Can newfangled utility bills persuade Americans to use less energy?

You've swapped out your old thermostats for programmable models, replaced inefficient incandescent lightbulbs with the best compact fluorescent lightbulbs, followed our advice for saving energy at home, weatherized your attic, and taken advantage of tax credits and other incentives for energy-related home improvements.

There are still other ways to squeeze some more energy savings out of your home, and your utility company might be able to help—not by giving you an energy audit or lowering your rates (like that'd ever happen!). Rather, some utilities nationwide are sending out new bills that show your energy use compares to those of your neighbors, with a goal of getting you to keep up (or is that down?) with the Joneses. See the image below for some of the detailed information customers receive.

National Grid is sending 50,000 of its Massachusetts customers bills (shown) with data showing how their gas and electricity consumption compares to the 100 nearest and 20 thriftiest households of similar size in the area, according to this Boston Globe report. "There's obviously a little bit of a competitive aspect to it, to see if you can one-up your neighbors in terms of energy savings,'' said Monica Ibrahim, program manager for the National Grid program, told the paper.

The bills also contain energy-saving tips to spur energy hogs to consume less. A nationally representative survey by the Consumer Reports National Research Center found that 55 percent of respondents had done very little to conserve energy in their homes.

The technology for the consumption comparisons in these bills comes from Arlington, Virginia-based software company Opower, which has established partnerships with 21 utilities nationwide, including the Sacramento Municipal Utility District and Puget Sound Energy. "We're best known for use of behavioral science to show people how their energy usage compares to that of their neighbors," says Opower CEO Daniel Yates, whose company's software draws upon psychologist Robert B. Cialdini's theories of persuasion. National Grid hopes Opower-assisted bills will persuade customers to cut household energy consumption by 3 percent a year over the next decade. (Learn more about how the billing is designed to work.)

If your own utility still isn't using such high-tech bills, you might want to look into Google's PowerMeter or Microsoft's Hohm services or one of the watt meters we tested to ferret out energy-wasting appliances and practices.—Gian Trotta | e-mail | Twitter | Forums | Facebook

Essential Information: Our Energy Saving & Green Living guide offers other advice, including updated coverage of the $300 million State Energy Efficient Appliance Rebate Program, aka cash for clunkers for appliances.

 

By the Numbers: Energy Star homes reach major milestone

1 million

Number of Energy Star-qualified homes built nationwide since the program debuted in 1995. These homes have saved Americans $1.2 billion in energy costs, reduced greenhouse-gas emissions by 22 billion pounds, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The top 10 markets for Energy Star homes are Houston, Dallas, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Los Angeles, New York City, Tucson, San Antonio, Sacramento, and San Diego.

To qualify for Energy Star, says the EPA, a new home must be at least 15 percent more efficient than homes built to the 2004 International Residential Code and include other features that make them 20 to 30 percent more efficient than standard home, such as effective insulation, high-performance windows, and efficient heating and cooling equipment, appliances, lighting, and ventilation. (The image below, from Energy Star, shows typical locations of air leaks in a home. Check out our recent Weekend Project on weatherizing your attic.)

"This is an amazing achievement for the Energy Star program, but the real winners are the 1 million American families who have the chance to save money and keep harmful pollution out of the air. That's great news for anyone who wants to cut costs and protect our planet," said EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson in a press release. "We're going to keep the number of Energy Star homes growing, because every new Energy Star home is a step towards lower costs, cleaner air, and communities that are environmentally and economically sustainable."

To boost the energy efficiency of your home and save some real money, start with these simple, inexpensive steps and follow our overall advice for using less energy at home.—Celia Kuperszmid Lehrman | e-mail | Twitter | Forums | Facebook

Essential information: If you haven't done so already, get your heating system tuned up and install a programmable thermostat. Also refer to our buyer's guides to furnaces (more details here), water heaters, pellet stoves, and solar water heaters, and find the best compact fluorescent lightbulbs. Remember, some projects might qualify for federal tax credits. If you want energy-efficient appliances, stay up on the news related to the $300 million State Energy Efficient Appliance Rebate Program, also known as cash for clunkers for appliances.

 

Save money by replacing incandescent holiday lights with LED versions

If your holiday lights have seen better days, you might want to replace incandescent versions with more-efficient and more-durable LED lights.

Our tests of mini, C7, and C9 holiday lights showed that while incandescent versions did burn more brightly than LEDs, the LEDs were much more durable, ran cooler and posed a lower fire risk, and cost less to operate. While the initial cost of LEDs is higher than that of incandescents, we found that LEDs used 1 to 3 kilowatt hours of energy compared with 12 to 105 kWh for incandescents, generating savings of $1 to $11. Watch the video for more details.

