed outside where temperatures go below freezing.
> but the parts cost was a few dollars lower.
The labor cost was also significantly lower and the rate of production was higher.
> than it was to install adequate insulation inside the fridge
They used to be insulated with cork and then fiberglass which were the common technologies for their time. As soon as foam became more prevalent they switched to that.
> Energy star and those yellow power consumption stickers changed that.
It normalized the patchwork system that existed before it. California, as always, experienced the initial problem and created it's own standards on refrigerators sold in the state. Other states followed, the federal government picked at it slightly, and finally Energy Star came into existence mostly by industry demand.
That's all in theory though. I wonder if this could be a confusion arising from the use of heating coils to defrost the evaporator coil (auto-defrost). that's a different thing though.
But it also seems like one of those things that surely doesn't cost much to keep around either. Getting rid of it is just virtue signaling to anti-climate people.
Institutional collapse is a thing.
Working in the manufacturing space, I have no doubt designs will change and energy consumption will go up. They will be able to remove sensors, heat water hotter in dishwashers and clothes washers, run cycles more aggressively, and use cheaper motors (such as HVAC fans). Any item you can remove from the bill of materials adds to the profit directly.
Capital expenditure versus operating expenditure is a common tradeoff discussed in a business sense, and the Energy Star gave a pretty darn good comparison for opex for consumers. Taking that away (even with some of the games that have been played over the years) is a huge loss for consumers.
This, of course, is exactly the kind of chaos and uncertainty that the APA and all those agency processes are supposed to prevent, but it’s a roller coaster for the next few years at least.
I'd agree Energy Star requires presenting that, but I feel like a lot of manufacturers would want to.
I don't live in the US. He does talk about some differences. For example, I've never had a dishwasher here that didn't heat it's own water.
I did live briefly in the US and I recall that there were a bunch of subtle differences around appliances. Europe, Australia and New Zealand use the same models and the US gets different models.
I don't understand how the tablets could be in rinse cycle but powder in wash cycle? They both go to the same container that fully flips open during the wash cycle. Or do you have a device that has some different compartment for powder?
See: Bud Light.
The lower the skill needed to evaluate something and the more well defined the problem space is, the easier it is to crowd source. For example Open Street Map works because the barrier to entry is relatively low and new cities aren't coming out every day. Similarly IMDB has a section that allows users to give their own parental rating to movies with their own explanation. That can compete with MPA film ratings because again the barrier to entry is low and movies don't change after they are released (in general).
A historic example is things was Linksys WRT54G wireless routers. The exact same product number had completely different amounts of memory and core chipsets.
Another one that's common is the first batch of particular SSDs in a model contain more/faster/any cache which gets good benchmarks and great reviews, but later neutered releases of the same 'model' perform like crap.
What is accurately? The efficiency of the product will depend on how full it is. The less mass you have inside it the more often it turns on and the more energy it consumes.
So do consumers even understand this particular point of their device? Or how their use case may impact the displayed numbers?
The Energy Star Test Procedures for refrigerators and freezers is defined in this document:
<https://www.energystar.gov/sites/default/files/specs/ENERGY%...> [PDF]
Refrigerators and freezers are tested unloaded. Which suggests that the Energy Star programme should report a less efficient energy usage as compared with normal loading of a refrigerator/freezer, which will reduce air exchange and the need to re-cool air.
Even with regulations like Energy Star, you can't just assume they're being followed accurately. It's much easier for companies to game one government-run system than a whole ecosystem of reviewers who are competing on the accuracy of their reviews.
…only it’s better than a tax because it preserves the freedom to get ripped off if you choose. Yay freedom.
Versus asking the manufacturer ("very efficient sir") or the government ("efficient and we ignored every other aspect of the product so it might not actually work", see the dishwasher discussion).
Energy Star is the blue and white label stickers granted to products meeting some energy efficiency levels and is managed by the EPA.
When I tapped this two years ago, it was for a ducted heat pump system replacement where the only immutable requirement was that the system had to have earned the ENERGY STAR label. SEER2 rating was a mere secondary consideration that had no impact on credit qualification; 14.8 was my saddle point.
