Local Enforcement of Appliance Efficiency Standards and Labeling Program in China: Progress and Challenges

As part of its commitment to promoting and improving the local enforcement of appliance energy efficiency standards and labeling, the China National Institute of Standardization launched the National and Local Enforcement of Energy Efficiency Standards and Labeling program on August 14, 2009. For this program, Jiangsu, Shandong, Sichuan and Shanghai were selected as pilot locations. This paper provides information on the local enforcement program's recent background, activities and results as well as comparison to previous rounds of check-testing in 2006 and 2007. In addition, the paper also offers evaluation on the achievement and weaknesses in the local enforcement scheme and recommendations based on international experience.

The results demonstrate both improvement and some backsliding. Enforcement schemes are in place in all target cities and applicable national standards and regulations were followed as the basis for local check testing. Check testing results show in general high labeling compliance across regions for five products. But it also identified key weaknesses in labeling compliance in Sichuan as well as in the efficiency standards compliance levels for small and medium three-phase asynchronous motors and self-ballasted fluorescent lamps. In the case of refrigerators, in particular, the efficiency standards compliance rate exhibited a wider range of 50% to 100%, and the average rate across all tested models also dropped from 96% in 2007 to 63% in 2009, possibly due to the implementation of newly strengthened efficiency standards. This paper also identified areas for improvement including awareness at the local level, product sampling methodology, and testing tools and procedures.