PHILIPS Philippines has launched a campaign encouraging Filipinos to switch their lights to LED, instead of power-supply gobblers still in use in many Filipino homes.
The campaign is called “May Magagawa Ka,” and was launched by company executives in a Makati City restaurant on Wednesday.
“We are all affected by the power crisis. Switching incandescent lamps to LEDs is one of the simple solutions we can all undertake,” Country Marketing Manager for Consumer Lighting Christine Villanueva said.
A study from Philips showed that switching to LED can reduce home lighting-energy consumption by 85 percent.
“Of the P1,000 you spend on your electric bill every month, approximately P200 goes to lighting. If you made the simple switch to LED, the P200 could become P30, giving you P170 worth of energy savings,” said Fabia Tetteroo-Bueno, country manager of Philips Philippines.
LEDs can also reduce carbon emissions by 50 percent to 70 percent. Lighting alone accounts for almost a fifth of global energy, equivalent to 1.9 billion tons of carbon emissions every year.
“We are consuming way beyond our limits,” said Joel Palma, World Wide Fund for Nature president and CEO. He said saving energy is one way to help manage this deficit and, with most energy coming from fossil fuels, less consumption of energy means lesser production of greenhouse gases, thereby lessening impact on climate change.
“As consumers, part of our responsibility is to practice smarter energy choices to make a genuine difference in power conservation,” Bueno said. The campaign seeks to raise awareness and build urgency on energy conservation in the country. “A power outage can be catastrophic for the economy,” Bueno said.
She encourages every Filipino to make steps to reduce the power shortage, with businesses, government and consumers doing the same thing. The campaign comes on the heels of the Malampaya maintenance shutdown, which left a 700-megawatt void in the local power grid and renewed the mounting calls for energy conservation in the country.
“When it comes to power interruptions, it affects the quality of power and disrupts business,” said Henry Schumacher, EVP of the European Chamber of Commerce of the Philippines (ECCP).
Schumacher said measures undertaken by the private sector in joining the Interruptible Load Program (ILP), implementing energy savings and energy-efficiency investments are hoped to help avoid power outages this summer.
The ILP program is a proposed set of contingency measures to manage electrical consumption amid the Malampaya shutdown, including the use of generators as an alternative power source for private companies. The campaign was jointly organized by Philips, Deutsche Investitions-und Entwicklungsgesellschaft mbH (DEG) Bank, WWF Philippines and the ECCP.