Appliance Energy Efficiency: Opportunities, Barriers and Policy Solutions

Substantial progress has been made in recent years in improving the energy efficiency of appliances. In the United States, for example, the energy use of major appliances has decreased by 25-65 percent over the past 25 years. However, for many products in the United States, appliance energy efficiency has stagnated in recent years due to the presence of many market barriers and the lack of a significant policy push. In other markets, such as China, appliance energy efficiency continues to make significant strides. In both the United States and Chinese markets, there are large remaining opportunities to increase the efficiency of appliances, if market barriers or policy inertia can be overcome. This paper reviews the technical opportunities for improving appliance energy efficiency, discusses barriers that constrain appliance efficiency improvements, and discusses policies that have shown potential for overcoming these barriers. Since it is not possible to discuss the entire world in a survey paper as short as this one, we focus on the United States and China as illustrative of opportunities and barriers in the developed and developing world.

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