APPLiA withdraws its legal challenge before the EU General Court

APPLiA has decided to withdraw its legal challenge filed before the EU General Court in March 2020 after the European Commission has made significant amendments to the Energy Labelling Regulations published on December 5, 2019. The original set of legislation contained some inconsistencies between product groups and contradictions related to how product performance data would need to be provided to the Eprel database. According to AppliA, this caused unacceptable and unnecessary uncertainty – both for consumers and producers – and endangered an efficient market surveillance. For this reason, although the sector has strongly supported the revision of the energy label and its contribution to energy efficiency, APPLiA launched a legal challenge before the EU General Court in March 2020 to improve some critical parts of this legislation. As a consequence of the APPLiA legal challenge, the EU Commission has worked on amendments on the above legislation, which were published on March 1, 2021. After a careful assessment, APPLiA considers that the new legal text corrects the most critical parts and is sufficiently clear to enable consistency and enforcement on the market. «With the amendments – commented Paolo Falcioni, APPLiA’s Director General – legal certainty and applicability of the requirements can be ensured in the internal market. Industries are now in a position to realistically comply with the new rules and drive forward innovation and competition to achieve energy and material efficiency. APPLiA highly appreciates the effort made by the European institutions to rapidly clarify uncertainties and inconsistencies found in the regulations published in December 2019. We refrain from pursuing our legal challenge further as the legal text is sufficiently clear, but we look forward to improving future legislation in this area.»