Opinion ID: 456159
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: The Validity of DOE's Definition

Text: 52 EPCA does not define significant conservation of energy, and DOE maintains that its interpretation of this statutory term is entitled to great deference. We agree that Congress left DOE with substantial discretion to set specific levels of significance, but no one disputes that the levels selected must be consistent with the express terms and underlying congressional intention of the Act. We must, as the Supreme Court has directed, decide whether EPCA's definition is a reasonable choice within a gap left by Congress. Chevron, U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc., --- U.S. ----, 104 S.Ct. 2778, 2793, 81 L.Ed.2d 694 (1984). Answering that question requires us to determine whether, as DOE thought in 1980, Congress meant to exclude only marginal savings as insignificant, or as DOE thought in 1983, Congress licensed DOE to create so formidable an obstacle that it blocked standards for seven of the eight priority products at issue here. To conduct that inquiry, we first look to the structure and text of the Act and then examine the rationale DOE offered for its most recent position. We conclude that DOE's definition of significant conservation is inconsistent with the congressional design reflected in NECPA. 53 We think the basic decisionmaking structure of the Act suggests that DOE has made a fundamental mistake. First, the elaborate NECPA provisions governing standards and their legislative history leave no doubt that Congress expected DOE to prescribe mandatory efficiency standards. Congress apparently intended the threshold significance determination only to weed out standards promising such negligible benefits that they were not worth the trouble of further examination. We note that DOE may not issue a standard it has disqualified under the significance provision even if that standard imposes absolutely no burdens at all. Consequently, even an efficiency standard with no technological or economic drawbacks whatever--one that offers a completely painless way to energy conservation--will be discarded if it fails to achieve significant conservation. If, on the other hand, the standard under consideration survives this first look, DOE must still decide whether the standard would be economically justified. In reaching that decision, DOE is explicitly directed to weigh the total projected amount of energy savings likely to result directly from the imposition of the standard. EPCA Sec. 325(d)(3). Thus, a finding that a proposed standard results in significant conservation is far from a prologue to inevitable promulgation of a mandatory standard; instead, that finding simply triggers a much more thorough review in which the amount of energy a standard would save is assessed in light of any other benefits and countervailing burdens of the standard. 54 We think it unlikely that the Congress that enacted NECPA and its four related energy statutes intended DOE to throw away a cost-free chance to save energy unless the amount of energy saved was genuinely trivial. 19 Moreover, that general view is bolstered by the few specific figures Congress included in the sections of NECPA that created the appliance program. In particular, review of the energy consumption level at which DOE was authorized to prescribe discretionary standards for an appliance is revealing. 55 As we note above, section 325(a) of EPCA permits DOE to prescribe an energy efficiency standard for an appliance if its average per-household energy consumption exceeds 150 kilowatt hours, and its aggregate national household use during one year exceeds 4,200,000,000 kilowatt hours, or .014335 quadrillion Btu (Quads). Congress plainly thought that saving some part of the energy consumed by an appliance operating at those levels would be significant, or it would not have authorized DOE to prescribe mandatory standards for such an appliance. Our review of DOE's figures suggests that standards for three of the appliances DOE considered in this rulemaking would have saved more energy per year than the total annual energy consumption necessary to qualify an appliance for discretionary standards. These standards, in other words, would have saved more energy than would have been saved if a standard instantly reduced to zero the total energy consumption of an appliance operating at the minimum level for discretionary standards. Yet for two of those three appliances, DOE branded the savings from standards insignificant, and thus rejected savings that exceeded 100 percent of consumption for appliances Congress was willing to regulate. 56 We must briefly sketch some technical background in order to illustrate this anomalous result. The consumption figures in section 325(a) measure energy use at the site of consumption, i.e., the energy actually consumed by an appliance in the household. However, the ORNL model calculates the energy a standard would save in terms of source consumption, or the energy used as input to powerplants that in turn generate electricity used in the household. Because of inefficiencies in the generation and transmission of electricity, a given number of Quads in site savings yield a substantially larger number of Quads in source savings. 