At the time, ductless mini-splits had to be ENERGY STAR certified and SEER2 > 16 to qualify.
[1] https://www.energystar.gov/about/federal-tax-credits/air-sou...
I honestly don't remember for sure, but I have a vague impression of "significant difference in energy star rating is outweighed by significant difference in purchase price". Could be that was just the particular type of appliance years ago, though.
Since there's no numbers attached to the energy star certification itself, it's a meaningless label that doesn't really tell what the difference is. With the energy guide labels, at least there's a point of comparison.
Even then, the difference between models of a few types of appliances I checked were typically in the 1-3% of the product cost range. The single biggest I could find online happened to be in TVs, where one brand's 65" was half the estimated annual electric cost of another- a savings of $20 per year! It'd pay for the difference in price between the models in 3 years, and pay for itself in 25!
Granted, I didn't see numbers for the likely worst offenders: central air conditioning and electric ovens.
The energy guide (yellow label with cost estimates) is mandatory for most appliances. The energy efficiency is quantified as an estimated annual cost of operation.
Energy star certification is a voluntary and binary thing. There's no readily visible difference between appliances with or without the energy star certification, short of going back to the energy guide label to compare.
This includes every major appliance in my primary home...and HEPA air cleaners too.
[1] https://www.energystar.gov/about/federal-tax-credits/air-sou...
Energy costs over the lifetime of many appliances types are many multiples of initial purchase price.
Sometimes I do a TCO analysis by subtracting the energy savings over 7 years (or 5, or 10 or whatever I estimate the useful life to be) from the more expensive price of the more energy efficient product. Occasionally it comes out less than the cheaper product.
One particular example was a tradeoff calculation for water heaters. I forget what the exact TCO tradeoff point was but it was ridiculously short (between 1-2 years). I was replacing a leaking/failed heater and expected it to be shortly thereafter replaced due to a basement remodel we had planned. I bought the best insulated one as it saved money if we used it for just 2 years. 16 years later, that unit failed (we didn’t do the planned remodel). That was based on the FTC sticker only (plus my actual gas rates).
Edit to add: we then replaced that water heater with an electric heat pump water heater (which is eligible for the IRS tax credit scheme, which requires they "must meet or exceed the highest efficiency tier (not including any advanced tier) established by the Consortium for Energy Efficiency (CEE)") and all of the EPA Energy Star rated heat pump ones do, but I'd argue that the heater would still carry the highest CEE rating with or without the Energy Star program, so I still didn't purchase based solely or primarily on any factor that the star under-pinned, but if there was a heat pump water heater that didn't have the sticker, I'd have had to look to be sure it was still eligible for the rebate.
I was originally looking for a mini fridge like what you’d think of belonging in an American dorm room. In the store, I noticed the medium sized fridges (more akin to what one might think of in a European studio apartment) actually used less energy according to the yellow sticker, so I went with that.
This was a case where I wasn’t really looking for anything very specific, though, so it’s not like I was already limited in options and limited more by that sticker.
Private industry cannot be trusted to act in any interest but their own bottom line.
Across the board though, PC PSU quality has gone up quite a bit in the last 20-25 years though.
Im so tired of the arguement of its not perfect guess we should get rid of it, start from scratch, and the new system will have none of those problems.
This isnt about government excess spending either. If the government was really concerned about excess spending they would take a real deep look at DOD spending and the number of cost plus contracts
The recent Energy Star requirements have gone horribly wrong for some things (eg dishwashers that no longer dry dishes because they omitted a drying heating element, clothes washers that fail to clean clothes because they skimped on water too much), but the basic idea is sound.
I love how Americans just can't figure this out, as if the German brands that are all three of better, cheaper to buy, and cheaper to operate simply don't exist. The American consumer is a person who cannot comprehend thermodynamics.
I'm only aware of Bosch, which uses some type of humidity-absorbing crystals that then desiccate with the heat of the next cycle. The marketing implication that this doesn't use energy would seem to be playing on that lack of understanding of thermodynamics.
