The North Carolina Energy Office has decided to launch an Energy Star rebate program, which will, from April 22-25, provide 15% off the purchase of select Energy Star labeled appliances (specifically washers, dishwashers, refrigerators, and freezers) from any store participating in the program. The money for this program comes from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which provided $8.8m for the campaign. The North Carolina Energy Office estimates that 49,960 “Energy Star” appliances will be purchased, “saving enough electricity to power 536 homes for a year”.
Sounds great, doesn’t it? Except it’s a horrible, horrible idea.
First, allow me to make the obvious argument: $8.8 million could go to help a lot of families. Sure, there’s always the “trickle down effect”, and supporting local businesses is valuable to the community, but $8.8 million dollars could go to helping a lot of families stay afloat for a good amount of time. Certainly, it wouldn’t be many families, and it might not keep them afloat for very long — but it’s still significant. I don’t mean to be eco-unfriendly, but the ability to eat and sleep on an everyday basis in my mind takes priority over energy savings.
The second argument? Energy Star is a very questionable program, especially when funds could go elsewhere.
The Energy Star program was initiated in 1992 as a method to encourage appliance manufacturers (particularly appliances that suck down a lot of power, like dryers) to design appliances that used less energy, and thus taxed less on the grid and lower greenhouse gas emissions. Without going into too many details, the theory of encouraging people to switch to Energy Star appliances is pretty simple: it saves everyone (electricity-related) money and the environment in the long run, and in the short term it helps encourage appliance sales.
The problem is, it’s not quite as cut and dry is that. For a variety of reasons, the Energy Star program is questionable, at best. For one thing, very recently, government investigators revealed that the program would literally accept a space heater with a feather duster and fly strips attached and label it “Energy Star” without even seeing it in person or investigating it. Appliance makers could very well be lying about energy efficiency and no-one would be the wiser. Even on the most basic level, “Energy Star” rated appliances can cost double the price of non-rated appliances, as well as can be a heck of a lot more difficult to work with. Furthermore, on a technical level, lots of the “Energy Star” appliances out there are using cheaper materials, which obviously break easier and, in some cases, simply contribute to landfills and require the customer to purchase a replacement. And, of course, the statistics are usually inflated about the effectiveness of the “Energy Star” program — meaning those wonderful numbers mentioned in the beginning of this article are likely just drawn from thin air. Clearly, the program has its flaws.
This is not to imply that going non-energy efficient is better — rather, it’s simply an indicator that going “Energy Star” does not necessarily benefit the consumer, the environment, or the government. It may benefit the energy companies, but only in small doses. And, of course, this is presuming that consumers would be replacing non-”Energy Star” appliances with “Energy Star” appliances — there is very likely the case that someone could replace a rated appliance with another rated appliance, meaning absolutely nothing to the government!
Of course, we can’t blame the NC Government too much for this — it’s federally handed down money, tagged for a specific purpose. Still, I can’t help but to think it’s sad that we spend so much money on such an unproven project when people in the state desperately need the money to survive.
