European Ecodesign Material Efficiency Standardization Supporting Circular Economy Aspects of Power Drive Systems for Sustainability

There is no way to reach the objective of a circular economy by dealing separately with the energy efficiency performance and other environmental objectives like with material efficiency aspects. Optimal trade-offs balancing different constraints impacting environment and sustainable economy are keys for consideration. The now-published Ecodesign Regulation (EU) 2019/1781 applicable to electric motors and variable speed drives (VSD) asks for compliance with mandatory minimum energy efficiency performance. The European Commission will start soon the revision process of this regulation for considering additional resource efficiency and will report on a proposal for discussion with stakeholder considerations for a finalization stage starting from November 2023. There are many published and current research works conducted by institutes, the European Commission Joint Research Center, or by professional manufacturer associations on this topic. A new one is the anticipated standardization work initiated by the CENELEC Technical Committee 22X for Power Electronics, dealing with “Methods and Specifications for the Assessment of Material Efficiency of Variable Speed Drives”. This work would consider the existing EN 50598-3 standard on product-specific rules for life cycle assessment and content of environmental declaration. In addition to other existing standards and regulations applicable, the VSD industry will benefit from tools helping them to reach sustainability objectives like with the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal 12 (Responsible Consumption & Production) and other SDGs 3, 6, 13, 14, 15 impacted by SDG 12. This chapter, as a follow-up of a previous EEMODS’2019 paper, will provide an update of the published series of nine EN 4555x CEN/CLC European standards related to the “General Methods for Assessment of Material Efficiency Aspects for Energy-Related Products”. It will particularly focus on the CENELEC initiative to derive these horizontal standards to adapt and apply them to the variable speed electric power drive systems and to consider the overall Environmentally Conscious Design (ECD). It will also focus on energy efficiency and material efficiency-related data to be operated by all stakeholders along the complete product and systems’ life cycles. The chapter will describe the need to make material efficiency and energy efficiency information available, interoperable, and usable through the whole life cycle. A digital catalogue data, including material efficiency properties, should be a key tool for ensuring interoperability between digital twins, requesting data exchange between equipment, design, manufacturing, or facility management tools for different operators who ask for an effective environmentally conscious digitization in Circular Economy.