The United States Department of Energy (DOE) has released two new rules for commercial and industrial pumps; the Energy Conservation Standards Ruling and the Pump Test Procedure Ruling.
The release of the final rules are a culmination of more than 5 years of effort and negotiations between DOE and interested parties.
In the Energy Conservation Standards Ruling, the DOE adopts new energy conservation standards for pumps.
DOE has determined that the new energy conservation standards for pumps would result in significant conservation of energy, and are technologically feasible and economically justified.
In the Pump Test Procedure Ruling, the DOE is now authorized to prescribe energy conservation standards and corresponding test procedures for statutorily covered equipment such as pumps.
The Appliance Standards Rulemaking and Rulemaking Federal Advisory Committee (ASRAC) developed the term sheet that became the basis for the rules.
The Energy Policy and Conservation Act (EPCA) sets forth the criteria and procedures DOE must follow when prescribing or amending test procedures for covered equipment.
EPCA also determined that any test procedures prescribed or amended under this section shall be reasonably designed to produce test results that measure energy efficiency, energy use or estimated annual operating cost of a covered product during a representative average use cycle or period of use, and shall not be unduly burdensome to conduct.
North America’s largest pump trade association, The Hydraulic Institute, and its membership also played a significant role in the development of these final rules.
The Hydraulic Institute (HI) provided performance data on more than 3,000 pumps for analysis and wrote the test procedure Methods for Rotodynamic Pump Efficiency Testing which was incorporated.
HI also reviewed and commented on the proposed rules, participated in public hearings addressing the rules and maintained an informative website detailing the steps taken before they were released.
