Currently, Vinh Phuc has more than 2,200 enterprises, of which two thirds are small and medium. There is a wide variety of industries such as food processing, textile, leather, wood, forestry, paper, and steel. Especially, Vinh Phuc is one of the provinces with the highest output of baked tile and brick in our country. Specifically, with about 900 manual brick facilities over nine districts, Vinh Phuc’s tile brick output is around 900 million pieces per year.

However, according to experts, like many other small and medium enterprises in the country, the production technology of most companies in Vinh Phuc is backward. Most brick facilities in Vinh Phuc still use manual brick kilns, leading to the relatively large consumption of energy in enterprises, high production costs and limited competitiveness.

A preliminary survey on the energy use of small and medium enterprises in such as food processing, baked tile brick production, paper production, textiles, leather footwear, recycling rough steel production shows that the main energy sources used are electricity, oil and coal. Each year, these companies use approximately 35 million kWh of electricity, more than 124,000 tons of coal and over 776,000 liters of oil. Corresponding to this rate of energy use is approximately 324,000 tons of CO2 emitted into the air during production.

According to the Center for Applied Science and Technology of Vinh Phuc: "The biggest difficulty of SMEs in Vinh Phuc is the lack of capital, so technological lines and production equipment are backward, which has caused large power consumption".

To overcome this situation and promote energy efficiency and conservation in enterprises in the province of Vinh Phuc, Provincial People’s Committee has issued many guidelines and policies to promote the implementation of energy efficiency and conservation in small and medium enterprises in the province. The prominent decision is the “Adjusted planning of construction materials in the province to 2010, vision 2020”, which has affirmed that "by 2010, the province will completely eliminate the manual production of tile brick in districts, while encouraging private sectors to invest in switching from manual production to brick baking technology with vertical continuous kiln".

To encourage enterprises, the province has specific support measures such as subsidizing VND70 million for each manual brick kiln switching to vertical continuous kiln technology. Besides, the enterprises participating in energy audit and implementing energy saving measures will be subsidized VND80 million. At the same time, Provincial People’s Committee has also invested VND800 million in equipment for energy audit in the Center for Applied Science and Technology and organized visits to vertical continuous kilns for businesses in the provinces of Hai Duong, Hung Yen and Ha Noi.

With efforts, currently, the province has had five facilities completing vertical continuous kilns and putting them into operation and other 18 brick facilities are implementing procedures to build vertical continuous kilns. Compared to old brick ovens, with each million bricks, using continuous vertical kilns will help reduce the consumption by 85 tons of coal dust, 917 tons of oil, 9.67 tons of firewood and 231.62 tons of CO2 emissions. As planned, in 2010, the province will continue to build 10 more vertical continuous kilns to limit the number of manual brick kilns operating in the province.

By Minh Duc