Sure thing.
The way the act is currently drafted, we have the authority to regulate energy-using products per se, just as it is. This amendment broadens our capacity to regulate products that affect energy use but may not be energy-using products in and of themselves.
The example is electronic thermostats, which don't use energy, or an appreciable amount of energy, but they have a tremendous impact on calibrating an electrically heated house efficiently. You can save 10% or 12% if you have an electronic thermostat and you're calibrating your heat down at night. We'd like to regulate the most efficient electronic thermostats, because they can help homeowners save money in their electrically heated homes, but the current act, as written, will not allow us to regulate electronic thermostats because they're not defined in the current act.
Another example is a piece within commercial dishwashers that distributes the water, the spray valve. It doesn't use any energy, but if you use a particular technology, you can have tremendous savings within that area of technology. So this broadens the act to allow us to get at more products that affect energy use, not just energy-using products themselves.
I want to give you one more example, because it deals with another aspect of this amendment. We want the authority to regulate classes of related products. So if you think of the proliferation of consumer electronics in all our homes these days, we would like to be able to regulate their standby power as a class. It would be more efficient than regulating each and every product in maybe a class of 10 different products individually. We would be more efficient to put those into one regulatory process and do them as a class. This wording simply allows us to do that.