Introduction

Energy efficiency is the concept of reducing the amount of energy used to provide a particular good or service without reducing the good or service’s value. Similarly, a building or item is considered to be energy efficient if it uses the least amount of energy possible while still providing the desired service at a reasonable cost.

Energy efficient products typically cost more than their inefficient competitors, but this additional cost is balanced by the resulting lower energy bills from saving energy. Over time, the money saved from energy efficient products will pay energy consumers back for their initial investment as well as begin to save them money. Typical investments in energy efficient products can recoup the upfront costs invested in energy efficiency in less than five years while payback periods of one to two years are common. While some energy efficiency projects are involved and expensive, such as installing new, efficient windows on a building or an efficient boiler, many are simple and inexpensive like installing efficient lighting or a low-flow showerhead and can be done by most any energy consumer after a trip to the local hardware store.

Often confused with the idea of energy efficiency is energy conservation, which is the changing of human behavior in order to reduce energy consumption. Energy conservation often does not require any additional money and as a result those that conserve energy see an immediate financial benefit from reduced energy costs. As an example, doing a better job of turning off the lights in your house results in the conservation of energy while replacing incandescent lights with higher efficiency compact fluorescent lamps improves the energy efficiency of the house. Neither method of reducing energy use is necessarily superior since both efficiency and conservation result in a reduction in energy consumption. Ideally, an energy consuming building or product is energy efficient and used by people with an eye out for conserving energy so that a minimum amount of energy is consumed with little or no reduction in the value of the building or product.

In order to help market energy efficiency the U.S. government has created the Energy Star program to certify products that use the least energy within a given product class. Energy Star certified products each have the Energy Star logo on their packaging. For more information on Energy Star, you can visit the Energy Star website.