Additional home appliance regulations could impact performance and affordability

By Jennifer Cleary

This is a lightly edited excerpt of testimony recently provided to the U.S. House’s Energy and Commerce Energy Subcommittee hearing "Appliance and Building Policies: Restoring the American Dream of Home Ownership and Consumer Choice."

The home appliance industry, through its products and innovation, is essential to U.S. consumer lifestyle, health, safety, and convenience. Home appliances have played a key role in unlocking economic growth by freeing individuals from chores to join the workforce, and today the home appliance industry represents a success story of energy efficiency and environmental protection, now operating at or near peak efficiency.

For example:

• The average dishwasher manufactured today uses 50 percent less water and 37 percent less energy than models made in 1998.
• The average refrigerator made today uses nearly 58 percent less energy than refrigerators built in 1980, with nearly 32 percent greater capacity.
• Clothes washers built today use nearly 78 percent less energy than clothes washers built in 1992 and have 60 percent greater capacity.

And all of this has been achieved while the Consumer Price Index for appliances has been flat or has even decreased. This is a stark difference compared to other products like food and the gas we put in our cars, which have steadily increased. 

Because home appliances have undergone so many standard changes, there are diminishing returns from further tightening of standards. Additional changes using existing technology may not be possible without sacrificing product performance, features, or affordability.  

H.R. 4626, the “Don’t Mess With My Home Appliances Act,” makes strides at addressing several key issues. Most importantly, [the Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers] AHAM strongly supports H.R. 4626’s elimination of the provision in [the Energy Policy and Conservation Act of 1975, as amended] EPCA (known as the “six-year look-back”). 

EPCA requires DOE to review standards every six years, resulting in a never-ending regulatory churn regardless of who is in the White House. Regulations should be based on the opportunity to conserve energy in a cost-effective way that preserves consumer choice, not on a ticking clock.

Due to budget and resource constraints and the length of time these reviews take, the experience of 40 years in both Republican and Democratic administrations show that DOE almost always misses these deadlines. 

Regulatory reviews based on the passage of time, therefore, do not necessarily meet EPCA’s goals because the requirement crowds DOE’s “to-do” list with rule reviews that do not have the potential to provide meaningful energy, water, or cost savings. 

Without EPCA’s mandatory 6-year review requirement, DOE can prioritize its rulemakings based on opportunities for energy, water, and cost savings for consumers. Removal of this required six-year look-back, which has most often been used to drive continual increases in the stringency of standards, will allow DOE—either on its own or in response to a stakeholder petition—to determine the right time to consider updating standards. 

This will better ensure any future rules improve efficiency without making products too costly, reducing product offerings, or sacrificing performance or features. Importantly, it will not prevent DOE from continuing to advance efficiency when it is justified to do so. 

While H.R. 4626 achieves this key objective, there are some changes we suggest making it stronger:

1. Protect national consistency: Strengthen preemption to maintain a national marketplace for home appliances and avoid states stepping in to become the de facto federal legislators and imposing different requirements that interfere with interstate commerce. A patchwork of state standards makes it difficult to sell a full range of products across the nation. The result is that consumers could face reduced choice of appliances and higher costs.

2. Guarantee DOE accountability: We recommend several changes to make sure DOE follows its own rules and EPCA’s requirements, so the standards development process is consistent, fair, and transparent. These revisions will reduce the risk of regulatory overreach and the whiplash from one administration to the next.

• Codify key elements of DOE’s so-called “Process Rule” to prevent the agency from waiving or bypassing important procedural safeguards that protect consumers.
• Require DOE to affirmatively demonstrate that its actions will not reduce consumer choice or product performance.
• Require DOE to consider cumulative regulatory burden from its actions, combined with other regulations on the same manufacturers, along with the impact on consumers, in its decision-making.

3. Lower costs and reduce regulatory burden: Reduce regulatory burden by providing manufacturers with adequate time to comply with new requirements and provide sufficient time between new regulations. Reducing regulatory burden not only gives manufacturers enough time to innovate and design new appliances that consumers love, but it can also lower costs to consumers.

We also suggest that H.R. 4626 be revised to retain the Department of Justice review of DOE’s

proposed rules. That review is designed to protect competition.

Additionally, and critically, we note that H.R. 4626 appears to remove the criteria for establishing revised, more stringent standards and replace them only with criteria for less stringent/rescinded standards. But the overall bill framework and some of the other language in H.R. 4626’s revisions to 42 U.S.C. 6295(n) seem to intend to allow DOE to increase standards if the amended standards meet the rigorous criteria H.R. 4626 outlines. This confusion will need to be clarified so that DOE’s authority to promulgate new and more stringent standards is retained so long as such standards are economically and technologically justified.

Jennifer Cleary is the Vice President of Regulatory Affairs and Deputy General Counsel for the Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers. 

_{*The opinions expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of EnergyPlatform.News.}