Introduction

In 1987, Congress passed the National Appliance Energy Conservation Act (NAECA), which gave the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) legal authority to promulgate minimum efficiency requirements for 13 classes of consumer products. The Energy Policy Act of 1992 (EPACT) expanded the coverage to include certain commercial building equipment. The law also mandated that DOE revise and update the standards over time, as technologies and economic conditions changed. From 1988 to 1998, DOE was active in establishing and updating standards for the consumer products it was assigned to evaluate. Table 42 shows the products and years in which standards were either established or revised. The table includes the most recent revisions to the standards for room air conditioners and refrigerators/freezers, which take effect in 2000 and 2001, respectively.

Table 42. Effective Dates of Appliance Efficiency Standards, 1988-2001

Historically, appliance efficiency standards have had a major impact on the amounts of energy needed to power many household devices. The reference case for the Annual Energy Outlook 2000 (AEO2000) projects a 31-percent decline in electricity use for refrigerators in 2020 from the 1997 level, despite a projected 23-percent increase in the stock of refrigerators. Table 43 shows historical data for the efficiency of new refrigerators, for which efficiency standards were promulgated in 1990 and 1993 and are planned for 2001.

The process for setting standards is by no means trivial. Once a product class is determined, detailed engineering, economic, and manufacturer impact analyses are performed over a period of many months. When the analyses have been completed and made available to the public, an Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (ANOPR) is published. Approximately 8 months later a Proposed Rule is published, and the Final Rule is published approximately 8 months after that.⁽⁹²⁾ After the Final Rule is published, a lead time of 2 to 3 years normally is allowed for the standard to take effect. (In some cases, negotiated rulemaking may be able to shorten the process.) DOE plans to publish final rules in the next 2 years that will revise the standards for four product classes under its NAECA authority: central air conditioners, water heaters, ballasts, and clothes washers.

In the Climate Change Technology Initiative (CCTI), a portion of the $275 million included in the proposed initiative for buildings technology would be used to accelerate the lighting and energy efficiency standards program.⁽⁹³⁾ Energy use in buildings may be affected by the acceleration of updates to NAECA standards for residential equipment such as heat pumps and central air conditioners and for fluorescent lamp ballasts. Updates to EPACT standards for commercial equipment may also affect energy use.

To estimate the potential impact of accelerating the standards-setting process, AEO2000 included scenarios that assumed additional appliance standards for various products. Given the uncertainty surrounding the effective dates of appliance efficiency standards, the reference case forecasts include only the standards that have been officially promulgated by DOE. In the accelerated standards case presented here, it is assumed that standards are revised every 8 years and the efficiency levels increased by 10 percent when technologically feasible. In general, both the schedule and level of the assumed efficiency improvements are aggressive when compared to the history of standards enactment. Because of the timing of these assumed standards, some technologies may have two cycles of improvement in the forecast horizon. Although the standards are in no way related to the specific funding levels in the CCTI proposal, the analysis illustrates the effects that accelerated standards may have on levels of energy use and carbon emissions. As with the tax incentive proposals, model results were obtained with and without the accelerated standards to gauge the projected impacts on the energy use and carbon emissions attributable to buildings. The analysis considered only the residential and commercial sectors, with no feedback from effects on energy prices or the economy. Table 44 shows the assumed efficiency levels and effective dates of the accelerated standards for each appliance in the CCTI analysis case.

Analysis and Results

Table 45 shows the results of the analysis. Again, the values shown do not indicate the effects of the specific funding levels in the CCTI proposal but rather those of the accelerated standards program represented in Table 44.

Table 45. Projected Buildings Sector Energy Consumption and Carbon Emissions for the Accelerated Standards Case, 1998, 2005, 2010, and 2020 

Efficiency standards are projected to have a greater effect on energy consumption and carbon emissions in the buildings sectors than would the CCTI tax incentives or the voluntary programs discussed elsewhere in this report, because minimum efficiency standards apply to all purchase decisions involving the affected technologies. With the standards assumed for the analysis, it is projected that about 195 trillion British thermal units (Btu), or 0.9 percent, of delivered energy in the buildings sector could be saved by 2010, reducing buildings sector carbon emissions by 7.1 million metric tons (1.1 percent) in 2010.

Once set, standards continue to affect purchase decisions and energy use as new buildings are built and worn-out equipment is replaced. The longer an efficiency standard is in place, the greater the percentage of appliances in use that meet the standard and the greater the benefit in terms of energy and carbon savings compared to a reference case without the standard in place. By 2020, projected delivered energy use in the buildings sector in the accelerated standards case is 593 trillion Btu (2.7 percent) lower, and carbon emissions are 20.3 million metric tons (3.0 percent) lower, than in the reference case. The projected annual savings in energy expenditures for residential and commercial consumers exceed $8 billion in 2020.