EPA Creating ‘Standard Operating Procedure’ to Boost Energy Star ‘Transparency’
EPA declined comment Wednesday on CTA accusations before a House Energy Subcommittee hearing Tuesday on an Energy Star bill discussion draft that Energy Star program administrators “overuse” paid consultants in drafting product testing requirements, resulting in "wasteful government spending” and "less transparency." Representatives referred us to a statement in the record where EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt said the agency “stands ready to work with Congress and our industry partners to ensure the Energy Star program continues to work well.”
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Communications Daily is required reading for senior executives at top telecom corporations, law firms, lobbying organizations, associations and government agencies (including the FCC). Join them today!
Creating a “standard operating procedure” for Energy Star product specs is one way the agency is trying to address “any potential confusion about the transparency and inclusiveness of EPA’s processes,” said Pruitt. The new procedure “will include specifics on minimum public comment periods, procedures for sharing proposals with stakeholders, and a detailed, step-by-step description of the entire process,” said Pruitt. EPA also is working with the Department of Energy “to reduce manufacturer reporting burden by avoiding duplicative submittal of product information” for Energy Star, he said.
CTA wants program administrators to “defer to private-sector voluntary consensus standards,” said Doug Johnson, vice president-technology policy, in written testimony. DOE and EPA “appear to spend significant sums hiring unnecessary consultants to develop test procedures for measuring the power consumption of products being considered for Energy Star program specifications and, if applicable, DOE standards,” said Johnson. “This use of consultants is not only costly, but also less transparent and open than the consensus standards development process.”
CTA takes no formal position on a discussion draft proposal to transfer Energy Star program leadership to DOE, said Johnson. Were that to occur, CTA “would need assurances that DOE would work collaboratively in partnership with industry in the voluntary Energy Star program,” he said. The draft makes it “feasible” that DOE “delegates to EPA certain sectors within the program,” but is silent on “what gets delegated,” said Johnson.
The draft advocates a “balanced and bipartisan solution” to Energy Star third-party certification, and CTA supports it, said Johnson. The solution maintains third-party certification “authority, but allows electronics manufacturers with a demonstrated track record of compliance to earn their way out of the burdensome requirement,” he said. If CE makers don’t comply, “more draconian, costly third-party certification requirements reapply,” he said. It's also important to note that the “rigorous post-market verification system that exists today would stay in place,” he said. EPA previously told us it’s no fan of CTA proposals to change the third-party certification rules. That would again leave Energy Star vulnerable to fraud as it was before the rules were imposed six years ago, EPA said (see 1604220027).
Pushing for relaxation of third-party certification rules on tech products is important because the sector is “rather unique in the sense that we have extremely competitive time-to-market pressures,” said Johnson under questioning from Vice Chairman Pete Olson, R-Texas. Product “life cycles in the tech industry may only be a few months long,” he said. “To take the time and the cost at the premarket stage" to test products is "a particular burden in the case of our sector,” he said.
The consumer tech industry has “an excellent track record of compliance” with Energy Star, said Johnson. “EPA acknowledged that several years ago when they imposed third-party certification on everybody in order to tackle discrete problems that could have been tackled in a discreet way. But the blanket went over everybody and we were covered as well and have been ever since.”
The draft takes a “balanced approach to let the good actors earn their way out of the burden and if they mess up, they’re back in” for three years, he said. “Post-market verification” of Energy Star products “stays," said Johnson. “That’s testing products off the store shelf to make sure they adhere to the requirements of the Energy Star program. We don’t touch that.”
CTA doesn’t advocate “eviscerating” EPA’s “capability” to require third-party certification, Johnson told Rep. Jerry McNerney, R-Calif. “It was important for EPA to recognize, and they did when they instituted third-party certification, that we had an excellent track record, and we’ve maintained that.”
CTA wants to shield member manufacturers from the “burden that is too much for a company” to bear if it has a product that would qualify for Energy Star "but doesn’t want to take the time and cost involved with testing,” Johnson told McNerney. “We’ve heard feedback from our manufacturer members who tell us they might not want to pay the bill or take the time, they’ll just meet the spec and get the product to market. So we end up with a store shelf where you have Energy Star-labeled products and products that meet the Energy Star spec but don’t have a label because they didn’t want to take the time. I don’t think that’s very good for the program.”
A “good track record of compliance” with Energy Star is "where there’s no egregious examples of failure, of producing Energy Star-qualified products not quite meeting the requirements,” Johnson told Rep. Dave Loebsack, D-Iowa. “I’m not talking about paperwork violations.” When Johnson defines what constitutes a “100 percent track record of compliance, I’m taking that characterization directly from EPA,” he said.