Energy-saving targets should be raised for power companies
Edwin Lau says new agreement should include incentives and penalties
The government's failure to secure the Legislative Council finance panel's approval for work on extending landfills has raised fears about another hot topic affecting Hong Kong - the ongoing interim review of the scheme of control agreement regulating the power companies' profits.
The current agreement, which will expire in 2018, provides only a small incentive for power companies to reach a very low voluntary energy-saving target of 15 million kWh (0.03 and 0.04 per cent of the annual sales of electricity for Hongkong Electric and CLP Power respectively). If power companies cannot reach such targets at the end of the year, there is no penalty. What a nice treat for the power industry.
Similar nice treats cannot be found in other industries such as waste recycling
Similar nice treats cannot be found in other industries such as waste recycling. While recyclers quietly help divert a huge volume of waste away from the city's landfills every day, they receive not a cent of reward from the government. However, if their trucks are not quick enough to load baled recyclables on the street, they can be fined.
Under the current scheme of control agreement, the government accepts only those verifiable energy-saving results based on improvements to equipment, such as changing from air-cooled to water-cooled chillers. If the energy savings are generated through less wasteful consumption habits, these savings do not count towards the total saving result.
This goes against common sense, as according to local and overseas energy experts there are many cases of how improving energy consumption habits, without any investment in equipment, can achieve 10 to 20 per cent savings.
A number of green groups including Friends of the Earth (HK) recently invited CLP to a discussion about higher energy-saving targets for the post-2018 agreement. Unfortunately, what we heard from CLP were doubts about and constraints to raising the current target further.
On the other hand, Friends of the Earth (HK) has successfully driven a change in energy-use habits via its annual Power Smart programme. We launched the programme in 2006 and had 178 participants save about 500,000 kWh of electricity in two months during summer.