Introduction
Energy Smart Appliances (ESA) are products that provide energy flexibility being capable of automatically (by means of machine-to-machine communication) optimising their consumption patterns (e.g. time or profile) in response to external stimuli, based on user permission.
As renewables’ penetration renders the energy supply in the EU increasingly decentralised and reliant on variable resources, demand-side flexibility offered by households gains importance for ensuring the development and operation of the power grid at lowest costs for consumers.
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. maintain indoor temperature within a comfort zone, or finish a wash cycle before a certain time).
In order to exploit ESA at a large scale and to provide flexibility to the grid, they should be able to work together and understand each other (i.e. being interoperable). 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 Code of Conduct was launched on 23 April 2024, and manufacturers have committed to make available interoperable ESA one year after the launch. Once they are on the market, consumers will be able to use EPREL to search for interoperable ESA.
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.
