Businesses contribute to "greening" the economy: Part 2 - Green transformation starts with energy transformation

Save energy from small activities…

Maxport is a foreign-invested garment company, owning many factories located in the Northern provinces. This is one of the few foreign-invested enterprises that implemented energy saving early. Ms. Do Thi Thuy Huong - Head of Sustainable Development Group (Maxport Company) said that since 2014, Maxport has conducted energy audits despite not having any decisions or requests from state management agencies.

“Previously, we knew that the most energy-consuming area was production equipment, accounting for more than 50% of electricity usage. However, Maxport always determined to practice electricity saving not only by changing equipment but also changing corporate governance awareness and daily practice with employees,” said Ms. Huong.

Accordingly, Maxport practices energy saving by installing natural lighting systems and using LED lights. These two actions have significantly saved the amount of electricity used for lighting in the company's factories. Since 2015, Maxport has proposed building a new factory with the goal of improving energy efficiency, especially machinery and equipment, helping to save about 31 - 40% of electricity output each month. In addition, it also takes advantage of factory roofs to install rooftop solar panels, proactively using energy during peak production times.

Currently, in the Company's purchasing and new construction plans, energy saving targets are considered an indicator to make decisions on "spending or not spending", in order to further improve the efficiency of emission reduction that the Company is still implementing annually through greenhouse gas inventory reports.

URC Hanoi Co., Ltd. - one of the companies in the group of key energy consumers has also started saving energy from the smallest things, then invested in larger measures. Accordingly, the Company has replaced all lighting bulbs in the factory from high-pressure fluorescent bulbs to LED bulbs, and at the same time replaced outdoor lighting bulbs from high-pressure bulbs to solar lights, separating lighting exposure according to the production line, according to local areas.

Along with replacing light bulbs, the company has implemented other measures such as switching from steam burned from FO oil boilers to steam burned from biomass, using cooling systems for factories, etc. The synchronous implementation of energy saving solutions has helped the energy consumption rate per unit of product of URC Hanoi Company Limited to decrease significantly every year, with each year being 2-7% lower than the previous year.

Big investment in energy saving

Mr. Nguyen Duc Minh - General Director of Nutricare Nutrition Joint Stock Company said that the green transformation at Nutricare lies mainly in the area of ​​energy transformation. Accordingly, Nutricare has transformed quite a lot when implementing semi-automation with lifting machines (robots). In particular, the robot does not use electricity (electricity is only used to charge the device) which is both energy-saving and very safe, with no fire or accident occurring during the production process.

Maxport garment factory conducted energy audits very early.

Citing specific evidence of the amount of electricity saved, a representative of Nutricare said that if in 2023, the previous equipment consumed about 141.5kWh/ton of product, in 2024, the energy consumption decreased to 130.9kWh/ton of product. Thus, each ton of product can reduce about 11kWh of electricity consumption, while the output of this factory is about tens of thousands of tons/year, so the amount of electricity saved in annual production is very large.

In addition, it also saves a significant amount of energy for factory operations because these factories are often very hot in the summer, and the company cannot invest in a cooling system for all the warehouses where workers work because the cost is often very high. "The investment in this lifting equipment system is large, but in the long run, this investment is very valuable because the depreciation time is long, bringing great benefits in reducing emissions, saving energy and will help gradually reduce production costs" - Mr. Minh said.

However, not all businesses are ready to invest in energy conversion in particular, and green conversion in general. According to the survey results on the readiness of businesses for green conversion, capital is the biggest difficulty that businesses encounter in the process of reducing emissions and green conversion. In particular, medium-sized businesses face the most difficulty in capital compared to small and large-sized businesses. Notably, up to 62.7% of businesses with revenue from 1,000 - 1,500 billion said that they had difficulty with capital.

To help businesses boldly implement energy conversion, the representative of the Ministry of Industry and Trade said that the Ministry of Industry and Trade can "support" businesses in making the conversion by classifying energy saving solutions from large investment, medium investment and small investment as well as the needs of businesses according to the scale of small and medium enterprises, medium scale and large scale. From there, different programs, projects and support levels can be designed.

The most common level of support that the Ministry of Industry and Trade can provide is technical support, meaning that if a business wants to invest in an energy-saving project, the Ministry can provide support with energy audits to identify feasible energy-saving solutions. Then, it can support the business with technical assistance in writing an investment report through an ODA project or through a risk-sharing protection fund to guide the business in approaching banks.

“Investing in lifting equipment systems in factories is quite large, but in the long run, this investment is very valuable because of the long depreciation time, bringing great benefits in reducing emissions, saving energy and will help gradually reduce production costs” - Mr. Nguyen Duc Minh, General Director of Nutricare Nutrition Joint Stock Company

(to be continued)

Hoang Tu

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