Standards and Labeling program for refrigerators: Comparing India with others

Energy efficiency levels for the Standards and Labeling (S&L) program in India for frost free (FF) refrigerators are compared with similar programs in China, United States of America (USA), and European Union (EU). A normalization method developed by International Energy Agency (IEA) is adopted with India as a benchmark for comparison. It is observed that the energy consumption level corresponding to minimum energy performance standard (MEPS) is very high in India. India also lags behind other countries on the consumption level corresponding to highest efficiency rating. Also, the range of consumption levels corresponding to a label is wide which dilutes the efficacy of label. India has aggressively proposed to tighten the ratings for FF refrigerators in 2014 by 36% across all the bands. This measure will make its highest efficiency rating comparable to other countries. However, due to the wide gap in the consumption levels across the ratings, the revised MEPS will still lag behind other countries. One possible outcome of high MEPS is that as the ratings are tightened, the market may move to lower star rated models significantly undermining the tightening effect.