Harmonised approach to address standby power losses through international policy

Products in standby modes consume approximately 1% to 2% of all electricity worldwide. Policies to address standby consumption have been introduced in jurisdictions worldwide, but are not harmonised, creating a challenging regulatory landscape for manufacturers and service providers. Furthermore, policy makers in different jurisdictions often reproduce one another´s work, researching similar products and proposing similar solutions, leading to duplication of efforts. A hybrid, horizontal approach is proposed that combines a hard limit with a functional allowance. Such an approach would mean that simple and complex products would both be efficiently covered by the same policy. The development of a repository to host the definitions and limit values would allow individual jurisdictions to avoid undertaking lengthy technical studies in order to assess the current state of the art for various products.