Last week, however, Trump administration officials said they were eliminating the program. The rationale? An EPA spokesperson wrote in an email that the move was part of “organizational improvements” to “better advance the agency’s core mission, while Powering the Great American Comeback.” The Energy Department, which also administers part of the program, declined a request for comment.

Legal and political challenges are sure to follow. Indeed, companies and trade associations are lobbying to keep Energy Star. When President Donald Trump tried to cut the program during his first term, that pressure helped convince Congress to maintain funding. But the second Trump administration has proved far more willing to slash government programs and funding without the consent of Congress. Trump has made it a mission to repeal efficiency standards for everything from incandescent bulbs to showerheads. If Energy Star dies, it would mark the demise of one of America’s most popular government programs — championed by industry associations, environmental groups, and Republicans and Democrats alike.

“It has brand recognition and consumer trust that only Santa Claus can compete with,” said Christine Egan, head of CLASP, an international nonprofit dedicated to energy-efficient appliances. “People know Energy Star as a brand that puts power and information in a single yes-or-no box … ‘If you buy with this, you get a more energy efficient product that’s going to cost you less to operate.’”Without that labeling, you will have to pay more and work harder to identify which appliances will use the least energy and save the most money. Can you DIY something like Energy Star? I spoke with researchers and policy experts about why Energy Star has been so successful and what we could do in its absence......now cancelled by Trump- check out all the helpful things the program used to cover....https://www.energystar.gov/

This week, we need to talk about climate solutions in a different way. As you’ve probably heard, the federal government has taken an axe to funding and programs related to climate change and environmental justice — from scientific research to clean transportation projects to efficient household appliances — and cut staff across a range of agencies. 

As climate work all over the country faces setbacks, Grist wants to help capture the stories of what is being lost. Check out some of Grist’s previous coverage of how federal cuts have impacted communities and climate progress: 

• Read: about a Madison, Wisconsin, nonprofit that was one of many organizations that has lost funding through the Department of Agriculture’s Patrick Leahy Farm to School program
• Read: about a program providing free food boxes to those facing food insecurity in Duffield, Virginia, that shuttered in the face of the USDA’s funding freeze
• Read: about a Chicago nonprofit that awarded grants for tree-planting in low-income communities, and then had to tell the recipients to stop their work after an executive order froze funding obligated by the Inflation Reduction Act
• Read: about the Trump administration’s plans to dismantle the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program, uncovered in an internal FEMA memo obtained by Grist
• Read: insights from fired Forest Service employees about their work and what its loss means for public lands
• No URL - click on links

To illustrate where this line of thinking goes wrong, let’s examine a simple, stylized example. Imagine we get granted a large plot of land and 1 GW grid connection that we need to supply with power all 8,760 hours per year, for 25 years. Our task is to find a cheap, reliable way to do this. We’ll set our scene in the south of the UK, exclude local carbon taxes to focus purely on economics, and use some standard cost assumptions for power generation technology, largely from the UK's DESNZ (detailed assumptions at the bottom of the article).[ii]As we'll see, we can supply 70% of this power with solar energy without any additional cost compared to just operating a gas plant. Interestingly—and perhaps counterintuitively—the total cost of running a 1 GW gas plant continuously is actually higher than building a combined system of 1 GW gas, 6.5 GW solar, and 12 GWh of battery storage. We will build out this case in this article—but if you want to jump ahead and play around with this hypothetical setup yourself, you can do so with this simple webtool.

The gas case......Let’s start with a baseline. We can consider just building a 1 GW gas power plant to deliver our 1 GW baseload. You’ll get the very boring result below: 100% gas generation all year round. This solution has a total cost of approximately £76/MWh. Remember that number as we’ll refer to this later as a benchmark.Note that only £8/MWh is for paying off the capex, and the other £68/MWh goes into running costs — predominantly the cost of buying gas. The latter we will try to reduce by adding in renewables now.

Adding solar on top....... So let's add some solar energy into the mix. Suppose we install an additional 1 GW of solar capacity alongside the 1 GW gas plant. You then get the result below.Contrary to what the double cost fallacy implies, total system cost actually falls when we add solar on top of gas. In our example, the system costs falls to about £70/MWh. This reduction occurs because during daylight hours we can rely on free sunshine rather than expensive gas to make electricity. As a result, gas usage drops by around 16%. As one can see from the three generation charts at the bottom, summer months are of course better than winter months for solar.

Adding more solar on top......Continuing this logic, let's double our solar capacity to 2 GW. Even if this means occasionally generating more solar power than needed, we can just throw away the excess. We get the result below.......read on               https://electrotechrevolution.substack.com/p/renewables-allow-us-to-pay-less-not