Happy 2010 to all our readers! This promises to be very eventful year for the Coolproducts campaign and the crucial piece of European Union legislation we are monitoring – the Eco-Design of Energy Using Products Directive. We have a new European Commission, a relatively new European Parliament and a number of important minimum requirements coming into force (having been already voted by EU Member States on a few months ago) and/or about to be decided on imminently.
The new EU Commissioner for Energy, Guenther Oettinger, was grilled by Members of the European Parliament last week. He made a commitment to making a proposal for a mandatory energy efficiency target for the EU as a whole. This can only be good news for our campaign, and is something which we have supported in our Manifesto and which has the support of a large group of environmental organisations, businesses and policy makers. However, he seemed to know very little about the Eco Design Directive – which he will be responsible for – despite the fact that it is one of the policies with the highest potential to achieve EU climate change and energy conservation goals.
Hopefully he’ll catch up soon, and find out that, for example, the new EU piece of legislation setting the maximum level of stand-by and so-called "off-mode" losses from products we buy in the EU - has just entered into force (the full legal text can be found here) on January 7th this year. When a hi-fi, microwave, washing machine or electric toy is on standby mode it still consumes energy - and shockingly, for some electronic products and washing machines or dishawashers this is true even when they are off. However, thanks to the new regulation, for new products this will now have to be, by law, below 1-2 Watt, equal to 8-16 kWh/year. In the future the maximum level of stand-by losses will be limited to below 0.5 – 1 Watt.
The measure on standby and off-mode is expected to save 15 million tons of CO2, or 35 TWh of electricity per year by 2020, as much as the residential electricity consumption of Sweden. This is obviously something to be happy about. The main shortcoming of this measure is it left out of the scope the so-called "networked standby modes" (standby still connected to a network to download updates), which misses about 40 TWh of savings. These will however be covered later under the Eco Design Directive.
The upcoming Member State vote on boilers and water heaters is even more crucial. The decision on what level the minimum requirement should be set at will take place in the Spring, and we hope that it will be an ambitious one. The stock of our heating equipment is responsible for 40% of our energy consumption and around 25% of all CO2 emissions, roughly the same level as road transport in Europe. Ambitious requirements and the introduction of energy efficiency labels could reduce CO2 emissions and energy consumption of household heating by a quarter if we also improved building insulation at the same time. And energy bills would be reduced by up to 44 billion Euros a year.
Other crucial issues that will emerge, and that we’ll try to cover in this blog, are to what extent the Directive will start covering other environmental aspects of products, including resource use, toxics use, recyclability, etc – something it is supposed to do according to the letter of the law but which has so far been neglected. This seems particularly crucial in the case of computers and monitors, another group of products that will soon be regulated under the Eco Design Directive. For the moment, all efforts have been almost exclusively directed at energy efficiency, despite the fact that this is only one part of the picture – albeit a crucial one – when it comes to the environmental footprint of consumer electronics. A new report issued by the European Environmental Bureau last week said just this.
Finally, as the new implementing measures – the ones that have already been decided on – enter into force, it will be very important to find out whether the market is really being transformed, i.e. whether or not the new rules are really being respected. Hopefully we’ll find that there aren’t many free riders selling products that don’t comply with these rules, therefore making the Ecodesign policy ineffective at reaching climate change and energy conservation objectives.