Never mind costing 2x or more for the models with this feature, still seeing complaints of people online saying they don't get the dishes dry, combined with the all-too-common refrain that you have to use "rise aid" - ie elective chemical residue.
(I edited my original comment to focus on the failure of functionality over the lack of a specific mechanism)
Cutting edge technologies can eke out higher efficiencies, but at the cost of all the downsides of new tech - cost premium, unproven designs, potential evolutionary dead end.
I'm in no way in favor of ending Energy Star, but it's risible to assert that stupidity is the only the only reason a consumer would favor a straightforward, easily repaired design over an over-engineered turd stuffed with controller boards that regularly go bad and cost more than the appliance is worth to replace.
(edit: oh, apparently the labeling is EnergyGuide, so that's not even Energy Star)
There is no "drying heating element" in dishwashers. Disassemble one and see for yourself. The same coil is used both for water heating and air heating during the drying cycle.
And I've so far had no problem with dishwashers drying my dishes.
Sure, if it's the classic design of the heating coil sitting exposed near the bottom of the wash tub.
But most newer dishwashers tend to have a much smaller heating element as part of the sump assembly, capable of heating the water only, because they omit the heated dry cycle. From what I've seen these days, you have to buy one without the Energy Star label to get back the traditional dual-use heating element.
And I haven't researched, but I'd venture a guess that those models are just the old designs still being sold, leaving out straightforward efficiency developments like electrically commutated motors. I've fixed many appliances myself, and based on what I've seen I have got little faith in manufacturers' motivations to improve much on their own.
> Plus, a private certification program could easily fill in the void.
Ah there’s your problem. It turns out private solutions actually cost money, and relying on a private certification program to “fill the void” as you say, is what actually changes the costs.
Alternatively if you believe that private corporate actions are always free when comparing it to government services, then this is a net zero change
When I needed a new washing machine a year or so ago there were many machines that were very similar except for large variations in energy efficiency. If it weren't for the Energy Star labels I almost certainly would have ended up with a machine with higher operating costs.
And while we are the world's largest producer of oil, we're also the world's 2nd largest importer of oil as well!
Even more reason to reduce our oil dependency if the real economic goal is to improve our trade deficit.
But to be honest, I'm not even sure how efficient Energy Star is these days. It feels like the US is behind Europe and East Asia by a decade, at least from a consumer perspective.
Just like there was a right-wing grievance attack on education, science, water quality, air quality, due process, food inspections, being bound by the constitution ... Basically anything that seeks to make things better.
They feel oppressed by all of it.
But don't worry. When your food is full of mercury and you're breathing in lead in a few years, the right wing will be there to blame DEI and wokeism for it because that's how they operate: destroy things, blame scapegoats, win elections, repeat.
There's people like Chris Rufo that openly state it's their strategy. None of this is speculative.
https://www.gao.gov/assets/files.gao.gov/assets/gao-10-470.p...
What would be more interesting would be a historic examination on the amount of fraud and abuse that actually takes place in the Energy Star program and whether the various decade plus old recommendations:
We briefed program officials with the Department of Energy, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and EPA OIG as well as attorneys with the Consumer Protection division of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) on the results of our work, and incorporated their comments concerning controls in place to protect the Energy Star label from fraud and abuse.
Showing that a system has flaws doesn't necessarily prove that a system is useless. You have to look at the overall impact. In cases where you have an imperfect but useful system (such as most government regulation and enforcement) finding vulnerabilities is an important part of improving the system. A police department which only catches some murderers should work on catching more criminals rather than deciding it's hopeless and we might as well make homicide legal.
But of course, there is always a chance that this program was sunset to prevent waste, fraud, and abuse since the current head of the executive branch is notoriously anti-fraud.
Many comments on Hacker News don’t strictly adhere to the rules and aren’t removed. Should they just shut down all of the moderation?
How do you compare three hot water heaters when all three brands are "refreshed" each year, so the specific models aren't listed on CR?
It's easier for consumer groups like CR to back-stop the regulatory agencies by identifying and reporting fraudulent self-reports.
