“I’m proud to report that the American Gas Association (AGA), the American Public Gas Association (APGA), Spire Inc. (who really led the effort), and a gas appliance manufacturer, Thermo Products LLC (a subsidiary of Burnham holdings), rose to the occasion with a filing that put DOE on notice that the gas industry isn’t giving up.”

“Market conservation, in short, is wholly different from command-and-control government conservationism.”

The Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is further escalating its electrification strategies using regulatory appliance efficiency standards. But the good news is that resistance continues and is even on the upswing with the global failure of ‘Net Zero’ in light of recent developments.

The entire debate is colored by DOE/EERE ignoring the intent of the Energy Policy and Conservation Act of 1975 (EPCA) to balance varied consumer interests and energy choices, rather than providing the agency with carte blanche permission to squeeze out every possible BTU without regard to consumer cost, convenience, and fuel preferences.…

Q. It’s been a year since your last MasterResource article. I know you recently retired from Spire, Inc., a St. Louis-based gas utility holding company you joined in 1994. What happened?

A. I was planning to retire for medical reasons anyway, but Spire beat me to it and that accelerated my retirement.

Q. But here you are still in the natural gas fight.

A.  I am very much still involved. I and a few other ex-gas utility ex-pats are starting a consulting group. Our objective is to become a technical resource for consumers and other entities that value and want to protect end-use alternatives to electricity. We want to be a technical alternative to NRDC (and its “useful idiots”). For now, we are going with the decidedly dull but to-the-point name of Gas End-Use Advocacy Group.

“Personally, I don’t see any interest on the other side to debate anything. Rather, they seem to think their environmental nirvana can only be achieved by replacing our free-market system. For that, they want a ‘green’ form of command-and-control socialism.” (Mark Krebs, below)

Q. Yesterday, you explained how DOE’s Office of Energy Efficient and Renewable Energy employs “garbage-in, garbage-out” (GIGO) to justify more stringent gas-appliance regulation. But step back: specifically, when and how did electrification become official energy policy?

A. Electrification, aka “deep decarbonization,” was in the background through at least the Obama and Trump Administrations. But it had come out of the woodwork with a vengeance under Biden. This started with an unprecedented gush of Executive Orders starting on day one. This implementation is now well underway.

 Q. Please identify the primary Biden Administration regulatory chain of events that empowered this present “transition” to electrification through refocusing its mission on “carbon efficiency.”…

Editor’s note: Part I yesterday described Krebs’s work to level the playing field against the Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE). Today’s post continues by examining how EERE modeling skews the results towards “deep decarbonization” (electricity over gas, via appliance regulation).

Q. What are some “tricks” by DOE’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy for finding “net benefits” to imposing stringent efficiency standards on gas appliances?

A. EERE’s “determinations” have come from highly subjective life-cycle costing (LCC) analyses. Remember: these modelers are in the business of finding different answers from what self-interested consumers are determining. They make their models “smarter” than the market for mutual benefit.

Tricks include inflated energy-price forecasts (for the disfavored energy, gas), lowballed maintenance costs for favored appliances (electric), and so on.