Energy Efficiency Standards For Appliances Research Articles

Do Opportunity Costs of Regulations Appropriately Benefit or Inappropriately Burden Disadvantaged Consumers?

Abstract President Biden’s first-day memo “Modernizing Regulatory Review” directs the Office of Management and Budget to “propose procedures that take into account the distributional consequences of regulations… to ensure that regulatory initiatives appropriately benefit and do not inappropriately burden disadvantaged, vulnerable, or marginalized communities.” This paper makes two contributions. First, it discusses how economic analysis can transparently provide the information needed to make value-judgments about what distributional effects are appropriate and inappropriate. Second, it discusses the distributional consequences of regulations that are either designed to reduce internalities or might have the additional benefit of reducing internalities. Examples include tobacco product regulations, appliance energy efficiency standards, and automobile fuel efficiency standards. In many cases, the regulations will increase the prices or decrease the availability of goods that disadvantaged consumers prefer. This paper discussed how to determine whether restricting their consumption opportunities creates net benefits or net costs for disadvantaged consumers. Inframarginal consumers who do not change their consumption face higher opportunity costs but do not receive any benefits from reduced internalities. Empirical challenges include the need to quantify the fraction of inframarginal consumers and the size of the internalities.

Minimum Energy Efficiency Standards for Appliances: Old and New Economic Rationales

Author(s): Houde, Sebastien; Spurlock, C. Anna | Abstract: We revisit Hausman and Joskow (1982)'s economic rationales for appliance minimum energy efficiency standards. In addition to the four market failures they argued could justify appliance standards--energy prices below marginal social cost, consumers underestimating energy prices, consumer discount rates above social discount rates, or principal agent problems--we discuss two additional market failures that are relevant and potentially economically important in this context: market power and innovation market failures. We highlight puzzles uncovered by recent empirical results, and suggest directions future research should take to better understand the normative implications of appliance standards.

97/04325 Present status of residential appliance energy efficiency standards—an international review

97/04325 Present status of residential appliance energy efficiency standards—an international review

Appliance energy standards in Europe

In recent years there has been a revival of interest in appliance energy efficiency standards in Europe, in particular within the European Union 1 (EU). This paper summarizes the activity that has occurred across continental Europe, from the EU to Russia, but focuses principally on Western Europe. The paper discusses the components of residential electricity demand by end use and the role played by appliances, the energy consumption and energy efficiency trends for selected appliances, the European appliance market, the development of the EU's mandatory energy labelling scheme and some of its results, the testing and certification institutions in Europe, the EU's mandatory minimum energy efficiency standards proposal for refrigerators and freezers but current preference for voluntary agreements, the maximum energy consumption standards in Russia, the Swiss target-value approach, and the savings potentials of appliance energy efficiency standards for ‘cold’ appliances, ‘wet’ appliances, leaking electricity, electric motors, and office lighting. Since this paper was written (in 1995), the EU has passed legislation to introduce mandatory minimum energy efficiency standards for refrigerators and freezers that will enter into effect in 1999. The standards are set at a level intended to ensure that models sold after 1999 will, on average, require 15% less energy than the average of models sold between 1991 and 1992 after normalization for storage volume and cooling service. Despite these activities, the paper demonstrates that there remains a huge potential to save energy cost-effectively. 1 The former European Community (Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, The Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, UK) became the European Union (EU) after the signing of the Maastricht Treaty in 1993. A year later Sweden, Austria and Finland opted to join. The former European Community is referred to as the EC-12 in this paper.

Appliance manufacturers' perspective on energy standards

Appliance energy efficiency standards have had a large and growing influence on the US appliance industry for the last fifteen years. This article presents the perspectives gained by the two largest US appliance manufacturers as our companies have participated in the process of determining the standard levels and then designed and manufactured improved efficiency products to comply with the new standards.

Theory and methodology of appliance standards

Interest in appliance energy efficiency standards is spreading from North America and Europe to many other countries around the world. This article discusses two basic methodologies for performing energy and economic analyses that are used to develop energy efficiency standards. Procedures for setting standards that are based upon those analyses are also discussed. Additionally, the future direction of appliance standards is briefly discussed.

Appliance standards in Japan

Japan's first appliance energy efficiency standards were set in 1979 under the Energy Conservation Law and covered refrigerators and household air conditioners. In 1994 a number of appliances were added to the list of specified equipment. After explaining the process by which standards are established, we review the new standards for fluorescent lights, televisions, heat pump air conditioners, and copiers. The new standards are expected to exert a major influence on appliance efficiencies in Japan, reversing a decade-long trend of designers ignoring energy efficiency. Manufacturers will shift their product mix away from inefficient models.