A new study has found that energy-efficient appliance programs administered by the state are not as energy efficient as predicted.
The Are Residential Energy Efficiency Upgrades Effective study, conducted by scholars at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), found that out of the 24 SoCal Edison programs that provide financial incentives for upgrading household appliances to reduce energy usage, not all were successful.
“This is not new and it’s something that everybody has suspected,” said Robert Michaels, a retired California State University (CSU)-Fullerton economics professor. “More and more research is determining that savings and energy costs can get wiped out if people respond by using more. The popular interpretation is these programs save energy so, therefore, they must reduce costs and people will simply use less energy but that's not the end of the story.”
The study found, for example, that subsidies attached to pool pump upgrades lead to 12.7% in energy savings and efficient refrigerators led to 6.2% energy savings but incentives for household appliances, such as washers and dryers, resulted in a rise in energy usage.
“We don't have any really good idea of how effective a lot of these programs are and yet we're going forward with them in ways that probably have some consequences, which if we were able to think about them now, they might at least lead us to better policy choices but we haven't done the homework on them,” Michaels told the Southern California Record. “There aren't that many people interested in doing the homework as long as it sounds good, people vote for it.”
The state of California spends some $1 billion per year on programs that subsidize the installation of energy-efficient appliances, according to a press release.
“This is going to raise the cost of living for lower-income people relative to upper-income people,” Michaels said. “Upper-income people will be able to take advantage of these luxuries and simply saying you're going to build these standards into the appliances, does not tell anything about who buys the appliances and it doesn't tell anything about who pays the bills if there are subsidies involved.”
The study also determined that engineering estimates tend to rely on the technical capability of appliances rather than on how people use them.
“There's a lot of research still going forward on this and, in many cases, it’s research that will correct a lot of errors in our way of thinking about energy efficiency,” Michaels added. “Whether the government will change its policies just because it's been learned that people really aren't behaving in the naive way that the conservation enthusiasts originally set forth, is a question for politics.”