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Energy Star: Providing Opportunities for Additional Review of EPA's Decisions Could Strengthen the Program

GAO-11-888 Published: Sep 30, 2011. Publicly Released: Sep 30, 2011.
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Highlights

American consumers, businesses, utilities, and federal and state agencies rely on the Energy Star product labeling program to identify more efficient products that lower their energy costs. Even with the program's successes, several reports by GAO and others have identified weaknesses in the Energy Star program. The program, which began in 1992 and was reauthorized in 2005, has been jointly administered by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Department of Energy (DOE). In 2009, the agencies signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) that outlined changes to address these weaknesses. The changes included identifying EPA as the lead agency, clarifying the roles and responsibilities of each agency, as well as instituting third-party testing of products. GAO was asked to examine (1) the status of EPA's and DOE's implementation of changes to the Energy Star program under the MOU and (2) program partners' views of the Energy Star program and changes that are under way. To examine the status of the changes, GAO reviewed guidance and eligibility criteria and interviewed various program partners to gather their views. The results of these interviews are not generalizable, but provided insights on changes to the Energy Star program.

Recommendations

Recommendations for Executive Action

Agency Affected Recommendation Status
Environmental Protection Agency To ensure decisions of the Energy Star program are fair and transparent, the Administrator of EPA should assess the need to develop a process for independent review of adverse agency decisions for the Energy Star program as it relates to setting specifications and disqualifications. If the Administrator of EPA determines that there is a need for an independent review process but that the agency has insufficient legal authority to undertake one, it should seek additional authority from Congress.
Closed – Implemented
In response to our recommendation, in 2015, EPA took steps to assess its process for product disqualification. In particular, in April 2015, EPA completed an assessment of its disqualification procedures as applied to almost 300 verification testing failures since 2012. In addition to this review, according to EPA, it made various process enhancements over this period. For example, EPA established a more standardized approach for reviewing failed Energy Star products; added several layers of additional review for products that manufacturers believed should not have been identified by EPA's testing results as not in compliance with Energy Star standards; and made other enhancements to case processing. EPA concluded in its 2015 assessment that given the process enhancements to its internal reviews over this period, the addition of an independent review of adverse decisions was no longer needed.

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Topics

Eligibility criteriaEnergy consumptionEnergy efficiencyEnergy policyEnvironmental monitoringLaboratoriesProduct evaluationProgram evaluationProgram managementSpecificationsStandardsTestingNeeds assessmentProgram implementation