Lately, the National Development and Reform Commission and the Standardization Administration of China have released the Plan for the Development of a System of Energy Conservation Standards (the "Plan").
The Plan clearly states that by 2020, the national standards for energy conservation, industrial standards, local standards, and group standards are more optimized in terms of their system structure. Major industries with heavy energy consumption and energy-using end products will be completely covered by energy conservation standards; over 80% of energy efficiency indicators will be up to the international advanced level; energy-saving standard indicators for major fields and sectors will be more advanced; and more than 50% quality and efficiency assessments will be made as per newly released mandatory standards for energy conservation. Accordingly, the Plan proposes to optimize the construction of standard systems, improve the management mechanism and lay a solid foundation for the standardization of energy conservation among other tasks. Moreover, the Plan sets out efforts to enhance the enactment and amendment of energy-saving standards in key sectors: the technical standards for energy conservation in the fields of iron and steel, nonferrous metal, petrochemicals and chemicals will be enacted and revised as soon as possible for the industry sector, while for the commercial circulation sector, efforts will be made to speed up formulating and revising the energy management system for retail business and the standards for green shopping centers, green markets, green services, and so on.