57 Under section 325(a), DOE may prescribe a discretionary standard for an appliance if, among other criteria, its national energy consumption exceeds .014335 Quads. According to DOE's figures, an appliance that consumes that amount of electricity at the site of use consumes approximately .0483 Quads annually at the source of generation. 20 The table below compares DOE's estimate of savings from standards for the six covered products considered in the 1983 final rules, calculated over the average lifetime of an appliance purchased in 1987, with the total consumption of an electrical appliance during that same period. 58 Thus, DOE's definition does not recognize as significant energy savings equal to the total annual consumption of an electrical appliance that in the view of Congress might appropriately be subject to a mandatory standard, even when that savings is calculated according to DOE's own figures and over the periods DOE itself selected for analysis. 22 We think that such a high definition of significance is inconsistent with the congressional decision to authorize discretionary standards for appliances consuming the amounts of energy Congress specifically designated. Congress determined that discretionary standards for such appliances might be appropriate if they would result in substantial conservation of energy. Congress plainly thought that substantial conservation was possible for an appliance operating at the minimum level stipulated in the statute; and it therefore could not have thought that the total energy consumption of such an appliance might reasonably be considered an insignificant amount to save. 23 59 In the December 1982 notice, DOE responded to a somewhat different version of the argument we have presented in the following way: 60 DOE does not believe that because the oil or gas and the electricity savings tests would require greater savings of energy by the eight products subject to this rule than is required to be used by some other products in order to be possibly considered for standards means that these tests are unlawful or precluded by the statute. As indicated above, the oil or gas and electricity savings tests were designed with a bias to products that use large amounts of energy. 61 47 Fed.Reg. 57,198, 57,204 n. 11 (1982). DOE's comment, however, is directed only to the first two of its three tests. It does not acknowledge that, as we have shown, a standard might save an amount of energy equal to the total consumption necessary for a discretionary standard and nonetheless fail all three tests. 24 62 More importantly, we think that DOE's approach is inadequately sensitive to the relationship between different passages in section 325 of EPCA. In effect, DOE points out that a fixed amount in energy savings might be a very small percentage of total use for a high-consumption appliance and a much larger percentage for a low-consumption appliance. DOE concludes that it may therefore reasonably regard energy savings as insignificant for a high-consumption appliance, even if the same amount would be significant for a low-consumption appliance. 63 In the abstract, we have no occasion to disagree with that idea. For example, we do not hold that the Act forbids DOE to set levels of significance for each product type as a percentage of the energy consumed by that product type, provided that the levels selected reasonably accommodate the policies of the Act. Our point is simply that DOE's definition of significance must show some awareness of the range of energy savings Congress thought worth pursuing. Congress unmistakably believed that savings for an appliance that just qualified for discretionary standards might be worth pursuing, even though the absolute amount of energy saved would be small. Perhaps DOE need not say that precisely the same amount of energy such a standard might realistically save would be significant if saved by a high-consumption appliance. However, DOE has gone much further than that. Obviously, the total consumption of an appliance subject to discretionary standards is much higher than the amount of energy Congress could have expected such a discretionary standard to save. Yet DOE has rejected as insignificant savings equal to the total minimum consumption of an appliance subject to discretionary standards. 64 As we have discussed, a determination that a standard does not result in significant savings means that DOE must discard the standard at a preliminary stage of decisionmaking as unworthy of detailed study. Moreover, DOE must reject the standard even if it imposes absolutely no costs on manufacturers, consumers, or anyone else. In our view, DOE's definition rejects savings that, judged against figures Congress included in the text of the Act, must be regarded as significant. At least in the absence of strong countervailing evidence of congressional intent, we think the anomalous and disproportionate results of DOE's definition are a powerful sign that DOE has passed beyond the limits of its statutory discretion. We turn, then, to the specific rationales DOE offers for its three tests to determine if they satisfactorily explain the strange consequences of those tests.