ENERGY EFFICIENT REFRIGERATORS
Swelling Energy Use
Refrigerators didn't get to be energy hogs on purpose. It's just that energy conservation ranked far below appearance and convenience on the list of design considerations in the '50s and '60s.
Energy guru Amory Lovins has often used the homely fridge as an example of how this approach affected energy use in the industrialized world. The motor was hidden underneath the appliance, where it radiated its heat right up into the food compartment. Manufacturers cut back on insulation so that they could increase the amount of usable space without making the appliance bigger -- not in itself a bad goal, but without high-performance insulators, this strategy allowed heat to stream right back into the cold box.
With little insulation, the refrigerator's metal skin got so cool that it tended to "sweat" -- to condense moisture from the air. So designers installed heaters on the outside of the fridge to evaporate the dew. The result was that a typical refrigerator in 1976 used an average of 1800 kilowatt-hours per year -- way more than any other appliance in the home. This was nearly four times the consumption of 1950-vintage models, which used about 500 kilowatt-hours a year and had their motors on top. By 1981, US models consumed twice the energy of Japanese models, according to Natural Resources Defense Council scientist David Goldstein.
The potential for conservation was not lost on energy-efficiency activists like Goldstein and Arthur Rosenfeld, formerly of Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory and now a senior adviser at the Department of Energy. The obstacle, as they saw it, was that the free market wasn't going to encourage the efficiency gains that technology allowed and society needed.
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