By John DeFore

When it comes to household appliances, the most consumers can usually hope for is an Energy Star rating indicating better power consumption than last year’s model.

Whirlpool intends to get us hoping for more — although it may be some time before the appliance giant will actually have goods for sale: In Copenhagen, Whirlpool Europe just introduced a “GREENKITCHEN” concept intended to generate substantial energy savings through re-imagining the way kitchens work.

The scheme includes some innovations that are so common-sense simple it’s a wonder they aren’t already widely available — like configuring refrigerators with slide-open drawers instead of as one big cabinet with a door, allowing cold air to stay contained by gravity in the drawer when it’s opened (instead of spilling out the open door) so electricity isn’t required to re-cool the air once the drawer is shut.

Other parts of the plan are similarly easy to understand, but would require complicated interconnections between appliances: A GREENKITCHEN would exploit the heat that today’s refrigerators waste, for example, using it to warm water that is then rerouted to the dishwashing machine.

A concept paper released by the company claims that, compared to a baseline measured using 2006 appliances, these innovations would “increase energy efficiency up to 70%” — although that figure includes hard-to-measure factors like consumer-behavior changes resulting from a kitchen that “promotes and facilitates a sustainability culture.” Still, it’s hard to see how some of these innovations could fail to result in meaningful conservation of resources — if and when they actually arrive in a home-improvement store near you.

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