WASHINGTON, D.C. – President Trump and his allies in Congress are seeking to eliminate energy efficiency requirements for appliances, automobiles and other energy consuming applications in an effort that will cost American families and consumers trillions of dollars over time, according to a new report issued today by Public Citizen.

“Trump’s decision to target efficiency initiatives discredits his claim that he withdrew from the Paris climate accord because of concerns that the deal would cost U.S. jobs. These programs unambiguously would help meet the goals of the accord and benefit the U.S. economy and yet Trump is still targeting them,” said Taylor Lincoln, research director of Public Citizen’s Congress Watch division and author of the report, “Blinded by the light.” Read full report (Public Citizen)

Among the findings of the report:

• The far-right U.S. House Freedom Caucus seeks to repeal 22 efficiency standards for appliances that would save consumers $212 billion over the next 30 years if the standards are left intact, according to U.S. Department of Energy projections. Standards for all appliances are projected to cumulatively save Americans $2.4 trillion by 2035.
• The Trump administration has proposed eliminating the Energy Star program, which recognizes products with outstanding efficiency performance. The program saved Americans $430 billion from 1990 to 2015, and $36 billion in 2015, alone, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
• The Trump administration has put on hold automobile fuel efficiency standards for vehicles sold in 2022 to 2025 that would save consumers $56 billion due to reduced fuel costs just for vehicles sold in those model years.
• Additionally, the Trump administration proposes to eliminate the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-e) program, which provides capital for early-stage clean energy pursuits. Relatedly, the administration proposes to cut the budget of the U.S. Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) by 70 percent. EERE conducts research into clean energy technologies and is credited with helping to bring the cost of solar electricity down nearly to that of electricity generated by fossil fuels.

Read more (Public Citizen)

Eleven state attorneys general are joining environmentalists in suing the Department of Energy (DOE) over a handful of energy efficiency regulations that the Trump administration has stopped from taking effect.

The rules, covering appliances such as walk-in freezers and air compressors, were made final in December under the Obama administration.

But Trump officials never completed the administrative steps to let the rules get published in the Federal Register. The lack of action was part of the new administration’s pause and review on regulations across the government, and the opponents say that was illegal.

“These common sense energy efficiency standards are vital to our public health, our environment, and consumers’ pocketbooks. Yet the Trump administration’s policies put polluters before everyday Americans,” New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, who is leading the lawsuit along with California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, said in a Tuesday statement.

Read more (The Hill)

Our first-ever scorecard of US utilities, released today, reveals striking regional differences and identifies the best — and worst — performers on energy efficiency. The 2017 Utility Energy Efficiency Scorecard looks at the performance of the 51 largest electric utilities in the United States and highlights cutting-edge efforts. Topping the list are Eversource Massachusetts and National Grid Massachusetts, which both earned the same score. Rounding out the top five are Pacific Gas & Electric, Baltimore Gas & Electric, and Eversource Connecticut.

Map showing the utilities in the scorecard, denoting the top performers.

Utilities are the primary providers of energy efficiency programs for US electricity customers. These programs deliver enormous benefits to households and businesses. Efficiency lowers customer bills, allows utilities to avoid or defer building new power plants or other infrastructure, and reduces local pollutants associated with electricity generation.

We wanted to dig further into this topic to determine which utilities are doing the best on energy efficiency programs and how others can improve. Typical programs encourage the purchase of efficient appliances, lighting, and heating, ventilation, and cooling (HVAC) — both at home and in other places such as commercial kitchens and restaurants.

Leading utilities sometimes undertake 20 or more efficiency programs. Only a few utilities take some of the more forward-thinking approaches such as promoting smart thermostats, residential geo-targeting, zero net energy buildings, and advanced space-heating heat pumps.

Read more (American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy)

Climate change poses a serious threat to every Virginian’s way of life. Unchecked, it will affect everything from our water quality to the air we breathe to whether and where residents can make investments or buy a home.

The Hampton Roads region is the second-most vulnerable area in the United States, behind New Orleans, to the costly impacts of sea-level rise. Because it is home to the largest naval station in the world, sea-level change threatens not only our infrastructure but also our national security.

We also have $92 billion worth of residential property at risk of damage from increased storm surges. Half of Virginia’s counties face increased risk of water shortages by 2050 caused by climate-related weather shifts.

Virginia may be particularly vulnerable, but this story is not unique to our state. The effects of climate change will increasingly pose a threat to communities and economies in every corner of the country and the world.

Read more (The Washington Post)

A majority of Americans across the political spectrum believe states are responsible for addressing climate change in the absence of federal policy, according to a new survey by University of Michigan researchers.

The National Surveys on Energy and Environment track public opinion on climate change and energy policy. This update gives a snapshot from this spring—after President Trump began eliminating former President Obama’s Clean Power Plan, and just before Trump’s June announcement to withdraw from the international Paris climate agreement.