If there are products that don't have reviews at all, just don't buy them in favor of those that do. In markets where consumers are choosy (e.g. films) companies often ensure reviewers have early access to products to ensure reviews are plentiful.
You're failing to consider the alternative no-EnergyStar scenario -- higher aggregate electricity demand, requiring more power plants, so everyone pays more for power.
Either you pay pennies to promote efficiency, or you pay quarters for energy infrastructure.
When you need to pay the king's taxes with the king's money as otherwise the king's men will beat you up, which is why you'll give the king's soldiers food in exchange for the king's money.
> companies often ensure reviewers
LOL! Of course they do! Companies pick reviewers who give good reviews, and spurn those who are critical. You every wonder why most game reviewers are so fawning?
Consumer Reports knows this, which is why they buy their products on the market, which is why they can't have reviews with the product first comes out.
Which is why when a product is first released you'll rarely find honest negative reviews.
Who rates the reviewers? Are they shilling for the manufacturer? Are they the marketing arm of the manufacturer? How do you know?
They're just no substitute for things like Energy Star
(if you can't tell whether that is sarcasm that might be because I also don't know)
There are even claims that Black Friday products are even special runs that are slightly different to lower cost.
First: Those numbers are all BS and have been for decades. If you want damp clothes, dirty dishes and refrigerated to within a blond one of the legal minimum food then you can trust the numbers. If you want your appliances to do their jobs in a satisfactory manner you're going to find yourself turning them up (whatever that means will vary by appliance) and consequently using a lot more energy.
Second: Those yellow stickers are from the FTC, not the EPA.
I have had zero of these issues. Can you be more specific about when you have encountered them yourself?
Meanwhile, logging old growth forests, drilling more oil, scoffing at renewables and EVs, and building power-hungry data centers for marginal-utility AI owned by a handful of billionaires. Flu vaccines are in doubt, the chaos and riots will begin around June/July when the shelves are empty and prices double.
Is this really a problem of energy star?
I need that Energy Star logo showing up while my PC bios is doing a memory test
Energy Star has been a huge success over the past 30 years. It's (now) widely supported by industry, has reduced the TCO to consumers for most household appliances, and results in hundreds of billions of kWh of electricity saved every year.
Energy Star is not some tree-hugging, drum-circle, feel-good program.
The US urgently needs to expand and modernize our grid. Every GW of power saved, is GW of generation and transmission capacity that we don't have to build and maintain.
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.
If you press the "non-bureaucracy" button that's on every modern dishwasher (usually labeled "quick wash" or a similar euphemism), you get a 'normal' cycle time (which works just fine, regardless of detergent), but at the cost of not being EnergyStar compliant. This is a product design that is entirely the result of government regulation.
No. I'm saying that you don't need a government bureaucracy mandating it. Moreover, you definitely don't need one mandating ever-more-strict energy consumption limits on energy uses that are not driving the consumption problem, which inevitably run up against hard physical limits (e.g. warm water works better for washing dishes).
Take the argument to the point of absurdity: should we have an EnergyStar rule on doorbell efficiency? The same line of reasoning applies, but by golly...if we had one, I'm sure we'd be sitting here arguing about why doorbells have to be barely audible in order to save the planet.
A better fix would be to expand the scope of Energy Star. I'm sure you'll still be able to find a suitable door bell just as easily as you discovered the quick wash button on your dish washer.
And, to take your argument to absurdity, we'd still have lead paint and no nutrition labels.
What is one of the most market-effective US regulations?
Requiring a standardized EnergyGuide appliance label for average yearly energy costs. (Aka the yellow label https://www.energystar.gov/products/ask-the-experts/whats-di... )
What did companies do before that? Installed the cheapest, least-efficient parts, put marketing copy on their boxes about how they were high efficiency, and then passed the costs onto unknowing consumers.
Except it doesn't really, because doorbells use very little current in pretty much any configuration. Appliances use a lot of current in most configurations, hence why many of them require a 240V/20A circuit versus the standard US 120V/15A circuit. Hence why the Energy Star program focuses on appliances.
