Gov’t to Accelerate Public Sector Energy Efficiency and Conservation Programme

The Government is looking to speed-up the provision of energy saving solutions under the Public Sector Energy Efficiency and Conservation programme.

Principal Director in the Ministry of Science, Technology, Energy and Mining, Fitzroy Vidal, said that work under the programme is “fairly advanced.”

“We are going to do as much as we can to accelerate it towards retrofitting the entire public sector,” he stated.

Mr. Vidal was speaking at a recent Jamaica Information Service (JIS) Think Tank held at the agency’s head office in Kingston, to provide details about the Second Meeting of the Ministers of Energy of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), to be held October 24 to 25 at the Montego Bay Convention Centre in St. James.

Some $396 million, allocated in the 2012/13 estimates of expenditure, is being spent on the Public Sector Energy Efficiency and Conservation programme, which was launched in May 2012.  It is being funded by the Government of Jamaica and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and is expected to conclude in December 2015.

Mr. Vidal informed that already, solar film technology and cool-roofing solutions have been installed at several government buildings to reduce the heat, while the procurement of two air-conditioning units to replace inefficient systems is in progress.

“Throughout the rest of this month into early next month, there will be another air-condition procurement as well as another for lighting. The objective is to retrofit the entire public sector with energy efficiency facilities, so that the government, as stated in its National Energy Policy through to 2030, will be a role model for how energy is used in this country,” he stated.

Even with the efforts to retrofit the public sector with energy efficient systems, Mr. Vidal said the “biggest and quickest” intervention must be the conservation of energy by citizens.

“When we use energy wisely, then our demand is less without compromising quality and if your demand is less, the need to import fuel is also reduced and therefore the cost implication is a beneficiary to the country’s economy,” he pointed out.

Mr. Vidal mentioned that through the Cuba-Jamaica Compact Fluorescent Lamp (CFL) Project, private householders have been provided with energy saving CFLs donated by the Government of Cuba, to replace high energy incandescent bulbs.

He said that the Government has also made available, several lines of credit through the Development Bank of Jamaica (DBJ), for the retrofitting of small and medium-sized enterprises. “So it is an energy revolution, which has different facets that we are pursuing one by one,” he stated.