Hardware manufacturers such as Dell, Lenovo and HP must ensure new laptops and other devices adhere to new energy-efficiency guidelines when legislation comes into force across Europe on 1 July.

 

The ‘ecodesign’ requirements were approved in June 2013, with a deadline of 1 July 2014 for the first stage to come into effect. The legislation covers numerous aspects of devices' power usage, including how much energy is used in sleep mode, idle state, off and lowest power state.

 

The directive covers a wide range of devices such as desktops, thin clients, workstations and small-scale servers. Games consoles, blade systems, multi-node servers and docking stations are exempt.

 

In the statement, the European Commission (EC) said it was confident the new rules would not impinge on hardware manufacturers or affect device performance.

 

The push for the new legislation was backed by a consortium of companies last year called Coolproducts, made up of groups such as Friends of the Earth and the European Environmental Bureau.

 

It is estimated that the new rules will lead to energy savings of at least 12.5 terawatt hours annually by 2020. This is equivalent to the output of 16 medium-sized coal power plants, or the CO2 equivalent emitted from 2.5 million cars, Coolproducts said.

 

However, it is unclear at present if hardware manufacturers are ready for the new legislation.

 

Despite welcoming the new rules on energy usage, the Coolproducts consortium said it was disappointed the EU did not push for greater rules around the lifecycle of tech products.