How does the efficiency of products available in my country compare to those available in other countries? What impacts have the minimum energy performance standards (MEPS) that took effect last year had on the efficiency and price of available products? Do our products comply with MEPS in other countries?

These are common questions among energy efficiency policy practitioners and policymakers around the world. However, they can be difficult to answer because the necessary data are spread across disparate sources and exist in many different formats.

To address this challenge, the Super-efficient Equipment and Appliance Deployment (SEAD) Initiative developed a global framework for capturing, updating, and maintaining individual product data – such as brand, model number, energy efficiency, and price –  for the many types of energy-consuming products sold around the world. To accompany the framework, SEAD also developed a data standard to define what fields are required for each product category, how they should be named, and what acceptable values are for each.

Widespread adoption of this framework in appliance databases worldwide would enable decision makers to monitor markets in real time and facilitate international data sharing via a common data standard. Model-by-model comparison of energy efficiency and price also allows consumers to make more informed choices about their appliance purchases, thus accelerating market transformation towards more energy-efficient technologies.

The bottom line? Better informed policy decisions.

This report was authored by Enervee Corp. and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in support of the SEAD Initiative.
For more information, please visit www.superefficient.org/dataaccess.