A final agreement was reached last week on two key EU energy efficiency policies: the revision of the energy efficiency legislation for buildings and the revision of the EU A-G energy labelling scheme.
On the energy label, the dispute (which we wrote about here and then here) between the European Parliament and some Member States led by the Swedish Presidency of the EU was resolved with a rather empty compromise. This has left many unhappy although it is arguably a damage limitation exercise from the European Parliament against some seriously aggressive lobbying from white goods manufacturers.
The decision in the end was to continue piling up additional classes on top of the initial well-known A-G scale. Energy classes A+ and A++ had already been introduced for fridges some years ago. Now for all product categories, the label will be opened to A+, A++ and even A+++.
The more reasonable option of "rescaling" existing models - in order to ensure that the A class remains the top reference by becoming increasingly tougher to reach, and that there is a real distinction between different classes – has always been opposed by the white goods industry and has been eventually postponed to the next label revision process, in 2014, despite the fact it would actually have been quite urgent.
This risks making the label ineffective on consumers’ purchase decisions because it means that - in the case of fridges - the most efficient products will be labelled A+++ but the most inefficient products on the market will actually be labelled A, as hardly any product still fall under categories below A, such as B or C (these classes were defined 15 years ago!). This is clearly confusing for consumers.
The only solution to this problem would have been to adopt an efficiency label that is regularly updated. Unfortunately too many policy makers seem to prefer to listen to the manufacturers' concerns about their fears of not being able to sell their outdated and inefficient products, rather than to consumers, environmental organisations and retailers worried about accurate consumer information and the future of our planet.
A close-ended scale that is regularly updated to reflect technical developments has been opposed by some manufacturers which feared that downgraded products can not be sold anymore.
On top of that, EU decision-makers were not able to agree on a public procurement clause, which would have meant that our governments and cities would have had to buy only energy efficient products. The mandatory mention of the energy rating in product advertising is also not as good as we hoped: it will be displayed only when product advertisements already mention technical data.
You can find a position of a group of environmental and consumer NGOs here (circulated to decision-makers just before their final decision) and a background paper by BUND (in German here. There is also some analysis on the Stop Climate Change website of the Green Party and a WWF press release.
On buildings, a political agreement on the revision of the Energy Performance of Buildings Directive (so-called ‘EPBD’) was reached last Wednesday. It still needs to be confirmed December 7th in the Council of Ministers. The new legislation calls for near zero energy buildings, which sounds good, but the agreement reached seems to be far from what environmental campaign groups have been calling for. It's particularly clear that the huge energy savings potential of Europe’s existing buildings has not been tapped into as much as it would have been needed, and that this will have a dramatic impact on the possibility of reaching Europe's energy conservation targets. Two weeks ahead of the start of the Copenhagen summit, this is not great news.