Government urged to implement energy efficiency measures

MANILA, Philippines — The government should start implementing energy efficiency measures in public offices by capitalizing on private capital to promote energy efficiency adoption and investments in the country.

During the Philippines Infrastructure Conference, Philippine Energy Efficiency Alliance (PE2) president Alexander Ablaza said many government offices do not employ energy efficiency programs.

Ablaza urged the government to capitalize on private capital to implement energy efficiency projects in the public sector.

“Any ESCO industry that is well developed, [like that of] China and the US, grew only because the government made it work,” he said.

According to the Department of Energy (DOE), an energy service company or ESCO is a business that develops, installs, and arranges financing for projects designed to improve the energy efficiency and maintenance costs for facilities over a seven to 20 year time period depending on the viability of the proposed project.

Ablaza said tapping the private sector for energy efficiency projects could be done through procurement, public private partnership transaction, or a joint venture with government owned and controlled corporations (GOCCs).

The Department of Energy is still  crafting the implementing rules and regulations (IRR) for the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Act signed into law last April.

“We need the IRR of the DOE to have enough or sufficient language to allow these three modalities,” he said.

Meanwhile, PE2 is also promoting energy efficiency as a new infrastructure asset class in the energy market, and proposed that the government should slowly move toward incorporating it as a mainstreamed resource in planning its energy mix.