Last fall, my colleagues and I at Heatmap put together a comprehensive (and award-winning!) guide on how to Decarbonize Your Life. Though it contained information on everything from shopping for an EV to which fake meats are actually good, as my colleague Katie Brigham noted, “an energy-efficient home needs energy-efficient … gadgets to fill it up.” So we also curated lists of climate-conscious stoves, heaters, and washer-dryers — recommendations we made by talking to experts, but also by looking closely at appliances’ Energy Star certifications.
You’ve probably relied on these certifications, too. Overseen by the Environmental Protection Agency, Energy Star labels are recognized by 90% of Americans as indicating that an appliance is top of its class when it comes to saving electricity and money. According to the government’s estimates, the voluntary program has saved Americans $500 billion since it began in 1992.
But now all that appears to be reaching its end: Last week, EPA leadership told staff that the division that oversees the Energy Star efficiency certification program for home appliances will be eliminated as part of the Trump administration’s ongoing cuts and reorganization (although the president has also long pursued a vendetta against low-flow showerheads and dishwashers that “don’t work”).
To better understand the ramifications of such a decision, I spoke this week with Deb Cloutier, the president and founder of the sustainability firm RE Tech Advisors and one of the original architects of Energy Star. She provided technical guidance and tools as a consultant during the program’s development stages of the program, and later worked as a strategic advisor for the Department of Energy’s Better Buildings Initiative. Our conversation has been lightly edited and for length and clarity.
You’ve been involved in the Energy Star program since the beginning. Can you tell me a little about what the atmosphere was like when it was established back in 1992? Was there resistance to it from appliance manufacturers or Republicans at that time?
Energy Star represented a voluntary public-private partnership, meaning a nonregulatory approach to engaging the business community and catalyzing the adoption of strategic energy management. So at the time, it was the first of its kind. I wouldn’t say folks were just like, “Yes, let’s do this.” It was really new and different.
The other thing is that at that time, we had come out of the oil crisis of the 1970s, and people were starting to recognize the importance of where and how our energy was being produced. But we weren’t focused on thinking about it as an opportunity. For office buildings, the single largest controllable operating expense is your energy or utilities expenses; if the Environmental Protection Agency or the government could build awareness, develop tools, and help businesses understand how they could invest in energy efficiency and how that would translate to financial performance results for them — it was a great experiment. And it turns out that it’s the single most successful voluntary program we’ve had to date, saving over $5 billion annually.
It’s clear how losing Energy Star would harm consumers, but I’m curious to hear from you about how this is also bad for building owners and residents. What is the cost of losing this program, especially from a climate perspective?
The most important contribution of the EPA’s Energy Star program is that it has created a national standard to benchmark and measure efficiency and energy performance. You can’t manage what you don’t measure, and consistency across building types, ages, and sizes — it’s pretty complicated to make an apples-to-apples comparison.
One of the tools and resources that Energy Star has created, which I see as being embedded in the fabric of American businesses, is their benchmarking tool called Portfolio Manager. It is tied to dozens of state and local jurisdiction policies and legislation that range from building energy disclosure to mandatory best practices to maintaining and operating buildings and emissions thresholds. So the Energy Star rating system is tied not only to how organizations assess their whole building performance, but also to how it tracks and measures progress towards efficiency improvements and then gives a certification or recognition for the most highly efficient ones.
Another thing folks tend not to consider is the relationship between energy efficiency and grid stability. Energy Star-certified appliances, homes, buildings, and industrial facilities help to reduce peak demand, which improves grid stability and resilience. It also lowers the risk of brownouts and blackouts. Think about the growing demands of data center computing and AI models — we need to bring more energy onto the grid and make more space for it. People sometimes don’t realize that it is really dependent on a consistent, impartial standard as a level setting.
If you look at some of the statistics, they’re projecting that investments in new data centers will grow at more than a 20% compound annual growth rate, and that’s equal to $59 billion. It’s just astronomical how much more energy demand there will be. If you try to put that on top of a grid that is fairly antiquated and very inefficient in the way it generates, transmits, and distributes energy, then you are intensifying the potential problem.