Home Depot is offering an added incentive to trade in your played-out strings. For each string of used or broken incandescent holiday lights you turn in through November 15, Home Depot will give you $3 off any new LED lights you buy. The retailer says it will recycle any lights you turn in.

Remember, LED lights are not foolproof, as evidenced by this March 2009 recall issued by the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission. The lights presented a fire hazard and lacked an easily verifiable label from Underwriters Laboratories or any other recognized testing laboratory indicating that the product had met all safety and construction standards. To keep things safe at your home, follow these precautions for holiday lights:

• Buy only products certified by a recognized testing laboratory, including UL, ETL, or CSA. For UL-listed products, look for the silver- or gold-foil UL label on the cord itself. Labels with the green holographic UL logo indicate the lights are for indoor use only, while those with the red holographic UL logo can be used indoors and out.

• Before you hang them, inspect light strings carefully for loose connections, bare or frayed wires, missing bulbs, and cracked sockets.

• Don't use indoor string lights for more than a 90-day season without inspecting. Don't use outdoor lights for more than three holiday seasons.

• Don't connect more than three strings of push-in bulbs or up to 50 screw-in bulbs together. There are no specific limitations for LED light strings.

• Since the lights' electrical cords might contain lead, refrain from eating while hanging lights and wash your hands after handling them.—Gian Trotta | e-mail | Twitter | Forums | Facebook

Essential information: Save money on lighting elsewhere in your house by using Energy Star-qualified compact fluorescent lightbulbs. Read our latest report on CFLs and check out the ratings of these energy-saving bulbs (available to subscribers).

Paradise Cost: Hawaii's not a better place to live than West Virginia or North Dakota . . . at least when it comes to electricity prices

Cutting down on how much electricity you use at home is a good move for your finances and the environment. Some steps to using less energy are simple, like choosing energy-efficient appliances and using and maintaining them properly—read about the U.S. Department of Energy's $300 million State Energy Efficient Appliance Rebate Program, otherwise known as cash for clunkers for appliances—and replacing incandescent lightbulbs with compact fluorescent lightbulbs, like those covered in our new ratings-based report on CFLs.

One area where you have limited options in terms of saving money is the kilowatt-hour price you pay for electricity. In our stories we always refer to the national average price for electricity—currently almost 12 cents per kilowatt hour—but the price you pay could be a lot more or a lot less. Here are the states with the highest and lowest average per-kilowatt-hour costs for electricity, according to the U.S. Department of Energy's Energy Information Administration:

Highest electricity rates
Hawaii: 22.99 cents
Connecticut: 20.24 cents
New York: 19.74 cents
New Jersey: 17.83 cents
Alaska: 17.82 cents
Massachusetts: 16.63 cents
New Hampshire: 16.41 cents
Maryland: 15.95 cents
California: 15.91 cents
Maine: 15.19 cents

Lowest electricity rates
West Virginia: 7.87 cents
Washington: 7.93 cents
Louisiana: 8.24 cents
Idaho: 8.44 cents
Kentucky: 8.58 cents
Oklahoma: 8.79 cents
North Dakota: 8.86 cents
Tennessee: 8.97 cents
Wyoming: 9.07 cents
Oregon: 9.07 cents

In the era of the CFL and LEDs, looking back at Edison’s 1879 incandescent invention

Today marks the 130th anniversary of Thomas Alva Edison’s invention of the first commercially viable incandescent lightbulb. (The image, from the National Archives, is from Edison’s patent application; he received the patent in early 1880.) And while incandescents are still being improved upon to be more energy efficient, the emphasis today is on compact fluorescent lighting and LEDs, like those vying for the L Prize in the U.S. Department of Energy's Bright Tomorrow Lighting Prizes competition.

Check out our latest report on and ratings of compact fluorescent lightbulbs and learn how to save money on your annual utility bill.

Essential reading: Find out how to choose CFLs, read "10 Questions for . . . Nadarajah Narendran, Ph.D., Lighting Researcher" for news on advances in lighting technology, and see what European consumers think about the EU's ban on some incandescent lightbulbs.

By the Numbers: DOE Inspector General audit IDs Energy Star issues

90 percent

Approximate percentage of compact fluorescent lightbulbs that qualify for the federal government's Energy Star, according to the recently released "The Department's Management of the Energy Star Program," an audit by the U.S. Department of Energy's Inspector General.

Energy Star, a joint program of the U.S. Department of Energy and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, was launched in 1992 to help you identify the most energy-efficient options across dozens of product categories. The program has succeeded in saving consumers money and in raising public awareness of energy-efficiency matters; what's more, 70 percent of U.S. consumers recognize the Energy Star logo. But for many product categories, Energy Star hasn't been fast enough to update testing procedures or qualifying standards or implemented independent, third-party verification of energy use.

