What do we understand under Energy Smart Appliances ?
Imagine your home appliances are smarter and help you cut down on electricity costs while supporting green energy. Energy Smart Appliances (ESAs) can be for example heat pumps or dishwashers that can automatically adjust when they use electricity, to times when renewable energy is most available. This not only saves you money but also helps the environment.
To ensure these smart devices work well with different brands, they need to be able to communicate the same way, regardless of who makes them. This is called interoperability, and it allows them to share the same functions, like starting at different times or limiting their energy use. To encourage this, the European Commission has been working with manufacturers to create a voluntary Code of Conduct (CoC). Officially launched on 23 April 2024, this initiative will help more of these compatible smart appliances become accessible by 2025, and you will be able to find them through the EPREL database.
Companies that agree to this Code of Conduct will show in EPREL what functions their appliances can do, and whether you'll need any extras, like a cloud service or a dongle. They will also provide an online link where you can learn more about these features, how to set them up, and the advantages they offer you.
Code of Conduct and advantages
Energy smart appliances (ESA) in homes enable consumers to shift electricity use depending on the preferences and other parameters, contributing to the stability of the power grid, or potentially lowering the electricity bill of the household. An example is running a heat pump or turning on a dishwasher when renewable generation is most abundant, whilst still delivering the service expected by the consumer (e.g. certain minimum temperatures, or to finish a wash cycle before a certain time).
Any energy control unit can usually manage automatically the energy consumption of an ESA. Unlike non-interoperable appliances, which have specific control systems and services depending on their manufacturers, interoperable ESA should offer common services and exchange the same information to enable them. These will allow for instance enabling a flexible start of a device or simply limiting its consumption regardless of the manufacturer.
To bring about cross-brand interoperability of widely used ESA, the JRC and the Commission’s Directorate-General for Energy developed a Code of Conduct (CoC) together with manufacturers. This voluntary initiative aims to increase the number of interoperable energy smart appliances placed on the EU market.
The objective of the Code of Conduct is to define common demand flexibility services and the information that needs to be exchanged to enable them, at a semantic level that can work even where different technical communication protocols are used by manufacturers.
You can find more information on the Code of Conduct and its signatories on the dedicated webpage.
Development steps
Under the Ecodesign & Energy Labelling framework, some preparatory work for addressing ESA had been completed. The preparatory study established the scope for further work (i.e. selected product categories with the highest potential for demand response), validated the economic benefits that could be achieved by a large scale deployment of ESA, and proposed some generic technical requirements for those. As a general approach, the study proposed a non-mandatory measure (i.e. to help differentiate on the market the ESA and ensure their full interoperability, but not to ban ‘non-smart’ products from the market). However, the study’s conclusion was that more work was needed in order to come up with a regulatory proposal.
The main issue identified was regulating in a way that would ensure full interoperability among different products from various manufacturers. This would require compliance with a multitude of standards, some of them not (fully) developed at that time. In addition, any such regulation would heavily rely on these standards (references to which might needed to be included in the regulatory text), while the standards themselves were in a very rapid evolution (much faster than the regulatory cycles).
Thus, while regulation seemed inappropriate, rapid technological developments could have also led to the consolidation of different product ecosystems, which would use proprietary solutions and would inherently be incompatible (i.e. not interoperable) with each other. Therefore, action could be taken by the European Commission for securing coherent development on the market, adherence of industry to open standards, and promotion of Smart Applications REFerence (SAREF) as a general ontology underpinning product interoperability.
