Letter: Letters: Shoddy fridges

From PW AGNEW

Your editorial ‘Fainthearts and Eurocrats’ accuses the European Commission
of failing to confront the manufacturers of shoddy goods by watering down
the new standard for the efficiency of refrigerators (Comment, 4 September).
But it is not the Commission that is at fault: it is the British government,
backed to some extent by the Germans, but only because they make cheap and
nasty fridges for the British market.

The Energy Efficiency Office issued a very good report on the efficiency
of household appliances in 1990, and estimated that 5000 megawatts of peak
load could be saved by bringing the standard of our appliances up to that
of the best already available. In the autumn of 1991 the government brought
in a scheme for labelling refrigerators with their running costs, but it
was a feeble voluntary scheme that did not comply with the proposals of
its own Energy Efficiency Office, and within a year the electricity companies
had quietly forgotten about it. It was clearly a bit of pre-election window
dressing, designed to show that the government was working to improve efficiency.

The electricity companies do not care about efficiency, but only about
selling as much power as possible. Because any extra load on the grid falls
on the coal-fired power stations, which are not particularly efficient,
electrical space heating causes the emission of about four times as much
C02 as does the use of a good gas-fired boiler. It is also more expensive.
Even if all the power stations were gas-fired the ratio would still be 2
to l. But in their annual reports the electricity companies boast of their
success in selling electrical heating in competition with gas.

In the privatised electricity companies, the government has set up a
powerful vested interest, which is blithely ignoring its commitment to control
CO₂ emissions. Of course, the government made sure that its supporters
in the financial community are running these companies; and it shows no
sign of doing anything to bring them under control. Indeed the financial
community, by a liberal distribution of non-executive directorships and
‘consultancies’, has put the politicians in a position from which they
will find it very difficult to take effective action.

The failure to impose a proper standard of efficiency on the makers
of refrigerators can be seen as one more instance of the government giving
favours to its friends, at the expense of the general public and of the
environment.

P. W. Agnew Scottish Green Party Aberfeldy, Tayside