“The Freedom to Buy Inefficient Products”: A Rebuttal

From MasterResource

By Mark Krebs 

“When relevant factors are properly considered, the most cost-effective appliances are usually the cheapest to buy and maintain. Super-efficient appliances are super expensive to buy and maintain.”

On June 9, 2025, Andrew Campbell, Executive Director of the Energy Institute at the Hass School of Business, University of California, Berkeley, published the above-named article.  It is subtitled and summarized by the following: “If the DOE undoes minimum energy efficiency standards, which are decades old, consumer costs will likely rise.”

This statement is simultaneously vague, inaccurate and misleading. Where should I start debunking this fallacious statement? I suppose I should start with who I am to challenge Berkeley’s Energy Institute at Haas. I’m an engineer and energy policy analyst with decades of experience opposing DOE’s minimum energy efficiency standards. This can be easily validated by:

1. Searching for my full name at regulations.gov.[1]
2. My archives here at MasterResource.

Cutting to the chase, in general, DOE’s Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy Office (EERE), has long since harvested the low-hanging fruits of improved appliance minimum energy efficiency standards. Over the last two decades, EERE has increasingly resorted to analytical manipulation of “technical support documentation” (TSD) that are too heavy to lift, let alone read. 

Typical EERE TSD’s easily exceed a thousand pages and are based upon “black box” models that virtually defy independent verification. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) is a major contractor to EERE (through its Energy Technologies Area (ETA) divisions) and who, in turn, manage an army of private contractors who generate EERE’s analyses. In short, this deep state bureaucracy has a lot of mouths to feed.

In recent years (i.e., the Biden Administration), the envisioned cornucopia for bureaucratic growth has been the “transition” to “clean” (renewable) energy through the increased regulation of carbon emissions. This bureaucratic growth potential is graphically summarized as follows:

“Transitioning” energy efficiency to carbon efficiency grows the regulation business

Source: “Electrification – What Does It Mean for Energy Efficiency?”

EERE and its technical support apparatus have been proven in court to manipulate its “cost effective” analyses to achieve it legislative hurdles. One case-in-point is its self-serving misuse of “random assignments,” which effectively assumes that consumers purchase decisions are never influenced by the economic consequences of potential investments regardless of the economic stakes. These assumptions, buried “deep in the weeds” of EERE’s models, purposefully skew EERE’s analyses to force-fit predetermined cost-effectiveness objectives.[2]

Another example of easy EERE scenario manipulation is the following comparison of 2011 and 2015 Life Cycle Cost (LCC) spreadsheet cost-saving calculations for non‐weatherized residential gas furnaces that EERE was determined to eliminate–at least for the non-condensing variety that most consumers have in their homes:

The most important observation of the above chart is the wild variation of percentage change between a few short years where gas prices were actually decreasing. Well over a thousand percent change in many cases. Let that sink in!

Getting back to the subtitle of Campbell’s article, “If the DOE undoes minimum energy efficiency standards, which are decades old, consumer costs will likely rise,” total life-cycle consumer costs effectiveness of EERE minimum appliance efficiencies” bear the brunt of bureaucratic empire building and mission creep.

Sure, EERE must collect public comments on all its minimum appliance energy efficiency “proposals,” but the division unilaterally determines what to do. At the end of the Day, EERE issues a “Final Rule” for a given proposed minimum appliance efficiency “improvement.” 

Effectively challenging a “Final Rule” is definitely not for the faint of heart. Historically, EERE’s legal defense is effectively unlimited through representation through the US Department of Justice (DOJ) and the technical/analytical support of the aforementioned deep state bureaucracy, as well as the usual suspects of well-funded energy efficiency advocates) e.g., NRDC, ACEEE, etc.). The latter is pictorially summarized as follows:

The cosmology of energy codes & standards

Conclusion

When relevant factors are properly considered, the most cost-effective appliances are usually the cheapest to buy and maintain. Super-efficient appliances are super expensive to buy and maintain.  In the real world, for example, one failed $0.50 capacitor in the computerized motherboard of a super-efficient furnace or whatever, can easily destroy any perceived/potential opportunity for consumer lifetime monetary savings.  Given its repeated manipulative propensities, EERE has proven to be incapable of serving the best interests of consumers and deserves to be eliminated.

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Mark Krebs (markedwardkrebs@gmail.com), a mechanical engineer and energy policy consultant, has worked in energy efficiency design and program evaluation for well over thirty years. Mark has served as an expert witness and/or commenter in scores of State and Federal energy efficiency proceedings and has been an advisor to DOE. Mark, a Principal at MasterResource, has authored dozens of articles on natural gas vs. electricity and “Deep Decarbonization” policy. Recently retired from Spire Inc., Krebs has formed an energy policy consultancy, Gas Analytic & Advocacy Services (GAAS) with other veteran energy analysts.

[1] Filter by selecting “Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy Office”

[2] For more information of the EERE’s “random assignment” analytical cheating, simply put the term “random assignment”:into the MasterResource” search box.