Promotion of the training and communication on economical and efficient use of energy in households is the city's great efforts during the recent years, to encourage people to use energy with conservation and efficiency in production and daily life, thereby, to save energy cost and reduce the impact of environmental pollution.

Since 2010, the Energy Conservation Center of Ho Chi Minh city (ECC-HCMC) has implemented a lot of campaigns to save energy through training courses, dissemination of knowledge about efficient use of energy across 15 districts of the city.

After about six years of implementation, 250 workshops were held for participating communicators, households, civil servants and employees, veterans, and students. Those programs have raised the awareness about efficient use of energy for roughly 20,500 households. Since August 2015, ECC-HCMC in collaboration with relevant units has deployed 40 training courses on power savings.

The task force of communicators at the local units comprises people from women's union, veterans' union, Youth union, and the Fatherland Front Committee.

One of the major activities, which have been broadly responded, is the model "Saving electricity for one hour from 8pm - 9pm every Saturday" in Vinh Loc A commune. Inspired by the light-turning off of Earth Hour, the Women's Union motivated the families to turn power off simultaneously for one hour, without inconvenience to daily life but reducing the power consumption. The program has attracted the participation of 100% of households. The program was later expanded to several other counties and districts in Binh Chanh District, so, just for three months of peak dry season (from April to June 6/2012), the value of power savings reaches over VND13 billion, with a reduced consumption capacity of 9.2 million kWh.

The survey findings on perceptions, attitudes and behavior of households about the economical and efficient use of energy in 2013 in Ho Chi Minh City show optimistic measures: 86.5% of the families responded that they have heard and/or read the messages about energy savings. The people in highly urbanized quarters have better understanding about energy savings.

The survey findings also reveal that television is the best source of information on energy savings (87.3%), and then comes the newspaper 25.7%, radio 23.3%, and  ​public loudspeakers accounting for 12.5%.

As reflected by the Director of ECC-HCMC, the households are not subject to the adjustment of the Law on Economical and Efficient Use of Energy, although they account for 40.07% of the total energy consumption in Ho Chi Minh City. Statistical data show that each year 1.75 million households in HCMC consume about 7 billion kWh. Therefore, the implementation of promotion programs, communication to raise public awareness, form habits, demonstrate good behavior in the household about electricity saving, energy saving and efficiency is very essential, and it needs to be further enhanced in the time to come. When each family saves 10% of energy, it is estimated that each year the whole city would save 700 million kWh of electricity.

Trong Tan