The proposed legislative agenda that will incentivize energy efficiency initiatives and conservation measures for companies secured much-needed boost with the promise of newly-elected Senator Teofisto Guingona III for a sponsorship of the measure.

The legislator said he will file the proposed measure once the next Congress opens, noting that energy efficiency and conservation are among the country’s pressing needs to stretch power supply that have been getting scant as growing demand gobbles it up.

“We still have to study what are the incentives that we shall integrate in the measure,” Guingona noted.

Ventures into promoting energy efficiency as well as conservation also need policy support in terms of incentives and instituting them as a disciplinary process across range of stakeholders.

Advocates of such policy agenda, both foreign and local companies, have been seeking for support from both Congress and the Department of Energy (DoE) to push for the passage of a measure toward that policy agenda.

European Chamber of Commerce of the Philippines (ECCP) executive vice president Henry Schumacher noted that from the point of view of declining power supply that the country is now experiencing “talking about power savings at this time when we don’t have enough power makes sense.”

He added that the extent of energy efficiency programs should reach a scale in which every end-users are encouraged to start using their energy wisely.” Schumacher is also passionate about promoting the concept and practice that “the cheapest energy is the energy that you don’t use.”

The European chamber in particular is introducing an energy audit initiative that shall entice its members to save on energy consumption, hence, also propelling a way for them on energy savings.

DoE director Evelyn N. Reyes has presented at the 1st Philippine Energy Efficiency Forum a target to reduce the country’s energy consumption which shall enable it to avoid investment for additional 7,455 megawatts of power projects over 20 years.