The landscape and solutions for energy saving were hot topics of a seminar, held recently by the Ministry of Industry, the Institute of Energy and PG Lighting Company.
Landscape of electricity consumption
Analysing electricity using at workplace, Tran Manh Hung from the Institute of Energy, said that due to irresponsibility of users, electricity consumption had seen a high growth in recent years. In three years, from 2002 to 2004, alone, workplace electricity consumption increased by 22.1 per cent. In 2004, in particular, the figure was put 28 per cent.
It is popular that users at home and workplace do not turn off electric equipment and devices before going out. Instead, they let the devices be in a standby mode. Each standby device consumes between four and eight watts. Total electricity volume consumed by standby devices in the whole country is very huge.
Let alone the public lighting system, which uses fluorescent lamps. At present, 80 million fluorescent lamps are used at home, workplace and in public places. According to experts, a fluorescent lamp’s electricity volume doubles that of a compact fluorescent lamp.
Some solutions for energy saving
At present, when price of energy has increased sharply and price of energy saving technologies has become much lower, instead of building new electric power plants, investment should be given to energy saving to produce a higher effectiveness, said Tran Thanh Lieu, expert from the Electricity Corporation of Vietnam (EVN).
EVN’s programmes aim to save energy during production and business activities, accelerating the implementation of projects on developing electricity generation sources and solutions for saving energy. The Vietnam energy efficient public lighting project was introduced by the office for public lighting project as an optimal solution for maximising economic effectiveness of public lighting system. The project aims to save 1,320 gigawatts hours from energy consumption in the
2006-2014 period, and 490.6 gigawatts hours from public lighting consumption in the end of 2010.
The implementation of the Demand-side Management Programme (DSM), phase two with assistance capital from GEF and WB is another solution of EVN. Within the project, in 2005-2006, EVN sells around one million compact fluorescent lamps to households in rural areas at a price 25 per cent lower than the market price. In addition, the project provides support to those companies which manufacture compact lamps and those who supply energy saving lamps via advertisement and marketing activities, so the Vietnamese market will consume between one million and 1.5 million compact lamps and between two million and three million thin fluorescent lamps.
Talking about the issue, Dao Toan, president of PG, said that a compact lamp consumes one fifth of a normal bulb with the same light level. Compacts lamps have lifetime of between 5,000 and 6,000 hours, some types have lifetime of between 10,000 and 12,000 hours while lifetime of around 1,000 hours. Apart from producing lights with various colours, compact lamps can start with low voltage and is not impacted by voltage fluctuation. This is an advantage of compact lamps in comparison with fluorescent lamps.
Toan made a calculation, if six million compact lamps of PG Lighting are used to replace fluorescent lamps and bulbs the electricity industry can save around 876,000,000 kilowatts hours per annum, or VND 481.8 billion (with the lowest electricity price).
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