Updates to Battery and Power Adaptor prefs (old energy saver prefs)

I'm using CFPreferencesSetValue and and CFPreferencesSynchronize. I can see the change reflected in the com.apple.powermanagement.plist

but when I use pmset to inspect the numbers currently in use they are not what is set in the preference plist.

I'm losing my mind as I've been working on this for several weeks (on and off) trying to solve it. Can anyone provide a clue as to what I should do?