State of product energy efficiency in Europe - Market insights from the new EU product registration database for energy labelling

In July 2017, the European Commission published the revised Energy Labelling Regulation (2017/1369/EU), setting deadlines for rescaling the current energy efficiency classes and introducing a product database. As from 1 January 2019, before placing on the market a unit of a new model covered by a delegated act, suppliers have to enter relevant product information in the new EU Product Registration database for Energy Labelling (EPREL). The database consists of a compliance part and a public part, which will be made accessible via an online portal. Its main goals are 1) supporting national market surveillance authorities, 2) informing consumers on the energy efficiency of appliances and 3) providing the Commission with up-to-date information for reviewing energy labels. The Regulation requires that the information will be made available as open data. Since 1st January 2019 manufacturers can manually input the requested data in EPREL and since 1st February 2019 a systemto- system mass-upload approach has been made available. However, the Commission postponed the access to the open data (public part of the database) to the second quarter of 2019, for which reason we could not perform a first data analysis of EPREL at this stage, as initially intended. The main objectives of the paper are fourfold. First, we introduce EPREL by providing a short historical background of the new EU database. Second, we show the structure and the main functionalities of the database as well as the main obligations for manufacturers. Third, we provide a brief overview over selected programmes in countries that have already implemented an online register system for energy related products in the past. Finally, we conduct a reduced market analysis for televisions on the German market, using data from the German comparison site www.idealo.de instead of EPREL.