Periodic Reporting for period 2 - EEPLIANT2 (Energy Efficiency Compliant Products 2)
Período documentado: 2019-03-01 hasta 2020-02-29
Energy Efficiency Compliance Products 2016 - EEPLIANT2 is a joint market surveillance action funded by the European Union with the aim of delivering the intended economic and environmental benefits of the EU Energy Labelling Regulation and Ecodesign Directive. EEPLIANT2 action involved 17 Market Surveillance Authorities (MSAs) and a national agency from 15 European Member States that have worked together to increase energy efficiency, improve the level of product compliance, and help achieve the EU political targets on climate change.
The Joint Action was designed to achieve cross-border impacts and to facilitate cooperation also with key market players and stakeholders, such as industry and consumer associations, in order to increase awareness and achieve overall higher rates of compliance with the EU ecodesign and energy labelling requirements. When reviewing the technical documentation and testing the energy performance of products, project participants have always provided the opportunity for clarifications and/or voluntary actions to economic operators.
Inspection and testing of products has always been at the core of activities in the EEPLIANT programme. The results of the inspections and tests in EEPLIANT2 have led to the removal or the rectification of the identified non-compliant products with consequential reductions in energy consumption and carbon emissions.
The 3 product sectors investigated were:
Domestic household refrigeration appliances – A mature and very large product sector that had long been acquainted with energy labelling and ecodesign regulations; but one over which suspicions of non-compliance were beginning to increase.
Network standby – A rapidly developing product feature impacting a very wide range of products. Any non-compliance here could have a large impact on excessive energy consumption and avoidable carbon emissions.
Professional refrigeration cabinets – An opportunity for MSAs to gain experience of working with commercial products and their supplier communities.
The Joint Action was designed to achieve cross-border impacts and to facilitate cooperation also with key market players and stakeholders, such as industry and consumer associations, in order to increase awareness and achieve overall higher rates of compliance with the EU ecodesign and energy labelling requirements. When reviewing the technical documentation and testing the energy performance of products, project participants have always provided the opportunity for clarifications and/or voluntary actions to economic operators.
Inspection and testing of products has always been at the core of activities in the EEPLIANT programme. The results of the inspections and tests in EEPLIANT2 have led to the removal or the rectification of the identified non-compliant products with consequential reductions in energy consumption and carbon emissions.
The 3 product sectors investigated were:
Domestic household refrigeration appliances – A mature and very large product sector that had long been acquainted with energy labelling and ecodesign regulations; but one over which suspicions of non-compliance were beginning to increase.
Network standby – A rapidly developing product feature impacting a very wide range of products. Any non-compliance here could have a large impact on excessive energy consumption and avoidable carbon emissions.
Professional refrigeration cabinets – An opportunity for MSAs to gain experience of working with commercial products and their supplier communities.
Overall, the work of the project working groups has been finalised in accordance with the agreed project plan and timeline. In EEPLIANT2, project partners have delivered market surveillance activities – conducting online inspections, reviewing of the technical documentation and testing of the energy performance. The final results, the lessons learned and the enforcement measures taken by the MSAs involved were presented during the project Final Conference held in Brussels on 4 February 2020, revealing worrying level of non-compliance. A brainstorming workshop co-organised with the European Commission during the final stage of EEPLIANT2 provided a further opportunity for the MSAs to explore the underlying causes of the identified non-compliances and to discuss possible remedies.
Household Refrigerating Appliances:
89 online shops were reviewed for proper label display in 10 EU countries combined. 71 shops were assessed as non-compliant (80%) and 18 shops as compliant (20%). When not compliant, most of the time the e-shop failed to correctly display both the energy label and the product fiche. In 34% of cases the information was not displayed at all.
172 document inspections were finalised in 14 EU countries combined. Through a risk-based approach (with over 50 parameters) 61% of cases presented non-compliance issues in the documentation. However, the overall compliance assessment by the MSAs suggests that evidence of compliance was deemed adequate for nearly three quarters of the appliances, and this rate improved after communications from the MSAs to economic operators (83% compliant cases).
64 units corresponding to 43 home refrigerator models were tested in an independent accredited laboratory. 40% of the targeted models were considered as non-compliant. So far, 79 economic operators have taken/are taking action to correct their product's technical documentation or correct the e-shop information, while 17 models were withdrawn from the market, penalty fines were imposed in 8 cases. No cases of use of circumvention software or test manipulation were detected.
Network Standby:
43 of the 161 products inspected were selected for a test in a laboratory, and 5 of these 43 went through a triple testing process. The high overall detected rate of non-compliance at 74% is largely due to missing data. Nevertheless, non-compliance with the networked standby power demands (31.3%) and power management requirements (31.5%) were high. The breakdown of results indicates that the largest single cause for non-compliance was excess power demand in one of the three power modes tested, i.e. 27 out of 43 non-compliant products (63% of total) exhibited excess power demand(s).
Professional Refrigeration Products:
The technical documentation of 64 cabinets was reviewed, whereby 40% required changes to declared data. Out of 29 model tested, 79% failed in a significant respect.
Household Refrigerating Appliances:
89 online shops were reviewed for proper label display in 10 EU countries combined. 71 shops were assessed as non-compliant (80%) and 18 shops as compliant (20%). When not compliant, most of the time the e-shop failed to correctly display both the energy label and the product fiche. In 34% of cases the information was not displayed at all.
