Govt mulls energy-efficiency label

NEW DELHI, Aug 6: The Government is mulling the introduction of an E-Mark' to signify energy efficiency as part of change being planned ...

NEW DELHI, Aug 6: The Government is mulling the introduction of an E-Mark’ to signify energy efficiency as part of change being planned in the Energy Conservation Bill. This Bill is the last of the three power sector Bills mooted by the Power Ministry.

The Ministry is also in discussion with the Finance Ministry to finalise the penal mechanism for industries which do not promote energy conservation and which are not energy efficient. As part of the Bill, energy audits will be made mandatory for manufacturing units. The two ministries are debating whether an extra excise duty would be a better option or a special cess on energy inefficiency should be levied on industry.

While the CERC Bill and the Transmission Bill have already been introduced in Parliament, the Energy Conservation Bill was held back as the ministry wanted to introduce a comprehensive and fool-proof Bill which could tackle energy efficiency in the country. The Bill is likely to be moved in the winter session of Parliament.

Among theideas being weighed by the ministry is to introduce energy labels on consumer electronic and electrical items. The label would indicate the power consumption parameters of the appliance. This would also help the Government in getting better estimates of power consumption and demand in the country. Currently, the power consumed by electrical goods and appliances is not factored in when the future demand for power is calculated. This has led to under-valuation of power demand figures.

With labelling, the Government would find it easy to calculate the power demanded and consumed as a result of the sales of air-conditioners, TVs, and such items.

The second type of labelling would be to place a special E-Mark’ on items which achieve high levels of efficient energy consumption. To be like an ISI mark which signifies quality, an E-Mark would tell the consumer that an appliance or an electrical good consumes minimum power.

The labelling would be done by the Energy Efficiency Bureau to be set up after the Billis enacted.

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Other ideas being floated are an efficiency rating which will rank appliances on the their efficiency. But this will be possible only after the the Bureau puts together a best practices index for different appliances.

Inefficient agricultural pump sets inflate the consumption of power. An idea doing the round is to introduce lease contract system. Instead of selling the pump sets to farmers, the manufacturers would lease it out. In this way the manufacturer would be responsible for the quality of the pump and would provide genuine spare parts for it. In the current system, the farmer buys inferior quality spares because they are cheap and ends up being energy inefficient.