The European Commission introduced new energy efficiency measures on 1 January 2015. This includes energy labels for online sales (retailers will be required to show energy labels when selling products online to ease product comparisons) and new energy labels for cooking appliances (new domestic gas ovens and range hoods, in addition to existing labels on electric ovens). New networked equipment (such as modems, receivers/decoders, connected televisions, printers, etc.) and coffee machines will have to offer a function that switches the equipment into a low power standby mode if no main task is performed.
These measures are expected to save €45/year per household by 2020. The three new measures (standby and energy label for cooking appliances) are estimated to reduce CO2 emissions by 15 Mt/year. All existing standby measures combined will reduce energy consumption by almost 75 TWh, without affecting product performance. This will reduce CO2 emissions by 28 Mt, equivalent to the annual emissions of 1.5 million households. All ecodesign and energy labelling measures combined are estimated to deliver annual energy savings of around 166 million tonnes of oil equivalent in primary energy.