Opinion ID: 6104167
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Burner operating hours

Text: The petitioners also challenge the DOE’s estimates for burner operating hours. Burner operating hours are crucial for the LCC analysis because the operating cost of a boiler depends, in large part, upon the number of hours its burner operates. The DOE did not have direct data about burner operating hours for its no-new-standard case, so it estimated them based upon building data from CBECS and RECS and 18 assumptions about heat load, including the adoption of a rule of thumb that for every square foot of heated area, a building uses 30 Btu/h. Once again, the Technical Support Document provides a lengthy description of the method by which the DOE estimated burner operating hours, and once again, questions went unanswered. During the comment period, a consultant for AHRI pointed to several purported anomalies in the DOE’s estimates. Specifically, he said “[c]ommercial buildings are generally cooling load dominated so it would be highly unusual to have one thousand system operating hours per year,” yet according to DOE’s estimates, the median burner operating hours for six of eight categories of burners was more than 1000 hours, the 90th percentile of two of the eight categories was more than 2000 operating hours, and the maximum burner operating hours in all categories was well over 2000 hours. Further, DOE “surprisingly,” he said, estimated that the median, 90th percentile, and maximum burner hours for large boilers are lower than the median, 90th percentile, and maximum burner hours for small boilers of the same type. These results, the consultant argued, should have alerted the DOE to the possibility that either its assumption about heat load or the data from CBECS were faulty. The DOE twice acknowledged these comments in the Final Rule document but did not respond to them. Rather, the DOE reiterated that it “has high confidence that its building load estimation is representative of the building loads in the field,” though it gave no reason for that confidence. 85 Fed. Reg. at 1624. Perhaps more telling, it explained that “DOE has not identified a source of comprehensive burner operating hour data for commercial boilers that could be used for such an analysis nor was such identified to DOE by stakeholders.” Id. at 1637. Using data ill-suited to the task is not excused by 19 failure — even good faith failure — to locate suitable data, particularly considering that the Congress here required clear and convincing evidence before the Secretary can disturb the regulatory status quo. By no stretch was this an exemplar of reasoned decision making. A commenter pointed to seeming anomalies in the DOE’s data and the agency ignored them. We need not decide whether this omission would, on its own, be sufficient to say the Secretary could not reasonably conclude she had clear and convincing evidence to support a new standard. Because the Final Rule has other deficiencies, however, we expect on remand a reasoned response to these concerns as well.