Experts from EU member states convened last week to decide on the first in the series of votes on energy-efficient and ecologically sound appliances. The first vote was on electric motors. This may sound strange to non-experts, but electric motors are used widely in industry and account for around 70% of the electricity used by that sector. The final decision will lead to annual use-phase electricity consumption savings of about 135 TWh by 2020, corresponding to an annual reduction of 63 Mt of CO2 emissions. These savings correspond to about the annual electricity consumption of Sweden. Coolproducts welcomes this key decision, but also thinks the measure could have been even more ambitious - as industry has managed to achieve several delays for small motors and other additional exemptions.
Some member states, including the UK, also thought there could have been more ambition. Lord Hunt, UK Minister for Sustainability said: "Given the importance of tackling Climate Change, in the UK we were keen to go further, faster and it is disappointing that other countries did not agree with us on this. The European motor market is lagging behind the rest of the world."
Meanwhile, the vote on fridges was postponed because of a lack of agreement on the energy labeling revision (we wrote about this in our earlier blog post silly numbers).
This will have disappointed climate activists from environmental groups BUND, SNM and Milieudefensie who had dressed up as penguins last Thursday and camped in front of the European Commission in Brussels.
Avaaz also joined the penguin camp to present decision makers with the 125,000-strong petition for coolproducts (you can see a short video here). This was presented to Gerard Legris, the European Commission's head of unit Transparency and Relations with Stakeholders, who attended the event on behalf of the President ot the Commission Jose Manuel Barroso. The petition has also been presented to the Czech Presidency of the European Union.
There was a lot of media at the penguin camp, as well as a lot of interest from passers-by, and the penguins made it to "photo of the day" in the online version of the Wall Street Journal and on San Francisco Chronicle. Environmental group SNM was also interviewed on prime time TV in the Netherlands. There was also coverage on NRC.next and Financieel Dagblad, as well as Spanish and even Korean news agencies. A useful and detailed article on this appeared on the Euractiv news site.