Energy

Advocates Support DOE’s Proposed Clothes Dryer Standards

With fellow advocates, CFA signed onto comments to DOE regarding proposed clothes dryer efficiency standards. The proposed rule from the Department of Energy would reduce costs for households by about $580 over the life of an electric dryer and $200 for a gas dryer—while still ensuring clothes are dried. Clothes dryers—whether electric or gas—are one of the biggest energy users in many homes; today’s least efficient electric models consume as much as a tenth of the average home’s total electricity use. Payback period is only about six months. The cumulative net present value (“NPV”) of total consumer benefits of the proposed standards for consumer clothes dryers ranges from $9.07 billion (at a 7-percent discount rate) to $20.8 billion (at a 3-percent discount rate). New clothes dryers would use about 40% less energy than today’s least efficient models and the proposal would cut 116 million metric tons of carbon emissions over 30 years of sales.