Refrigerators getting bigger, cheaper, more efficient

People upset about the government telling them what light bulbs and toilets to buy may not realize that the iron fist of socialism has also been controlling what refrigerators they can have, too. For decades.

And so it went more or less unnoticed a few weeks ago when the Department of Energy announced new efficiency standards for refrigerators that will cut their energy use by 25 percent.

It’s the latest in a string of ever-tightening energy standards since the 1970s that have led to both gains of nearly 75 percent in energy efficiency, and lower prices, even as Americans increasingly move toward larger refrigerators, as this graph from the Appliance Standards Awareness Project shows:

What’s more, a good number of refrigerators are still manufactured here in the U.S., including plants in Indiana, Iowa and Ohio.