(Photo Credit: Steve Halama on Unsplash)[/caption]
The Department of Energy proposed rollbacks to energy efficiency requirements for lightbulbs on Wednesday in a move that environmental groups estimate will cost American consumers and businesses billions of dollars.
One of the proposals would eliminate the energy efficiency requirements for familiar pear-shaped lightbulbs that were set to go into effect on January 1, 2020, as the New York Times’ John Schwartz explained. The other rollback from the Trump administration would eliminate the requirement that several incandescent and halogen bulb types get added to the energy-efficiency group next year.
“What’s saved is not worth it, for the little they save,” President Donald Trump told journalists at the White House on Wednesday, Bloomberg’s Ari Natter reported.
The National Electrical Manufacturers Association (NEMA) had opposed the efficiency standards, Natter noted. NEMA’s membership of nearly 325 manufacturers includes well-known lighting brands Philips, Sylvania, and GE Lighting.
Lightbulb efficiency standards were first introduced under the George W. Bush administration and passed by Congress in 2007. Around 2014, during the Obama administration, the transition away from inefficient lighting became politicized, Schwartz reported. University of California, Berkeley energy economist Lucas Davis told the New York Times that the partisan divide faded in recent years and now LEDs are being sold in large volumes across the country.
Environmental and energy-efficiency organizations quickly criticized the DOE’s proposals. The American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE) and the Appliance Standards Awareness Project (ASAP) published an analysis last year estimating that eliminating the 2020 standards for pear-shaped A-lamps would cost US consumers as much as $14 billion annually and increase climate-change emissions by about 38 million metric tons per year.
“LED lightbulbs are a proven, popular product — it’s time for the national minimum standards to catch up to today’s technology,” ASAP executive director Andrew deLaski said on Wednesday. “Instead, the Trump administration is siding with manufacturers that want to keep selling outdated, energy-wasting lightbulbs.”
Bob Keefe, executive director of the national nonpartisan business group E2 (Environmental Entrepreneurs), was also critical. “Consumers and businesses are the ones who will pay for this dim-witted decision,” he said.
In response to the DOE’s final rule announcement, the president of the Alliance to Save Energy Jason Hartke said, “Wasting energy with inefficient lightbulbs isn’t just costly for homes and businesses, it’s terrible for our climate. This rule means we’re going to need the electricity produced by 25 coal power plants just to power wasteful bulbs.”
Noah Horowitz, director of the Center for Energy Efficiency Standards at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said his organization is exploring options that include litigation.
“The Trump administration is illegally blocking the improved standards approved by a bipartisan Congress and supported by the lighting industry 12 years ago,” he said. “Today’s action sets the United States up to become the world’s dumping ground for the inefficient incandescent and halogen bulbs being phased out around the world.”
The DOE’s rule was published today on the Federal Register.
