7 News Belize

Making Appliances More Efficient
posted (December 15, 2015)
The Ministry of Energy and the Government of Belize are trying to make sure that you start to make efficient use of the electricity running through your homes and business.

That means getting rid of old incandescent lights and appliances which use electricity inefficiently. But, a part of the problem is to make sure that appliance merchants move the stock of outdated equipment that currently have in their stores to make sure only energy efficient appliances are available to the consumer.

So, how will this program roll out to make sure that energy efficiency is the highest priority in your homes and businesses? Well, the technocrats from the Ministry of Finance, Energy, Public Service and Public Utilities have been working with the Organization of American States, who have brought in international experts.

Today, we stopped by to discuss this new energy efficient regime and how it will work:

Carolina Pena, Manager - Sustainable Energy Capacity Initiative
"We can to recognize the leadership that the ministry and the government are pursuing in order to have affordable and reliable energy. We are just making a contribution to that effort. But we recognize that there is a challenge also for the utility and the government to make it affordable. So we are supporting that effort and when I say supporting is providing information from experience from other Caribbean Nations to provide their expertise and that's what the OAS was able to gather experts from the Virgin Islands and also region wise to bring available that knowledge and share their experience to the Belizeans. We are just one institution. They are bringing together other experts in order to have as I said before electricity affordable and accessible for all customers, not just a few."

Ambrose Tillett, Energy Director - Ministry of Energy
"One of the main, we call it our number one pillar, is to improve energy at the point of end use. Because we recognize that one of the challenges we face going forward is that in Belize we tend to use energy right inefficiently or very wasteful. And so we in the ministry have put together a program where we want to improve energy at the point of use both reducing waste and improving how people use energy to provide services like lighting, cooling and whatever services to do it in an efficient way. So that is our overall theme and overall strategy that we have put in place."

"The OAS is helping us with certain interventions that we need to implement that strategy and the 3 key interventions I am making are; 1) they have brought some consultants who have had experience with putting in place financial and market mechanisms. Because one of the difficulties is that whenever people are face with making decisions about investing in energy efficient equipment, or improving their billing envelope to make it more efficient - compare to some other activity that they can do like sending their kids to school or a business buying new inventory. Most people tend to differ to what they see as more immediate. And so there is this market failure. Energy efficiency tend to have run up against this market failure. So one of the team members that they have brought together is looking at experiences they have had in the Virgin Islands for example. And looking at some experiences in Mexico as to how these governments and these agencies have been able to overcome that hurdle in order to get large adoption of energy efficient appliances and improvements in billing envelopes going forward."

The experts will be here until Thursday.

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