OK, that was just a bit tongue in cheek, but it is actually serious, and it raises issues of unintended consequences, which are not always easy to address. However, it is urgent that home owners, and building owners come to grips with it, for it will materially impact the value of their real estate holdings in the future.
It all revolves around a theme that is pervasive on this blog, and that is sub-optimization. You could spend a lot of money on energy efficient appliances and still not create an energy efficient solution. The whole gist of the Energy Star label (when it works as intended) is to focus on the individual function, and make that as effective as possible, but buying everything Energy Star-rated will not solve your problem, and may in fact cause you to spend a lot more money than necessary, thus sub-optimization leads directly to capital destruction (aka stupid investments). A big example is the issue of tankless hot water heaters that I've raised on this blog, which is a hopelessly suboptimal solution because renewable hot water solutions are so easy and plentiful. Eventually there are others, and they all boil down to one and the same thing, which is the systems approach, the holistic approach in which the building is central, and not the equipment. The focus is on operating cash flows, and long term building values. Thus, if you can implement solar DHW, it may pay to look your washing machines and dishwashers to make sure they can take in hot water, in lieu of heating cold water. For never mind how efficient is their heating element, if they can take in water from your solar thermal installation.
Once you put the building central, you can look at integration of various technologies, and implement them even in sequence, if necessary, something now, and something else five years from now, when you're done paying for what you installed today. This kind of preplanning is entirely possible when you figure out the engineering and economic interdependencies, and do not fall for the temptation to implement something now which will prevent you from doing the next logical step five years from now. If you are only looking at the available incentives and the Energy Star ratings, and let them prevail over proper engineering and planning, you are very likely to make these mistakes, which will cause you to spend the same dollar two or three times over over the life of your house or building. The incentives, as much as the ever so well intended Energy Efficiency ratings look only at the level of the individual function of subsystems.
Besides planning ahead your engineering integration of a whole house/building system, the general principle is not to overspend in places where it really does not pay off, for the highly efficient variants of products are often not only more expensive, but sometimes less reliable. Simpler is better in that case. Another examply of where you should break the mold is the reverse, namely you should probably overspend on LED lighting where it conerns far out of the way lighting. If you only look at the difference in energy savings, LEDs are still hard to justify for most applications, but not in out of the way spots, where their longer lifetime pays off in reduced hassle and maintenance cost. LEDs last two or three times (or more) longer than the alternatives, and by looking at both energy savings and maintenance savings the picture changes the more they are in hard to access locations.
By the same token, many forms of subsidy and incentives are geared to the use and installation of Energy Star rated equipment, and again there is no guarantee that this results in an optimal design from the standpoint of energy economics of the building, be it a home or an apartment house. The simplest example is that of the back-up water heater for a solar thermal, or geothermal hot water installation. For this function it may not at all be worthwhile to buy an Energy Star rated piece of equipment. The other example is the installation of solar pv systems financed by your local utility against a Power Purchase Agreement (PPA), which is a low yield investment, which extends their franchise, but is suboptimal from the standpoint of operating cost of your building, since even the worst solar thermal system offers a higher yield of energy than Solar PV.
The fundamental error is that energy efficiency and renewable energy are treated as interchangeable, when they are not. Energy efficiency is not additive to energy independence, but renewable energy is. Energy Efficiency should rationally be funded either directly from savings or by PPA from your utility or oil company, not from public money. Renewable Energy, if it is engineered sensibly, is the only thing that deserves public stimulus because it achieves energy independence, raises real estate values, and is a permanent improvement. There may be exceptions when energy efficiency is the only option, depending on the nature of the buildings, in which case policies should be flexible enough to support it.
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