I’ve heard about manufacturers or an outside energy or appliance group possibly setting up a replacement program if Energy Star is eliminated. What is the advantage of having the government specifically oversee Energy Star?
Three or four things make the federal government the most unique entity and the most well-equipped to oversee the Energy Star program. First, they have access to large data sets using CBECS, the Commercial Building Energy Consumption Survey, and RECS, the Residential Energy Consumption Survey. The government inherently is an impartial, unbiased group, and entities are willing to share their data with it, and that would not be the same if it were a third party or a privatized group. That data set is instrumental in creating the standards that allow you, for products, to evaluate the most energy efficient, or for buildings, to develop a one-to-100 score. Energy Star allows the top 25% to be recognized as exemplary energy performance.
The government also has access to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory resources; they have the data, and I believe they have the impartiality and the trust. Today, the Energy Star brand has over 90% consumer recognition. I would be concerned if manufacturers or others would produce confusion in the marketplace related to a single little blue label.
Is there anything consumers should know about making decisions or navigating their choices if we return to a pre-1992 landscape?
In the absence of an Energy Star label, one thing we can do is help consumers understand that it is not just about the first cost of a dishwasher or a washing machine or renting an apartment. It’s about total lifecycle costs. What the Energy Star label does is it helps you have confidence that [an appliance] will use the least amount of energy necessary to run over its lifetime. But if your product or apartment is full of less efficient appliances, you have to think about how much more energy you will pay for over that life cycle. That’s sometimes a difficult concept for folks to understand: They think of their first cost, not the cost to operate or maintain something over time, which is higher if it’s not energy efficient.
Is there anything else people often overlook when considering the ramifications of losing Energy Star?
Energy efficiency is important for all constituencies and all sectors of the U.S. economy. Some folks will be harder hit by this, and by that, I mean low-income housing, schools, hospitals, and public sector buildings. Those facilities often have very limited budgets, so energy efficiency is one of the lowest-cost, most effective investments with good returns. But if you’re a low-income family, think about it: If you make less than $33,000 a year for a family of four, your utility bills have an outsized impact on the total cost of living. If the total utility bill is $300 or $400 a month, then utilities represent 10% to 15% of your total income, so efficiency can have an outsized impact.
The other side of that is mission-critical facilities. Having the ability to run lights, air conditioning, and cooling is important for comfort, but in some facilities — like precision manufacturing or biopharmaceuticals, data centers, things of that nature — it becomes a mission-critical area, not a nice-to-have. We can help reduce the amount of energy used by those facilities, extend their useful life, help them maintain their systems longer, and allow those businesses to be more competitive.
What’s your read on how the proposed Energy Star elimination is being discussed right now?
There’s a lot of hyperbole about Energy Star being eliminated — it’s a fait accompli. It is important to note that Energy Star is a line item identified in the statute by Congress for approval for funding. It seems pretty unrealistic, from a judicial standpoint, that it would be able to be eliminated before the end of this fiscal year.
I know that there are many, many representatives, both Republican and Democrats, who support Energy Star. We’ve had 35 years of bipartisan support, and it has been earmarked in congressional law many times, through multiple George H.W. and George W. Bush administrations. And there are a lot of lobbying efforts that I’m personally aware of within the commercial real estate industry and the manufacturing industry, where folks are reaching out and doing calls to action for the House and Senate Appropriations majority members — similar activities to what we did eight years ago when Energy Star was directly under fire.
It seems like such a strange thing for the administration to go after. It’s not like appliance manufacturers were clamoring for this, right?
It’s very vexing to me. I don’t get it. If the Trump administration wants to focus on affordability in American households, energy efficiency isn’t the thing to cut. I’m not sure if it’s getting caught up in the fact that it is in the Office of Atmospheric Pollution Prevention, or because at the Department of Energy’s Better Buildings Program, Biden launched the Better Climate Challenge. I don’t know if it’s because it had some ties to climate, but what’s ironic is that it didn’t start as a climate program. It began as an energy efficiency program, and it’s always been focused on businesses and the financial returns on investment — it helps us attract capital and debt for investment in real estate. It’s really disconnected.
Pre-construction Thacker Pass.Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images