Effective implementation of EU product efficiency legislation

Topic description

Specific Challenge:

By 2020 full implementation of the EU product efficiency legislation should be one of the most important contributions to the EU energy efficiency target. The Ecodesign Directive alone should yield yearly savings of up to 600 TWh of electricity and 600 TWh of heat in 2020, as well as net savings for European consumers and businesses of €90 billion per year – 1% of EU’s current GDP – in year 2020 (meaning net savings of €465 per household per year). Non-compliance with these rules is estimated to reduce these savings by at least 10%. Previous initiatives have demonstrated the usefulness of market surveillance activities. However to ensure full implementation of product efficiency legislation, these activities should be improved.

The enforcement of energy efficient products regulations should also take into account other relevant environmental impacts (e.g. emissions, noise) in order not to adversely influence peoples’ quality of life.

The challenge is thus to:

• improve market surveillance activities.

Provide support for joint surveillance actions. Proposals should focus on building up the monitoring, verification and enforcement of the EU's energy-related products policy, in particular for those products that represent the highest energy saving potential and with lower compliance rates or those regulated products that represent new challenges for market surveillance (e.g. newly regulated products or ones where new challenges arise such as suspected use of defeat devices) and therefore may require new approaches and methods for monitoring, verification and enforcement. Proposals should support higher level of surveillance activities and go beyond product testing. They should not replace activities that are under the responsibility of Member States, but should add European value to them (e.g. execution of joint activities, exchange of information, development of common methods, protocols or checklists, etc.). Actions must include the relevant market surveillance authorities^[1] at least one per participating country, in their consortia. Actions should also involve consumers’ (or other end users') associations as appropriate, and demonstrate a high transnational added value. Actions should take stock of previous EU-funded work on monitoring, verification and enforcement, combining and leveraging relevant results to a much wider audience across the EU. Proposals should consider the use of databases to record actions' results on specific product models, notably existing databases used by market surveillance authorities and/or developed in previous EU-funded work.

The Commission considers that proposals requesting a contribution from the EU of between EUR 1 and 2 million would allow this specific challenge to be addressed appropriately. Nonetheless, this does not preclude submission and selection of proposals requesting other amounts.

Proposed actions are expected to demonstrate the impacts listed below (wherever possible, use quantified indicators and targets), depending on the scope of the proposal:

• Primary energy savings triggered by the project (in GWh/year per million Euro of EU funding) corresponding to the energy losses avoided from non-compliance;
• Increase of confidence among purchasers, manufacturers and retailers;
• Contribution to the enforcement of EU product legislation.

[1]The market surveillance authorities are the authorities of the EU Member States, of the EEA EFTA states (Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein) and of the Customs Union with the EU (Turkey) responsible for enforcement of ecodesign, energy labelling and labelling of tyres regulations, appointed in accordance with Regulation (EC) No 765/2008 of the European Parliament and the Council