Consumer Reports has called for changes to the program for years, including in our October 2008 investigation "Energy Star Has Lost Some Luster," and the Inspector General's audit makes some of the same points.

Energy Star's guidelines indicated that about 25 percent of products in a category should qualify for an Energy Star. The fact that 90 percent of CFLs currently make the grade shows that the standards aren't tough enough, a point made in the Inspector General's audit: "One of the underlying principles of the Energy Star Program is to help consumers differentiate the most energy-efficient products within a given category. When 90 percent of the [products qualify], the consumer cannot easily judge the relative efficiencies of CFL products." (Note that using CFLs in the right applications can save you real money, and we recommend you buy Energy Star-qualified CFLs. As stated in our October 2009 report on CFLs, most non-Energy Star CFLs we tested had lower overall scores than Energy Star-qualified bulbs. Check our CFL ratings, available to subscribers, to find the top performers.)

This "overqualification" has not been limited to lighting. As we reported last fall, at one point half of all dishwashers qualified for an Energy Star, as did 67 percent of residential-use oil-fired boilers and 60 percent of dehumidifiers.

Less than three weeks after he took office, President Barack Obama issued a memorandum that called on the U.S. Department of Energy to update it efficiency standards for many household appliances. In that memorandum, the president requested that "the DOE take all necessary steps . . . to finalize legally required efficiency standards as expeditiously as possible and consistent with all applicable judicial and statutory deadlines."

Even when qualification standards are rigorous, the Energy Star program too often relies on self-regulated compliance from manufacturers. At best, this policy results in honest mistakes. At worst, it appears to open the door for obfuscation aimed at gaming the system. In our October 2008 report, we identified one refrigerator that used more than twice as much energy as claimed by the manufacturer. Citing that finding, the Inspector General called Energy Star's "lack of oversight and control in the area of product testing and certification" its most significant shortcoming.

"Third-party certification of compliance conducted by independent, accredited testing laboratories combined with DOE spot checking of Energy Star and energy-usage claims by manufacturers . . . is an important first step in ensuring Energy Star labeling is meaningful and helpful to consumers," wrote Shannon Baker-Branstetter, policy analyst for Consumers Union, the nonprofit publisher of Consumer Reports and the Home & Garden blog, in an October 16, 2009, letter to Energy Secretary Steven Chu.

The DOE has made some recent moves to strengthen its enforcement of energy-efficiency standards. Last week, the agency announced that it had established an enforcement team within the Office of the General Counsel and will set up a program to randomly review compliance with DOE certification requirements by manufacturers, and further detailed its enforcement of energy-efficiency regulations.

"For the sake of our environment and our economy, it's critical that we enforce our energy-efficiency regulations," said Scott Blake Harris, general counsel of the DOE, in an October 13 release. "Strong enforcement of the rules will encourage compliance and keep manufacturers who break the law from having a competitive advantage over manufacturers who play by the rules."

We'll continue to follow the news surrounding Energy Star.—Daniel DiClerico | e-mail | Twitter | Forums | Facebook

Essential information: If you're in the market for new, more-efficient appliances, read our FAQ on the $300 million cash for clunkers for appliances rebate program.

Buzzword: Socket Saturation

What it means. Socket saturation represents the number of lighting fixtures that use compact fluorescent lightbulbs in this country, according to the folks who run the federal government's Energy Star program.

But the term is actually a misnomer: Although 70 percent of all U.S. homes have at least one CFL—the average is 4.4 CFLs per household—only around 11 percent of all residential sockets are fitted with a CFL, according to Energy Star's March 2009 "Big Results, Bigger Potential" market profile (PDF). Hardly a saturation point. That Energy Star report even acknowledges that "Despite recent market growth, CFL household saturation is still low throughout the United States, even in regions with successful and long-standing energy efficiency programs. . . . Overall, there is still plenty of room for the CFL market to grow." Rush Limbaugh, bombastic basher of CFLs, would probably be happy to read about this less-than-significant saturation.

Why the buzz? Given that CFLs are not an emerging technology and that they can save you significant money over their life span, you'd think that their market penetration would be deeper. Plus, all the coverage of these energy-efficient lightbulbs—including our October 2009 report, which includes ratings of two dozen different CFLs (available to subscribers)—seems like it would have been a sales booster, too.

There are a number of likely causes of this modest socket saturation, including problems with the bulbs themselves, such as cost, quality, performance, and light quality. Recession-driven belt-tightening by consumers is another reason for the shallow penetration. Indeed, even as the price of CFLs has come down, their 2009 sales have dropped 25 percent from their 2007 peak, according to the National Electrical Manufacturers Association.

The long CFL life span and fewer available in-store promotions and incentives from utilities haven't helped sales either, according to Christina Kielich, a spokeswoman for U.S. Department of Energy.

