Energy Label revision: Say bye to plusses

After a strong political debate in the ITRE Committee, and the vote in the full parliament plenary in early July, the ambitious first draft of the Rapporteur has been reigned in, but some key concerns of the members of Coolproducts were still supported by the parliament.  A majority vote in the Plenary gave MEP Tamburrano the mandate needed to start Trilogue negotiations with the Commission and Council to finalise the legislation.

The positive outcomes from the European Parliament include a desire to return back to a simple A-G label (i.e. without the confusing plusses), a fundamental position of Coolproducts. Should this be maintained, it will facilitate a better understanding for consumers and a better market differentiation between products.

However, rescaling back to A-G label, in the eyes of the Parliaments would happen in two steps:

1) by end 2022: for most of the existing labelled products groups (fridges, lamps, etc.)
2) for new products groups and subsequent rescaling, it will depend on the penetration rate of the most energy efficient models 

Disappointingly, the Parliament has voted to allow water heaters and boilers, the most energy consuming goods, to continue receiving confusing A+, A++, A+++ labels until around 2030. The heating industry claims that the current label adequately reflects the range of products available on the market and is a good example of a working label. This persistence of plusses could however result in confusion in the years to come, particularly as Ecodesign measures come into force. Household direct electric heating will continue to be excluded from the energy labelling scheme, despite being the most inefficient way to heat living space.

A database of energy efficient labelled products is to be created and to be functional on 1 January 2018.  Although the Commission is now mandated by the Parliament to establish a product database, they have only agreed to a partly public – partly restricted database. Market surveillance authorities may only be able to check on suppliers via their own decentralised database as they may potentially be entitled to keep sensitive data on their own servers. Coolproducts has consistently appealed for a sortable, searchable, and free-to-access database that will not only facilitate market surveillance activities, but allow for national-level, up-to-date dissemination on the most efficient products available on the market.  

Unfortunately, at this stage, Parliament has decided that there would be no obligation to inform consumers about the energy consumed by the labelled products when they are advertised. Another disappointing outcome from Parliament is their view that the Commission should not get free access to aggregated sales data from suppliers, which would make it more difficult in understanding the real situation of the EU market. If such a situation were to develop, it would hinder efforts to period rescaling the labels, which may be based on the number of units of products sold in each energy class, depending on the views of the Commission and Council.

In the next steps of the regulatory process, the Commission, Parliament, and Council will negotiate a text they can all support – the three institutions will now engage in an inter-institutional negotiation to produce a final and complete text that will be the new framework regulation. We expect these negotiations to be concluded by the middle of October.