Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-01-31-Speech-3-185"
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"en.20010131.9.3-185"2
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"Mr President, I would like to thank Mrs McNally sincerely for her excellent work, as this issue is a very important one. We are all agreed on this matter. The present trend in matters of energy efficiency is not always the best possible alternative, however. For example, the aim for household appliances should be that all power-consuming circuits should be switched off. But this is not possible in all cases: modern equipment often lacks an on/off button, as was mentioned here earlier on, making it utterly impossible to switch it off, even if the consumer wants to. Many machines have a small red lamp that glows constantly to show that the equipment is still on and that it is consuming energy to some extent. If we imagine the infinitesimally small amount of one watt per hour per appliance in a household this volume of energy consumption is multiplied very quickly. With just a thousand appliances the figure reaches one kilowatt per hour, and with a million, one megawatt per hour, at which point we are talking about much larger volumes of energy consumption. On the other hand, a quiescent current has its positive side, when, for example, the air in the room has to be heated. In the northern regions of the Union, rooms, houses and buildings are heated and the heat produced from appliances and bulbs cuts heating costs. But then again, in warm conditions, especially in the southernmost countries of the Union, where rooms must be kept cool with air-conditioning, the costs resulting from quiescent currents are doubled.
The general aim must be to promote the use of technology that consumes less energy; for example, the use of glow bulbs in equipment should always be avoided when they can be replaced with LEDs. Furthermore, there must be more focus on consumer information than is the case at present. It is difficult for the consumer to appreciate that equipment that is cheap to buy but an ‘energy guzzler’ will prove expensive in the course of time. Energy efficiency labelling must be standardised in such a way that all consumers of any age, including children and the elderly, understand how much energy a piece of equipment consumes. The information must be easily intelligible to all. Merely to mention wattage means nothing to many people. The manufacturers of equipment must explain, for example, in the instructions for use, how to save energy using the equipment in question."@en1
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