Energy efficiency called for to protect environment

JAKARTA (JP): It is high time Jakarta's transportation and industrial sectors as well as households used energy more efficiently to help conserve the environment, an official said on Wednesday.

"It's totally wrong to think that bigger and more advanced technology will use more energy, either fuel or electricity," Emy Perdanahari of the Ministry of Mines and Energy's directorate general of electricity and energy development said.

Speaking at a seminar on reducing energy costs through best practices in buildings, Emy said it was not too late to reshape people's way of thinking about energy consumption.

"Our opportunities to reduce energy use are widespread, with or without further investment," she said.

People should be aware that if they were consuming more energy, they should improve their productivity, Emy said, adding that people here tended to use more energy but without their productivity increasing proportionally.

"Apart from technical assistance, like the use of better equipment in the transportation sector and industry, which can help reduce fuel and energy consumption, the mentality of people who operate the equipment is also important," Emy said.

She said that, in the long run, energy consumption in the transportation sector was projected to fall 25 percent, in industry 30 percent and in households 25 percent.

In the late 1970s households consumed most energy in relation to their productivity but the trend later shifted to industry followed by transportation in line with the country's development and industrialization, Emy said.

"Now industry leads in the consumption of energy, followed by the transportation sector and then households," she said.

Paul MacDonald from the British's government's Department for International Development (DfID) said that he had spent four years studying the use of energy in Jakarta for a project called End Use Energy Efficiency.

"For the project, my government helps and assists Indonesia as a growing developing country in Asia to lower the use of energy as far as possible," he said.

MacDonald said he had also embarked on a survey in Jakarta and Bandung -- as pilot projects -- in the three above sectors.

He said that in the near future, he would install measuring equipment in some public vehicles to count how much energy they had wasted and then compare it to the benefit they received from the energy.

"It's important for our survey to obtain data but at the same time we can make people believe us as they (vehicle operators) can see the figures for themselves," he said.

It also emerged that Indonesian offices waste much more energy than their neighbors in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.

In 1997 Indonesian offices used an average of 333 kwh per square meter while the average for the region since 1992 was 246 kwh per square meter. (emf)