This is a real stretch as slippery slope arguments go. Pick something better.
To this point, you're making a big leap, going from "current consumption while running", to "overall energy usage". How many times a day are you running your dishwasher? I guarantee mine isn't in the top items in my life that consume electricity, in aggregate.
While EnergyStar may have been a good idea when it was created (when energy prices were lower), it's no longer necessary in a world where cost of use significantly exceeds the cost of the appliance itself during its own lifetime. And if that isn't true, then you really have to ask what you're doing in the first place, regulating the energy use of an appliance that doesn't use much energy?
I think there are certain aspects of EnergyStar that make sense -- the little label that tells me how many watt-hours an AC uses helps me compare products, so fine. Keep the little sticker. But it doesn't require an agency making silly rules about how much energy any dishwasher, doorbell or dongle can use. Let the market decide.
At least once, sometimes twice, very rarely 3 times when my wife is doing a lot of baking or making candy.
Google says dishwashers can draw between 1200W and 2400W. Asking the same source puts a doorbell at 10W to 40W. 2 orders of magnitude less. The dishwasher consumes massively more power than a doorbell.
How many times a day is your doorbell ringing? Does your doorbell ring for a couple hours on each press, like the length of a dishwasher cycle?
Said differently: precisely how "efficient" does EnergyStar need to make dishwashers, or microwaves, or whatever else, before the gains in theoretical "efficiency" are offset by the compensating behaviors of the users working around the brokenness of the system?
I can replace your microwave with an easybake oven, powered by LED lamp, and it'll be "efficient" in terms of operating current draw, but...
Don't know what to tell you on that...
Yes, I know the reason, but now say it in a way that doesn't make the assumption that the rule is rational: EnergyStar continued to increase the efficiency requirements to the point where the only option manufacturers had was to make the default cycles much longer in order to get the same performance [1]. Every dishwasher therefore has a button that reverts to the pre-regulation mode, but it's usually named in doublespeak.
Somehow I doubt that dishwashers are driving the power consumption curve in the US in 2025. But this is what bureaucracies do, unless given a self-destruct date.
[1] for example, what's preventing EnergyStar from requiring that the water be cold? That would use way less energy!
I, and I would guess most consumers, are perfectly fine with the trade off of taking longer at lower cost (energy and water). I run mine overnight so it doesn’t matter. This is what I want as the default.
On the few occasions I need it to run faster and am fine with the trade off of higher cost, I press a button and it’s there.
What’s the problem?
My argument, in a nutshell, is that we don't need a government agency mandating energy consumption limits for home appliances, and moreover, getting rid of government agencies that do X rarely means that we get less X.
The fact that you would be perfectly happy choosing a more annoying appliance for lower overall energy consumption is merely validation of my belief that, when it comes to this kind of thing, the market is better than a government bureaucracy.
Do you have any examples where that has been the case?
>The fact that you would be perfectly happy choosing a more annoying appliance for lower overall energy consumption is merely validation of my belief that
I have re-read my own comment multiple times and I am not seeing where I said that I would be an annoying appliance at all. In fact, I say the exact opposite that the appliance is doing exactly what I would want it to do for trade offs. Are you replying to the wrong comment?
I'm not exactly sure what you're asking, but the department of education comes to mind as a bureaucracy that has no net influence on the amount of education occurring.
(not totally fair, since the department of education is little more than an inefficient way of allocating block grants, but it's a particularly amusing example.)
This coming from the administration that uses tariffs to force production to be happening in one place over another doesn't seem to be motivated by free market absolutist position either.
If you want to be certified, sure, but that's voluntary.
The only thing energy star is going is mandating companies inform their customer so the customer can decide and compare products. The free market is making you dishwashers use less energy, not energy star
Sure, it's "voluntary" in the sense that if you don't do it, you won't be picked up by any major distributors. How many non-Energy-Star appliances do you see at Home Depot and Wal Mart?
(Edit: also, federal procurement requires certification. So you know...if you don't ever want to sell to the government, go ahead and ignore the certification.)
But now you’re describing market forces.
