On July 26th, under the chairmanship of Deputy Prime Minister Hoang Trung Hai, the Steering Committee of the National Target Program on Energy efficiency and conservation had a meeting to evaluate the performance of Phase I of the Program (2006-2010) and to propose upcoming contents for phase II (2011-2015).

At the meeting, Deputy Prime Minister Hoang Trung Hai stressed that, along with the investment in developing new energy sources, energy saving is a vital element in solving the problem of balancing national energy.
 
According to the report of the Steering Committee, in three years from 2006 to 2008, about 15.2 billion kWh of electricity was saved. Savings rate has increased over the years, starting from 1.56% in 2006, rising to 3.15% in 2007 and 3.48% in 2008.

Also after the first phase of the program, the system of legal documents and a network for managing and developing activities on economical and efficient use of energy have been basically formed. System of energy database has also been improved with the implementation of a pilot system on storing and analyzing reports. The standard norms for a number of industries such as cement, steel, textiles, seafood processing have been set.

In addition, the propaganda to spread information, raise community’s awareness on the energy efficiency issue and encourage people to use energy more economically and efficiently in order to protect the environment has been expanded in various forms and has achieved a number of positive and praiseworthy results.

In particular, the units participating in the energy efficiency program have created their own solutions to actively disseminate and encourage the community to use highly efficient and energy saving equipments, step by step removing the low performance ones. Thanks to these solutions, tens of millions of compact lighting bulbs and solar power water heater equipments have been put into use.

Along with these solutions, the program has also organized competitions and exchanged experiences with other countries in the same region, step by step building a model of managing the economical and efficient use of energy in enterprises, smart buildings and green buildings.

Concluding the situation at the end of the meeting, Deputy Prime Minister Hoang Trung Hai stressed that along with investment in development of new energy sources and renewable energy, a vital element in solving the problem of balancing national energy is energy saving. The energy elastic coefficient of Vietnam (the ratio between the growth rate of energy consumption and GDP growth rate of the same period) is still too high, compared to other countries in the same region. Despite some certain changes recently, the propaganda calling for energy saving have only achieved modest results.

The Deputy Prime Minister called for an expansion of the six categories of the Program’s contents, in which the promoting work to raise public’s awareness should be further stressed. Process for making policies, drafting legal documents, implementing projects on energy efficiency, especially in sectors having a large amount of energy consumption and having low efficiency, should be simplified.

The Deputy Prime Minister reminded the Ministry of Industry and Trade to coordinate with the other concerned ministries in evaluating which particular sectors and areas are using energy highly inefficiently, in order to make more drastic solutions. Also, each energy indicator in a sector should be compared with equivalent ones in other countries in the region and in the world to form specific directions.

At the beginning of 2011, the Steering Committee will conduct final conclusion on phase I of the program and begin the second phase (2011-2015) with new, higher targets.

By Nguyen An