EPA Weighing Energy Star Rules to Prevent CE Disclosures Under FOIA
The Environmental Protection Agency will consider including language in Energy Star agreements that would bar Freedom of Information Act release of sensitive information about set-top box shipments and deployment, Product Manager Katharine Kaplan said Wednesday.
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In a teleconference on the EPA’s draft specification for set-top boxes, she said the EPA hasn’t gotten any FOIA requests so far on unit shipments, but the agency has successfully blacked out proprietary information in three other FOIA requests. CE makers raised concerns about the ambiguity of existing language in Energy Star agreements that the agency would use data from industry only for program evaluation and that it will be “closely controlled.” It’s a little nebulous, said one participant. Kaplan said the agency “fully masks” data before sharing it with others, and its reports to Congress don’t break down data by industry segments or providers. One box maker pointed out that in some markets there are only a couple of suppliers and even if the agency rolls together all data it wouldn’t be difficult for one manufacturer to figure out the shipment data of its competitor. That’s true with satellite providers as well, the agency was told.
The EPA also will approach utilities to provide separate incentive programs for cable and satellite providers deploying Energy Star set-top boxes as a way of nudging them to share information such as the types and features of boxes they're deploying, Kaplan said. Utilities need the information to compile energy savings, she said. Satellite and cable representatives said they weren’t sure how much box and deployment details they would be able to share with the utilities. The information about set-top box features and functions are “highly related” to subscriber profiles, and disclosing such information would raise concerns, one participant said.
Satellite providers wouldn’t be doing a mass “swap out” of existing boxes for Energy Star compliant ones, representatives of EchoStar and DirecTV said. “It would literally be billions of dollars to do a swap out.” Deployment of Energy Star boxes would also depend on energy levels in the final specifications, they said. Kaplan said the EPA would come up with a “constructive solution” to deal with the issue of whether a manufacturer could advertise an Energy Star compliant box as such even if it’s sold to a service provider who doesn’t participate in the program.
Industry also raised concerns about the EPA deciding now the second phase of the specifications that will become applicable two or three years later. Energy Star generally revises its standards only after a large number of companies meet them, the agency was told. “We don’t know what new features are going to be in the boxes four years from now,” said one manufacturer. Motorola is concerned that the base level for set-top boxes doesn’t include CableCARD, a representative said. The specification will have to make allotment for the power consumption of single and multi- stream CableCARDs, he said.