The Obama administration is facing heated opposition to a slew of new rules for major household appliances it has unleashed as part of its aggressive energy-efficiency program.
The program, kicked into high gear by President Obama’s climate change agenda, targets common appliances such as water heaters, furnaces and refrigerators. Critics say it lacks transparency, excludes major groups and uses baffling metrics that would leave the agency steeped in lawsuits with no progress on emissions reductions.
“We fear it is sacrificing transparency … in pursuit of this very ambitious carbon dioxide reduction” strategy, said the American Gas Association’s head of policy, Kathryn Clay. The gas association, representing local gas utilities, is one of a number of groups fighting the agency over its approach to developing the efficiency standards.
Clay says the utilities she represents were not consulted before the department issued a stricter proposed standard on residential natural gas furnaces, which would dramatically increase costs for their customers. That has prompted it to confront the department over access to the information it used to develop the standard, which so far has been an uphill struggle.
For the time being, Clay says the industry will work through the normal process in the hope the agency will negotiate. But it will sue if necessary.
The agency in recent weeks has indicated it does plan to re-examine standards in light of industry concerns. But most of the recent changes published by the agency have been technical in nature and don’t substantively change the rules.
“We are still in the comment period,” Clay said, but if the agency is not cooperative in releasing the data that the industry needs to argue for changes, “then AGA would pursue all options, including litigation.”
It is “absolutely” a legal concern, as the Energy Department “is supposed to” provide enough information and transparency, Clay said.
At the heart of Clay’s concerns is a nationwide 92-percent efficiency standard for natural gas furnaces. The efficiency standard would force anyone looking to replace a non-condensing natural gas furnace to buy a new condensing furnace that would be far more expensive to buy, and even more costly to install. The rule requires the furnaces to consume 92 percent less natural gas in producing the same amount of heat as less-efficient models.
The 92 percent fuel-efficiency standard cannot be met by standard non-condensing gas furnaces. That means manufacturers will be required to produce the higher-priced units. Critics of the rule say it will drive up costs for at least 20 percent of homeowners.
Clay says the issue is that the agency has not shared data with utilities or manufacturers. The data would show how the agency decided it would set the standard.
Dave Schryver, executive vice president of the American Public Gas Association, said the nationwide standard will have the opposite effect of raising efficiency. Instead, it will force consumers to “go for cheaper options” that are less efficient, like electric heat pumps.
The heat pumps, which are less expensive to buy and install, would lower the efficiency gains that the agency is betting on to reduce emissions under the president’s Climate Action Plan. It would drive down natural gas use and increase carbon emissions since heat pumps use electricity generated by power plants, many of them coal-fueled, Schryver said.
Nevertheless, an Energy Department spokesman says the dozens of standards the agency has already approved are estimated to save consumers nearly $480 billion and reduce harmful carbon pollution by more than 2.2 billion metric tons through 2030.
But the department is raising the goal for carbon reductions and is now “committed to continuing to establish new efficiency standards” under the president’s plan to reduce carbon pollution by 3 billion metric tons by 2030. The carbon reductions would be an “amount equal to more than a year’s carbon pollution from the entire U.S. electricity system,” the spokesman said.
The furnace rule is the latest efficiency standard to stoke the ire of industry groups, but there are a suite of others that they are fighting.
For the gas groups, the furnace rule is a top priority, but that is expected to change. The groups expect a major rule on residential water heaters to be proposed soon. And manufacturers, who also oppose the furnace rule, are in court over the department’s strict standards for refrigerators and commercial walk-in freezers.
The strictness of the rules has landed the Energy Department in two federal appeals courts in the 5th and 7th Circuits.
An attorney with the Air-Conditioning, Heating, and Refrigeration Institute, which is suing the department in both courts on two separate rules for walk-in commercial freezers and for commercial refrigerator equipment, says the near “constant stream of rules” is confounding the normal regulatory process. “A lot of it is not getting done right.”
“We feel the efficiency standard is too stringent” because they made errors in the test procedures used to design the rules, he said.
The institute also has a problem with the department’s use of an ever-changing metric called the Social Cost of Carbon, which an interagency group led by the White House devised to account for the effects of climate change.
Critics say the metric increases the stringency and costs of the rules, and is out of step with a 1970s law that the Energy Department is supposed to follow in devising efficiency and conservation rules.
The “Social Cost of Carbon is anything but certain,” the attorney said. The agency says the metric is “provisional, revisable … but we’re going to use it” regardless. The problem is the metric is “so imbalanced” that it can be used to “justify anything.” The administration says the metric is used to measure the societal costs posed by carbon dioxide pollution that many scientists say is causing the Earth’s temperature to rise.
