Within the context of its strategy for increasing energy efficiency, the Egyptian Ministry of Electricity is implementing the "Energy Efficiency Improvement and Greenhouse Gas Reduction Project" (EEIGGR) with the participation of power sector companies responsible for the generation, transmission and distribution of electrical energy. The total project cost is $5.9 million and is jointly financed by the Global Environment Facility (GEF) and the UN Development Program (UNDP), with the support of the government of Egypt. Lighting is the largest electricity consumer, accounting for nearly 25 per cent of the total energy sold in Egypt. The residential and commercial sectors use nearly 34 per cent of their energy (estimated at 43 per cent of total energy use) for lighting purposes. The lighting consumed by the industrial sector accounts for 10 per cent of its energy use, while public lighting consumes five per cent and governmental building lighting accounts for nearly 70 per cent of government energy consumption (estimated at 5.5 per cent of total energy consumption) Thus lighting used in Egypt is to a great extent responsible for system peak time electricity production. In addition to high electricity bills, it has a negative impact on the environment by requiring the combustion of greater quantity of fuel in power plants resulting in atmospheric pollutants shown to cause global warming, acid rain and smog. Compact fluorescent lamps are therefore being actively promoted in order to reduce the share of lighting in total energy consumption. These lamps are a simple technology that does not need special preparation; they offer a short pay back period and they have a direct and high impact on energy saving and carbon emissions reduction. The project has been successful at increasing the market size of compact fluorescent lamps from 278,000 lamps in 2000 to four million lamps in 2007, achieving an energy saving of 0.75 MTOE (million tons of oil equivalent) and a carbon emissions reduction of 2.63 million tons. Given that lighting in governmental buildings accounts for 5.5 per cent of total energy consumption, the project has recommended the following: 1) Appointment of an energy manager for each governmental building provided with sufficient training and responsible for implementing energy conservation measures. 2) Conducting awareness programmes targeting employees in governmental buildings. 3) Implementing retrofits of current governmental building facilities, especially for the lighting system, including replacement of incandescent lamps by compact fluorescent lamps. 4) Developing governmental procurement guidelines to take into consideration the concept of energy efficiency. The recommendations of this study have been approved by the Ministerial Committee for Services for application at the national level. Source: Dr. Ibrahim Yassin, EEIGGR
