Context - This is a proposal from Google based on our experience consuming schema.org Product markup and working with similar data from online merchants. If it were accepted, it would make it easier for us and others to understand energy efficiency properties of products.

Introduction

Many products advertised or sold on the web consume energy and countries around the world have regulations related to labeling such products with energy efficiency information, both online and in stores. An example of such a regulation is EU directive 2017/1369, which covers energy labeling for various categories of products. Another example is the Energy labeling rule under the Energy Policy and Conservation Act (EPCA) in the US. In addition to these regulations, consumers in general are increasingly interested in the energy efficiency of products they are researching online.

The energy efficiency characteristics of a product are typically expressed through a combination of one or more of the following elements:

• An energy efficiency rating, which could be:
  • A flag indicating that the product meets a particular energy efficiency standard (for example, the Energy Star rating in the US), or:
  • A value out of a range of energy efficiency classes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_energy_label) in the EU. Each such class indicates a different level of energy efficiency (high to low). Different products have a different range (spectrum) of classes, for example [A+++, …, D] for dishwashers or [A,...,G] for [A++,...,E] for lamps.
• An energy efficiency label (image) in a standardized format. Examples: EU, NZ, US.
• A datasheet (or "fiche"), specifying details such as energy consumption, water consumption, loudness, and many others. The required line items on such a datasheet are typically different for different types of products (see examples of EU fiche requirements for air conditioners and wine coolers) and must be supplied in a specific order.

Currently, Schema.org provides no explicit support for expressing energy efficiency properties of products. Although the /PropertyValue class could be used, we believe allowing an explicit and structured way of expressing energy consumption characteristics by adding a small amount of vocabulary would benefit the ecosystem.

Proposal

Our proposal is to add a new class, for example /EnergyConsumptionDetails, that would define the energy consumption characteristics of a product. This class would then be used by a new property /energyConsumptionDetails under /Product.

Properties under this new class could include, for example:

• energyEfficiencyRating, a value from a new /EnergyEfficiencyRating enumeration type, containing values such as "EnergyStar", "A+++", "G", etc.
• energyEfficiencyRatingRange, a value from a new class /EnergyEfficiencyRatingRangeSpecification to specify a range (from-to) of energy efficiency ratings.
• energyLabelImage, a URL to an image of an energy efficiency label.
• datasheet, for which we could consider using the existing /ItemList class to represent a list of line items on the datasheet, each item being a key-value pair which could be modeled using /PropertyValue.

Some Open Questions

• We could consider adding an explicit regional or country identifier to identify the specific locale (EU, US, …) a particular /EnergyConsumptionDetails instance belongs to.
• Adding more structure to the datasheet (as an alternative to using key-value pairs) can be considered but for the EU alone this would lead to a very large (over 200) number of specific properties for over 25 product groups that would need to be modeled explicitly.