Assessment of SEAD Global Medals for Televisions

The Super-efficient Equipment and Appliance Deployment (SEAD) Global Efficiency Medal competition is designed to enable the market to move toward higher efficiency by spurring innovation among manufacturers and increasing the market share of efficient products. The competition is also expected to help retailers or consumers easily identify the most efficient products across a region, and recognize these products as global leaders in energy efficiency. Through the SEAD awards program, policy makers and utilities can identify industrial potential (i.e., possible contribution from the appliance/equipment manufacturers) on energy efficiency improvement in selected product groups and design appropriate policy measures to drive the market towards greater efficiency. In addition, the SEAD awards competitions foster international government collaboration, which can strengthen the technical foundation of globalized products by supporting the harmonization of test procedures and building test lab capabilities.

With these overarching goals, the SEAD Global Efficiency Medal competition for flat-panel display televisions (FPD TVs) (hereinafter referred to as “the SEAD TV Awards”) was launched in January 2012. In October 2012, SEAD awarded Samsung and LG for producing the most energy efficient FPD TVs in the world. The first competition aimed to encourage the production and sale of super-efficient TVs in three different size categories and four geographical regions (Australia, Europe, India, and North America), with an overall global winner for each size category and one global award for the most efficient emerging technology product. To ensure that the competition results in meaningful market transformation, the SEAD TV Awards competition required minimum sales thresholds. For the commercially available technology (CAT) category, applicants were required to have plans to sell at least a minimum number of units of a product model in the region of nomination.1 The sales threshold is intended to ensure that award-winning products have a significant footprint in terms of market share, in order to maximize potential energy savings. For the emerging technology (ET) category, applicants were required to have plans for mass production within two years of the end of the competition.