[T]he Vermont House approved a bill Wednesday that would put energy efficiency standards for appliances into effect in Vermont if Congress or the White House were to eliminate national standards.
President Donald Trump’s proposed budget features dramatic cuts to an array of government functions, including energy efficiency, in order to expand military spending.
The bill, H. 411, sets standards for energy efficient home, commercial and industrial appliances. The federal regulations were put in place by President Gerald Ford.
The office that administers the program, a branch of the Department of Energy called the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, is expected to be defunded or otherwise hobbled through Trump’s budget, said Rep. Curt McCormack, D-Burlington.
The Legislature is trying to avert an explicit repeal of the standards, McCormack said.
“We’re trying to get the states to convince Congress and the president not to repeal” or otherwise prevent enforcement of the efficiency standards, McCormack said. “One way of doing that is to say, ‘We’re going to do it if you don’t.’”
The bill represents Vermont’s bid to join in a larger effort undertaken by numerous other states, McCormack said.
California is one of them, having already adopted a law that will automatically establish within state borders whatever efficiency standards Congress or the president nullifies, said Chris Granda, a Richmond-based senior researcher with the Appliance Standards Awareness Project.
“The reason for H.411 is to follow California’s lead and make it more difficult for extremists in the White House and Congress to eliminate energy efficiency standards at the federal level,” Granda said.
Efficiency standards have saved individuals and companies money and have helped to protect the environment, Granda said.
“If Congress and the Trump administration are successful in repealing or rolling back federal energy-efficiency standards, it will truly be a radical act that’ll be fairly unique in the world,” he said. “Most industrial countries have energy-efficiency standards. This is an aspect of modern, industrial civilization that’s widely acknowledged to be a beneficial thing.”
Such standards are common in large part because they save consumers money, said Sarah Wolfe, a clean energy advocate for the Vermont Public Interest Research Group.
Vermont households save around $550 each year from energy efficiency savings, Wolfe said, or about 20 percent of a Vermonter’s average energy bill.
“This is the most important energy policy you’ve never heard of,” Wolfe said. “No one is even aware these standards exist, they just benefit from them.”
Consumers are generally ignorant of the standards because there are no up-front costs.
In fact, the average cost of efficient appliances has decreased by an average of $12 since the standards went into effect, she said.
The standards are important, even if relatively unknown, because of the overall energy consumption they avert across the country, Wolfe said. Of all the energy-savings policies the U.S. government has in place, these save more energy than any but the fuel-economy standards known as CAFE, which were established in the 1970s in response to the Arab oil embargo.
The program is expected to have saved Americans a cumulative $1 trillion by 2020, and $2 trillion by 2030, according to Department of Energy estimates. This latter sum represents an energy savings equivalent to what the entire United States consumes in a year, according to the DOE.
House representatives approved H.411 Wednesday evening. The bill will then go to the Senate Natural Resources and Energy Committee.
Representatives from the Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers did not return a request for comment. Sofia Mancheno-Gross, of PR firm The Hannon Group, refused on behalf of the Department of Energy to permit EERE representatives to take questions for this story.