If you want to take advantage of the money CFLs can save you—about $56 over the average bulb's life—follow the buying advice from our October 2009 report and remember:

• CFLs aren't ideal for every application. They work best in light fixtures that remain on for long periods since frequent cycling on and off can shorten their life, and you won’t get the maximum energy savings from fixtures that are left on for only a few minutes at a time.
• Color is key. As with all lightbulbs, CFLs come in different   "temperatures"—that is their yellowness, blueness, or whiteness. So learn about their various colors as well as their light output (lumens). And since it might take some trial and error to find CFLs that work in your surroundings, save your receipts so you can return bulbs that don't work for you.
• CFLs take time to fully brighten. Since run-up time ranges from 27 seconds to 3 minutes for the bulbs in our tests, don't use CFLs in areas where you need instant light.
• Energy Star-qualified bulbs are best. In our tests, most non-Energy Star CFLs had lower overall scores than Energy Star models. e-mail | Twitter | Forums | Facebook

Essential reading: CFLs, including all we've tested, contain small amounts of mercury. To keep mercury from being released into the environment, don't throw CFLs out with the trash or your regular recycling. To learn how to dispose of them properly, contact your local department of public works. And if a CFL breaks, follow these clean-up instructions. Finally, if you have you avoided or stopped using CFLs at home, tell us why by leaving a comment below.

Forum Friday: CFLs light up the discussion boards

Compact fluorescent lightbulbs have long been a popular and controversial subject on our forums. So it was no surprise that after airing an interview with one of our editors about CFLs, National Public Radio reported receiving an unusually large number of e-mails. (To find the best CFLs for your home, read our October 2009 report and check out the ratings of specific models, available to subscribers.)

Among reader concerns about CFLs are short life spans, disappointing light quality, and the potential mercury hazard. Learn how to safely dispose of CFLs.

Join in those discussions and others about on/off cycling shortening bulb life, consumers' experiences with brands, and dimmer switches.—Gian Trotta | e-mail | Twitter | Forums | Facebook

Essential information: To learn about the latest developments in lighting, read our 10 Questions for interview with researcher Nadarajah Narendran, Ph.D., the U.S. Department of Energy's Bright Tomorrow Lighting Prizes competition, or L Prize, and the European Union's ban of incandescent lightbulbs. For more news on energy efficiency, including the cash for clunkers for appliances program, visit our Energy Saving & Green Living guide.

By the Numbers: Virgin Earth Challenge calls for innovative ways to reduce greenhouse gases

$25 million

Prize in the Virgin Earth Challenge, which will be awarded to the individual or team to come up with a commercially viable design that accomplishes or appears capable of achieving the net removal of significant volumes of man-made greenhouse gases annually for at least 10 years.

Sir Richard Branson, of the Virgin Group, and former Vice President Al Gore are two of the six judges for the competition, which was launched in February 2007. As of the end of September, 900 entries had been received. A review of entries that made the first cut will take place next February.—Kimberly Janeway | e-mail | Twitter | Forums | Facebook

Essential reading: Use less energy and save up to $1,500 on your annual utility bills. Read our reports on pellet stoves and solar water heaters and find out which compact fluorescent lightbulbs top our ratings (available to subscribers).

By the Numbers: New EPA rule aimed at lowering greenhouse-gas emissions

25,000 metric tons

Minimum amount of greenhouse gases that an industrial facility would have to emit annually to be affected by a new U.S. Environmental Protection Agency rule aimed at regulating carbon emissions. The rule will require facilities producing more than 25,000 tons of greenhouse gases to obtain permits demonstrating their use of the best available technology to reduce emissions, or face penalties. The final rule was signed by EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson on September 22.

"By using the power and authority of the Clean Air Act, we can begin reducing emissions from the nation's largest greenhouse-gas-emitting facilities without placing an undue burden on the businesses that make up the vast majority of our economy," said Jackson in a September 30 speech. "This is a commonsense rule that is carefully tailored to apply to only the largest sources—those from sectors responsible for nearly 70 percent of U.S. greenhouse-gas-emissions sources."
 
About 14,000 facilities, namely power plants, refineries, and factories, would be affected. Farms, restaurants, hospitals, and other small businesses would not, according to the EPA.

The new EPA rule comes in advance of December's United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. Critics of the rule contend that it unfairly singles out big industry and that the EPA is violating the terms of the Clean Air Act by using it to regulate greenhouse gases.—Daniel DiClerico | e-mail | Twitter | Forums | Facebook

Essential information: You can lower the amount of greenhouse gases you generate at home and on the road. Whether you use compact fluorescent lightbulbs or install a solar water heater (stories and ratings available to subscribers), you can cut your utility bills by $1,500 a year.