Refrigerator Energy Labelling and MEPS Compliance in the Australian Market

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Summary

Australia has a long history of regulating the energy efficiency of major consumer appliances. The benefits of this regulation are said to include lower running costs for consumers, increased security of energy supply and reduced environmental impact from reduced energy demand. This paper is about whether the claims of energy consumption of products regulated for energy efficiency are being met by equipment suppliers, using refrigerator data as a proxy for other regulated equipment types.

Any regulatory scheme carries a risk that some suppliers may inadvertently or intentionally breach the minimum energy performance standard or mandatory labelling rules. The risk of non-compliance is increased if the market perceives that regulatory agencies are not undertaking monitoring, verification and enforcement (also called compliance) activities. These activities measure whether supplier efficiency claims are being met and whether consumers are benefiting from lower energy bills, which should result from regulatory programs.

The Equipment Energy Efficiency (E3) Committee, on behalf of government regulatory agencies, has undertaken targeted checks of product compliance for more than a decade. These compliance checks are not based on a random selection of products on the market but are highly targeted towards products that are most likely to fail. The targeting of compliance testing is to ensure that limited public sector testing resources are used most effectively by examining the equipment most at risk of not complying. This targeted compliance activity, however, masks the actual level of compliance in the wider marketplace. In 2010, a public debate developed about what the overall compliance rate was for products regulated for energy efficiency in Australia. The targeted compliance testing program does not provide an answer to that question.

This report is an attempt to re-create a randomly selected sample of regulated whitegood products to better respond to this question using refrigerators, the longest regulated product within the program. The methodology behind the report is to create a more randomised sample from the data available. It documents how a "random" assessment of market compliance for refrigerators was created to draw conclusions about the possible overall marketplace compliance in the last decade.

This page last modified 15 June 2011