By Thomas Catenacci | Fox News
Energy experts and manufacturers are warning that the Biden administration’s aggressive regulatory regime will lead to more expensive household appliances that are far less effective than current models.
The Department of Energy (DOE) has made so-called energy efficiency standards a central part of its climate agenda since Biden took office, boasting that it has taken more than 110 actions on appliances in 2022 alone. According to experts, though, the regulations impacting everything from water heaters and furnaces to clothes washers and dishwashers could ultimately be counterproductive.
“What these mandates, what these standards, do is enforce a level of efficiency that doesn’t make sense,” Ben Lieberman, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, told Fox News Digital in an interview. “And they compromise product quality. We’ve already seen this to an extent with cost of clothes washer standards.”
‘These savings really just don’t add up right now during this time of high inflation,’ appliance industry group tells Fox News Digital
On his first day in office in January 2021, President Biden signed an executive order requiring the DOE to make “major revisions” to current appliance regulation standards and standards set by the Trump administration. A month later, the agency began moving forward on more than a dozen energy efficiency rules, impacting a wide range of appliances.
And the administration has continued introducing appliance regulations this year, unveiling rules in February that would restrict which cooking stoves, ovens, refrigerators and clothes washers consumers can purchase. The DOE said the efficiency rules would save consumers billions of dollars and “significantly reduce pollution” contributing to climate change.