172 document inspections were finalised in 14 EU countries combined. Through a risk-based approach (with over 50 parameters) 61% of cases presented non-compliance issues in the documentation. However, the overall compliance assessment by the MSAs suggests that evidence of compliance was deemed adequate for nearly three quarters of the appliances, and this rate improved after communications from the MSAs to economic operators (83% compliant cases).
64 units corresponding to 43 home refrigerator models were tested in an independent accredited laboratory. 40% of the targeted models were considered as non-compliant. So far, 79 economic operators have taken/are taking action to correct their product's technical documentation or correct the e-shop information, while 17 models were withdrawn from the market, penalty fines were imposed in 8 cases. No cases of use of circumvention software or test manipulation were detected.
Network Standby:
43 of the 161 products inspected were selected for a test in a laboratory, and 5 of these 43 went through a triple testing process. The high overall detected rate of non-compliance at 74% is largely due to missing data. Nevertheless, non-compliance with the networked standby power demands (31.3%) and power management requirements (31.5%) were high. The breakdown of results indicates that the largest single cause for non-compliance was excess power demand in one of the three power modes tested, i.e. 27 out of 43 non-compliant products (63% of total) exhibited excess power demand(s).
Professional Refrigeration Products:
The technical documentation of 64 cabinets was reviewed, whereby 40% required changes to declared data. Out of 29 model tested, 79% failed in a significant respect.
Overview of key findings and impacts:
• The results of testing have exposed high levels of non-compliance;
• The value of the potential energy saved through increasing MSA activities far outweighs the cost of the market surveillance campaigns;
• There is a continuing increase in the effectiveness of MSAs to detect non-compliant products;
• There has been visible enforcement of EU product legislation with resulting reduction in consumer detriment;
• There has been sharing of inspection and testing results with all MSAs in the EU, so that they can use them too.
An IT data collection and storage system was developed as a web desktop application. One of the key functionalities of the EEPLIANT2 IT system was to be the semi-automatic upload of inspection data to European Commission's ICSMS portal that will increase the efficiency in the MSAs' work and eliminate a source for errors by ensuring that data only have to be entered once. The objective of this task was to ensure that all findings, whether these showed the products to be compliant or not, were recorded in the EEPLIANT2 developed database and transferred to the ICSMS database by the IT tool.
The prime support for policy undertaken by WP6 was an additional testing programme enabling a direct comparison between ISO 22041 and EN 16825, the test method that had been used for the testing reported above. This comparison was requested by DG GROW because of a recent change to the EU test standard used for assessing the performance of professional refrigerated storage cabinets. Six cabinets previously tested by WP6 to EN 16825 were tested to ISO 22041. None of the changes between EN 16825 and ISO 22041 is projected to result in a systematic change in performance for all types of cabinets. Impacts will be on a sub-set of types of cabinet.
A novel mathematical/statistical impacts model was developed to calculate and predict the estimated level of the energy and financial impacts created by the project. The system takes several data sets given by the user regarding one or more tested product categories to return an easy to understand figure on the energy that can be saved though the improvement of the selected product(s)’s energy efficiency in the EU market as a whole. Primary energy savings triggered by the project have been estimated for WPs 4 and 6 combined to average 100.6 GWh savings per year for the period 2020-2030. The cumulative energy savings by 2030 thanks to WP4 alone would be 369 GWh that equals to € 75.6 million.
• The results of testing have exposed high levels of non-compliance;
• The value of the potential energy saved through increasing MSA activities far outweighs the cost of the market surveillance campaigns;
• There is a continuing increase in the effectiveness of MSAs to detect non-compliant products;
• There has been visible enforcement of EU product legislation with resulting reduction in consumer detriment;
• There has been sharing of inspection and testing results with all MSAs in the EU, so that they can use them too.
An IT data collection and storage system was developed as a web desktop application. One of the key functionalities of the EEPLIANT2 IT system was to be the semi-automatic upload of inspection data to European Commission's ICSMS portal that will increase the efficiency in the MSAs' work and eliminate a source for errors by ensuring that data only have to be entered once. The objective of this task was to ensure that all findings, whether these showed the products to be compliant or not, were recorded in the EEPLIANT2 developed database and transferred to the ICSMS database by the IT tool.
The prime support for policy undertaken by WP6 was an additional testing programme enabling a direct comparison between ISO 22041 and EN 16825, the test method that had been used for the testing reported above. This comparison was requested by DG GROW because of a recent change to the EU test standard used for assessing the performance of professional refrigerated storage cabinets. Six cabinets previously tested by WP6 to EN 16825 were tested to ISO 22041. None of the changes between EN 16825 and ISO 22041 is projected to result in a systematic change in performance for all types of cabinets. Impacts will be on a sub-set of types of cabinet.
A novel mathematical/statistical impacts model was developed to calculate and predict the estimated level of the energy and financial impacts created by the project. The system takes several data sets given by the user regarding one or more tested product categories to return an easy to understand figure on the energy that can be saved though the improvement of the selected product(s)’s energy efficiency in the EU market as a whole. Primary energy savings triggered by the project have been estimated for WPs 4 and 6 combined to average 100.6 GWh savings per year for the period 2020-2030. The cumulative energy savings by 2030 thanks to WP4 alone would be 369 GWh that equals to € 75.6 million.