“Prior to the Obama administration, the states were really driving climate policy, and Americans say if the federal government doesn’t want to act on climate anymore, then states should be back in the driver’s seat,” said Sarah Mills, a research fellow at the U-M Ford School of Public Policy and co-author of the study. “States are where we have historically made progress and where we can continue to make progress in the future.”

Mills says there’s strong support from all political parties for specific policy steps states have taken in the past—and not just among those who believe in climate change.

Read more (Michigan News)

As President Trump retreats from his predecessor’s efforts to tackle climate change, it is more important than ever that our cities and states develop tools to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions responsible for the planet’s warming. In New York City, this means first and foremost cutting energy use in buildings, which accounts for over two-thirds of the city’s emissions.

A simple tweak to an existing law could help the city reach its goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent by 2050 and create a template for the rest of the country to follow. Local Law 84, enacted in 2009, obligates the city’s largest buildings to report how much energy they consume each year. Participating buildings then receive scores indicating how efficient (or inefficient) they are compared to similar buildings.

But almost no one sees the data. The ratings are posted on a government website that few people know about and are charted on a 100-point scale that is difficult to interpret. Seven years into the program, even many experienced real estate brokers are unaware the data exists.

Read more (New York Times)

Here’s a fact I bet you didn’t know: in 2015, energy efficiency saved more electricity than was produced by every type of electricity resource in our country but for coal and natural gas. Hydro, renewables, even nuclear—energy efficiency saved more than each of them produced.

That is incredible. It also means that energy efficiency came through as the third-largest electricity resource in the United States that year.

When it comes to clean energy, we spend a lot of our time talking about the tremendous benefits and abilities of resources like wind and solar. But do you know the very cleanest energy resource we have? That would be the one that helps us never call upon an electron at all.

Over the past few decades, energy efficiency has slowly but steadily helped us make better use of the energy we consume for all types of activities, from heating and cooling to lighting and transportation. Everybody has benefited as a result, so it makes sense to keep pushing forward, right?

Read more (Union of Concerned Scientists)

What’s not to like about energy efficiency? It saves consumers money, supports millions of jobs, encourages businesses to innovate, and benefits the environment. In fact, becoming more energy efficient is the cheapest and fastest way to cut energy bills and carbon pollution.

Yet while energy efficiency—also known as optimizing our energy use or not wasting energy—is one of America’s most successful energy policies, it faces an unprecedented threat from President Trump and some fellow Republicans in Congress.

True, any policies that smack of “clean” (air, water, energy) are under threat in the Trump era. What makes the multi-front assault on energy efficiency surprising is that it could dismantle programs—such as ENERGY STAR®—that have long enjoyed support not only from both sides of the aisle, but also the private sector and the public at large. More than three-quarters of Trump supporters expressed support in a 2016 post-election survey for policies that require manufacturers to make appliances and equipment more energy efficient.

Read more (National Resource Defense Council)

Not long ago in the southwest of England, a local community set out to replace a 1960s-vintage school with a new building using triple-pane windows and super-insulated walls to achieve the highest possible energy efficiency. The new school proudly opened on the same site as the old one, with the same number of students, and the same head person—and was soon burning more energy in a month than the old building had in a year.

The underfloor heating system in the new building was so badly designed that the windows automatically opened to dump heat several times a day even in winter.  A camera in the parking lot somehow got wired as if it were a thermal sensor, and put out a call for energy any time anything passed in front of the lens.  It was “a catalogue of disasters,” according to David Coley, a University of Bath specialist who came in to investigate.

Many of the disasters were traceable to the building energy model, a software simulation of energy use that is a critical step in designing any building intended to be green. Among other errors, the designers had extrapolated their plan from a simplified model of an isolated classroom set in a flat landscape, with full sun for much of the day. That dictated window tinting and shading to reduce solar gain. Nobody seems to have noticed that the new school actually stood in a valley surrounded by shade trees and needed all the solar gain it could get.  The classrooms were so dark the lights had to be on all day.

It was an extreme case.  But it was also a good example, according to Coley, of how overly optimistic energy modeling helps cause the “energy performance gap,” a problem that has become frustratingly familiar in green building projects.   The performance gap refers to the failure of energy improvements, often undertaken at great expense, to deliver some (or occasionally all) of the promised savings. A study last year of refurbished apartment buildings in Germany, for instance, found that they missed the predicted energy savings by anywhere from 5 to 28 percent. In Britain, an evaluation of 50 “leading-edge modern buildings,” from supermarkets to health care centers, reported that they “were routinely using up to 3.5 times more energy than their design had allowed for” — and producing on average 3.8 times the predicted carbon emissions.

Read more. (Yale)