Aligning Energy Efficiency in the Asia-Pacific and Beyond

Experts from the APEC economies gathered in Seoul, Korea yesterday to convene a second conference intended to achieve alignment on mandatory energy efficiency regulations for personal computers.  While PCs have been around for a long time, achieving global alignment on how they are regulated for energy efficiency remains at the early stages.  To help address this problem, ITI has been partnering with our government and APEC, which comprises 21 economies from around the Asia-Pacific region.  
 
Our effort took a big step forward last fall at an inaugural conference on this topic in California where regulators and other APEC officials together with industry agreed on a set of helpful principles on energy efficiency regulation, which supports the APEC Leaders emphasis on green growth.
 
At the conference in Seoul, participants agreed to put these shared principles into practice and move forward with concrete steps toward establishing a harmonized minimum energy performance regime that includes:
 

  • A common standard for test methodology and product categories
  • An international program for transportable test results
  • A common dataset approach for product energy target setting and conformity assessment

 
ITI will continue to lead industry participation, as APEC economies weigh the establishment of a working forum to address the technical challenges associated with this effort.  While much still needs to be done in the APEC context and in other venues on getting in place a global regime for energy efficiency requirements for PCs and other ICT products. If we are successful, there will substantial immediate and long-term savings for the tech sector, which will not have to worry about meeting a patchwork of unique energy requirements (including testing and certification) around the globe.  This would also contribute to a greener ecosystem for the peoples of all our nations.

Public Policy Tags: Energy, Trade & Investment

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