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Only this morning at least one popular, mainstream Pakistani newspaper carried the news that the government was considering increasing “the annual energy import bill to a whopping $50 billion from $12 billion now, while energy sector companies asked the government on Tuesday to substantially raise domestic energy prices and sell natural gas and electricity to all consumers at a uniform rate by removing slab benefits being given to domestic consumers.” Meanwhile the Water and Power Minister, Syed Naveed Qamar felt that “two weekly holidays should be enforced” to allow saving approximately 300MW of electricity…

 

The question now arises whether this would be a truly feasible approach for all the organizations operating in Pakistan, both national and multinational. The move of declaring both Saturdays and Sundays public holidays had been made last year with allegedly great success since 300MW of electricity was saved. However, despite its effectiveness, it unfortunately, does not reasonable to miss the entire weekend simply because the country and its resources are unable to meet the energy and power demands that working Saturdays make on them. What then is to be the key to conserving energy and our resources?

 

The cons of ‘off Saturdays’

The first thing that all businessmen must realize is that conserving energy is almost synonymous with trying to preserve the environment and the Earth. This is because the energy that we wish to conserve is mostly obtained by burning fossil fuels, coal, oil or gas. Not only are these fossil fuels only available in finite amounts, but both their extraction and burning are very harmful for the atmosphere. The extraction of the power resources as they are called is a long, expensive process in itself, but later on, burning these fuels in power stations produce harmful greenhouse gases which heat up the Earth. As the Earth heats up, the atmospheric temperatures also rise making us feel “hot” or “cold,” and then air conditioning (or heating systems) are required to stabilize the temperature to something more suited to human beings’ needs. This simple explanation is enough to make one realize that preserving power resources and the Earth are closely interlinked.

 

Consequently, having a long weekend is not the solution that either organizations or governments should be looking for. No matter how much the employees may enjoy a long weekend, looking at the idea from a business perspective shows that Saturdays off would probably not be a very good idea. What then is the solution? Some alternative measures that all organizations should follow to reduce their energy consumption.

 

How to slash energy consumption?

According to Munib Khwaja, the CSM at APCC, “when a building is being planned, then a lot of things can be done at that time which will be beneficial to users later on. Like the building management, the lightning management, BMS (building management system) and light intensity can be changed to meet intensity requirements. In this case, more dependence is also placed on sunlight so that solar lightning may be used to lower electricity consumptions” so that eventually a green, intelligent building is built.

To illustrate his point, Munib Sahib also used his own organization as an example. Since they use a lot of computers, Munib Khwaja spoke of how they cool down all their instruments. “We’ve started using rack like structures,” he said, “and to lower the heat produced by these racks, we bring cooling racks near to them. This allows cool air to blow from the front of the rack, while hot air goes out from the back.” The hot air is also captured by the cooling unit in the same row, so that long panels or low paths to recover heat are not required. All in all, the procedure has helped “minimize the room load and energy consumption has been lowered by nearly 40%.”

 

Furthermore, organizations could begin by making a minor investment and getting all incandescent lights replaced with energy savers. These energy savers consume only half the amount of energy that incandescent bulbs do. Employees could be asked to use the sunlight as much as possible, switch off unnecessary lights, lower the speed at which air conditioners run and switch off monitors when not at their desks. Put together, the measures would have a far better chance of success at lowering the energy consumption at offices. Also, while it might even let organizations save enough energy throughout the week to warrant their opening at least half the day on Saturdays!

 

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