Frustrated CE Firms Weighing Energy Star Alternatives
CE companies are looking at devising alternatives to the Energy Star program, and the immediate provocation for the move is the changes being made to the program’s product qualification and verification rules. Executives of several companies “in our industry will be coming together” this week to “talk about possible alternatives to the Energy Star program,” a senior executive familiar with the initiative told us. The EPA is unaware of the industry initiative, an agency official said.
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The idea is in a very early, “exploratory” stage, the executive said, declining to give details of the meeting. There’s “serious concern and frustration” among industry players over the EPA’s planned changes to Energy Star, and the way the agency is “managing those changes,” he said. “The concerns center around product qualification, certification and verification [and] the proposed changes in those areas."
The EPA is strengthening product qualification and verification rules, requiring that qualification testing be done by third-party labs or in-house accredited labs. It also wants verification testing, to ensure compliance with Energy Star specifications, to be conducted by third-party companies. The agency decided to fast-track the changes after a GAO report found that Energy Star was prone to fraud and abuse because investigators got certification for 15 bogus products.
The CE industry has sought exemption from the proposed changes, citing its “excellent track record” of compliance with Energy Star. The EPA has found 100 percent compliance by the industry, the CEA said in comments. The proposal for testing by third-party labs “ignores this marketplace success as well as industry’s underlying system of self-certification,” the group said. The requirement would mean “new costs and burdens for many consumer electronics manufacturers,” it said.
As for industry gripes over how EPA’s carrying out the changes, the executive said it concerns how the agency is “not addressing at all the concerns and suggestions of key program stakeholders.” This has led to interest from several industry players in “at least having an exploratory discussion of possible alternatives to the Energy Star program,” he said. Industry sees an opportunity here, recognizing consumer interest in saving energy and “consumer and industry support” for energy efficiency, he said.
The meeting this week will be the “first of many steps if there is sufficient interest to pursue more seriously an alternative to Energy Star,” the executive said. Asked if CE retailers were attending the meeting, he said the “invitation is out there for anybody across the distribution chain of the industry who is interested.” Asked if there was concern about revisions to specifications for particular products, the official said industry has issues with specs for certain products, but “this discussion stems from a frustration with EPA’s planned changes to the program in the area of certification and verification and how EPA is managing the changes."
An executive of a TV maker we spoke to was skeptical of the push to develop alternatives to Energy Star. “There is a lot of concern among manufacturers about the [Energy Star] program’s direction, but it is the leading program out there in the world so I can’t imagine people would willingly walk away from it,” he said. The effort is largely a manufacturer initiative, said a CE retail executive. “I don’t know what problems the manufacturers are trying to resolve but from a retail point of view we value Energy Star.” As a voluntary program and a “public-private partnership,” Energy Star has been largely successful, he said.
Energy Star Program Manager Katharine Kaplan said she was unaware of an industry move. The Consumer Electronics Retailers Coalition is “watching and monitoring” the move by manufacturers to devise alternatives to Energy Star, said Executive Director Christopher McLean. The Plasma Display Coalition directed inquiries to individual manufacturers. The LCD TV Association didn’t respond to a call for comment.