$50m to get industries, people in Singapore to go green

Tracy Sua, Straits Times 1 Mar 08;

SINGAPORE will pump in $50 million over five years to encourage corporations and people here to go green with their energy use.

This was announced by the Environment and Water Resources minister Dr Yaacob Ibrahim in Parliament on Friday.

Called the Sustainable Energy Fund, it will be used to support programmes by the Energy Efficiency Programme Office which is an inter-agency set up by the National Environment Agency (NEA) last year.

Making Singapore more energy efficient is one of the key areas recommended by the National Climate Change Committee in a strategy they launched on Friday.

The strategy sets out areas that Singapore will address to tackle various aspects of climate change.

Greening Factories
Manufacturing industries are the largest users of energy in the country and so will be a main target of the green plan.

The environment agency recognises that manufacturing facilities should be designed to be power efficient from the start therefore the design phase is key.

NEA will introduce a pilot scheme to co-fund design workshops for new industrial developments.

The agency has already made some headway in getting companies to go green with its Energy Efficiency Improvement Assistance Scheme which co-funds energy audits for corporations.

Up till the end of January this year, 87 factories and buildings have spotted measures to be more power efficient hence contributing to an annual energy savings of $23 million.

The environment ministry reports that power generation efficiency has gone up from 37 per cent to 44 per cent in the last 7 years with more companies using more efficient power generation technology called combined-cycle generation.

Electricity produced by natural gas has also surged in the same period from 19 per cent to 79 per cent.

These improvements have significantly reduced carbon intensity levels or CO2 per dollar of the 2006 Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to about 30 per cent below 1990 levels.

It is not just factories that will be encouraged to go green.

Power Efficient Buildings
Come April this year, the Building and Construction Authority plans to introduce mandatory green standards for new buildings which are equivalent to its Green Mark programme that rates buildings for their environmental performance.

The authority is also developing a grant to encourage existing buildings to upgrade their facilities to be more power efficient.

Green Vehicles
The transport sector had contributed about 19 per cent of Singapore's carbon dioxide emissions in 2005.

The government hopes to improve this by encouraging more people to use public transport during the morning rush hour and to get drivers to buy fuel efficient vehicles instead.

An additional measure is that it will be mandatory by April 2009 for car retailers to display fuel economy labels on cars in their showrooms.

$50 million to get 'energy efficient'
Neo Chai Chin Today Online 1 Mar 08;

COMPANIES can now tap on a slew of perks and schemes to become more energy efficient, soon after some in the business world were wondering why the Government's Budget lacked "green" incentives for them.

They found out when the Ministry of Environment, Water and Resources (MEWR) unveiled yesterday its National Climate Change Strategy (NCCS), a roadmap for economic development at an environmentally sustainable pace.

"Energy efficiency" was the key catchphrase of the plan, directed particularly at the industrial, building and transport sectors, which account for almost 90 per cent of Singapore's carbon dioxide emissions.

The NCCS identifies Singapore's vulnerabilities to climate change — also the subject of a separate study to be completed next year — and ways the country could adapt and mitigate greenhouse gases emissions.

The plan, which can be seen online at www.climatechange.gov.sg, was launched on Friday by Senior Parliamentary Secretary Amy Khor at an industry seminar.

"Improved energy efficiency not only reduces the amount of greenhouse gases produced, it also increases companies' competitiveness by lowering their energy bills," said Dr Khor, calling energy savings "low-hanging fruit" easily enjoyed by companies.

Elaborated on in Parliament later that day, many of the new schemes and grant will draw on a $50-million Sustainable Energy Fund, which will support Singapore's Energy Efficiency Plan for the next five years.

Some, like the Grant for Energy Efficient Technologies, build on the $10-million Efficiency Improvement Assistance Scheme (EASe) introduced in 2005, which co-funded energy audits of private-sector buildings. The new grant will help companies implement measures recommended in the audits.

So far, 87 companies in the power, industry and building sectors have used EASe subsidies for energy audits. The recommendations, if taken up, would result in annual energy savings of $23.4 million. All large government office buildings, polytechnics and ITEs will conduct audits by March 2010.

In many of the audits, chiller systems, which account for 40 to 50 per cent of buildings' energy usage, were singled out. The MEWR took the lead, consolidating the two chiller systems of its Environment Building into one — the savings amounted to $78,874 last year.

"We also adjusted the building chillers to start at the right times to cater optimally to the building's load," said Mr Raymond Chan, head of MEWR's Facilities and Operations Management. The investment in the chiller systems would take about eight years to recoup, he added.

Keppel Bay Tower (picture) did an audit in 2006 and, since completing improvement works last August, is on track to achieve $135,000 in annual energy savings, said Mr Lim Tow Fok, Keppel Land's general manager for property management. The property giant's Ocean Financial Centre, now in its design stages, is well-placed to enjoy some of the new grants, which cater to buildings at various stages of completion.

Mr Lim hoped the grants would extend to companies that took on green measures recently.

"Our ball has started rolling with Keppel Bay Tower, so I don't think we're going to hold back with our other buildings and wait for the grants to kick in. But I hope companies won't be penalised because of the dates (they implemented the measures)," he said.