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 isaggregated assessment of cost effectiveness
It can be argued, however, that the analysis in Table 3 is still too aggregated to capture the full
range of possibilities. We therefore show Table 4, which breaks the bins
down into ten percent increments (the first bin contains the ten percent
of the buildings with the lowest operating hours, etc). Even for the least
favorable bin (the lowest operating hours case for F96 ballasts) the IRR
for purchasing the efficient ballast is 31 percent real. The disaggregation
also shows much larger IRRs for the highest usage bin compared to the more
aggregated data in Table 3.
We then calculated the percent of commercial sector floor
area attributable to different IRRs. We sorted the records by IRR for F40
and F96 ballasts and combined the records into bins titled "IRR <
6 percent real", "6 percent < IRR < 20 percent real",
and "IRR > 20 percent real". This calculation demonstrates
that the overwhelming majority of the commercial sector floor area (99 percent)
is associated with IRRs of greater than 20 percent real. About 0.7 percent
of the floor area is associated with IRRs of between 6 percent and 20 percent.
Only 0.3 percent of the floor area is in the bin that is clearly not cost
effective.
This detailed analysis does not change the basic conclusions
from Tables 3 and 4. Efficient magnetic ballasts
represented an excellent investment for 99 percent of commercial building
floor stock, and a moderately good investment for 0.7 percent of the commercial
floor stock. Still, these ballasts were only being adopted in the 1980s
at a rate commensurate with the enactment of appliance efficiency standards
in various states. |
