
Steve Chu: Consider the Refrigerator - kalvin
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/tny/2008/12/note-to-detroit-consider-the-r.html
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kalvin
The quote about assigning jobs to engineers instead of lobbyists is what
intrigued me most-- I wonder to what degree that actually happened/happens.

"Refrigerators consume a lot of energy; all alone, they account for almost
fifteen per cent of the average home’s electricity use. In the mid nineteen-
seventies, California—the state Chu now lives in—set about establishing the
country’s first refrigerator-efficiency standards. Refrigerator manufacturers,
of course, fought them. The standards couldn’t be met, they said, at anything
like a price consumers could afford. California imposed the standards anyway,
and then what happened, as Chu observed, is that “the manufacturers had to
assign the job to the engineers, instead of to the lobbyists.” The following
decade, standards were imposed for refrigerators nationwide. Since then, the
size of the average American refrigerator has increased by more than ten per
cent, while the price, in inflation-adjusted dollars, has been cut in half.
Meanwhile, energy use has dropped by two-thirds.

The transition to more efficient fridges, Chu pointed out, has saved the
equivalent of all the energy generated in the United States by wind turbines
and solar cells."