I just did a search for dishwashers on Home Depot's site.
166 dishwashers are Energy Star certified out of 310.
Of standard-size only dishwashers, 136 out of 241 carry the Energy Star certification.
That's a not insignificant portion of the dishwasher market that has not done this thing that you put in scare-quotes as "voluntary" and are still carried at the number two reseller of major appliances in the US.
The idea that manufacturers wouldn’t just make energy and water hogging dishwashers now is naive at best. Making something run well using less resources costs more money up front, even though the total cost of ownership is lower. If you don’t have to make them efficient and you don’t have to display how much energy or water they use and how much that would cost, then you can massively undercut anyone that does those things, even though the consumer would end up paying more over time.
> Somehow I doubt that dishwashers are driving the power consumption curve in the US in 2025.
But of course it isn’t just dishwashers, it is practically every home appliance. If every house was using 10% more energy, that adds up to a lot. It doesn’t mean that data centers aren’t also a problem, but abandoning a program that saves energy doesn’t fix either problem.
>for example, what's preventing EnergyStar from requiring that the water be cold? That would use way less energy!
Is that something you are worried about or was discussed? Or is that just a ridiculous made-up scenario trying to paint a reasonable regulation for nonsense?
Really? You sound like someone who would pay for such a thing. I bet there are more of you!
> If you don’t have to make them efficient and you don’t have to display how much energy or water they use and how much that would cost, then you can massively undercut anyone that does those things, even though the consumer would end up paying more over time.
Nobody said anything about getting rid of the stickers. We can still require stickers, just like we require food has labels on it. We don't need a sprawling certification system encompassing everything from telephones (sigh) to roofing materials and the government bureaucracy that defines it.
> manufacturers don't have any incentive to start producing power-guzzling appliances when power costs are increasing
That's only true if customers can know how much energy their devices are going to use. Energy star forces that disclosure and that's it. Market forces are done everything else. Consumers prefer lower energy costs and devices that voluntarily achieve an energy star certification
Also, "takes like 4 hours to finish a load", I have a new dishwasher, there is no combination of settings (except adding a delay) that will make a load take four hours. Max I can get is 2:36
Incorrect. The far bigger part of the program is certification:
https://www.energystar.gov/about/how-energy-star-works/energ...
(There's also the scoring system, though I don't know if that falls under certification.)
This is how the efficiency requirements become de facto mandates. Federal procurement, among other things, requires energy star certification. There are even mortgage discounts for energy star certified buildings.
Nobody forces manufacturers to get certified, they do it because the market prefers it.
Energy star does not force manufacturers to be certified. I can walk into my local appliance store and walk out with a whole kitchen full of uncertified products if I wanted too.
The difference between appliances in 1970 vs now is immense. My dishwasher is so quiet we double check if it’s on. It uses less water than handwashing. Even the Chamber of Commerce (big business lobby) asked them to keep Energy Star.
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.
And sure Americans care about energy costs but looking at the car market you can see Americans don’t actually care to make choices that save them money in the long run. Ford doesn’t even produce sedans anymore.
This article is about the blue Energy Star sticker program, which is managed by the EPA.
FTC - Federal Trade Commission
EPA - Environmental Protection AgencyI googled, and you are right. Here's the description of Energy Star from the EPA website [1]
> The ENERGY STAR label saves you the effort needed to process all the information on the EnergyGuide sticker by simply designating the products that are highly efficient. When you see a product that has earned the ENERGY STAR, it means it meets strict guidelines for energy savings set by the EPA. Only manufacturers that independently certify their product’s performance are allowed to use it. (And when they do, you’ll find that manufacturers sometimes incorporate the ENERGY STAR label right into the EnergyGuide label, giving you the best of both worlds).
However, isn't it better to implement this A -> G scale we have in the EU? It's easier to read than EnergyGuide.
As with gutting the EPA in general, dropping this is another step towards trying to remove any regulatory pressure on companies so they can focus on maximizing profits for shareholders.
Idiots.
Am I just personally oblivious or is it more prominent in the US?
out-of-ideas•12h ago