Saeed Al-Khotani Saudi Gazette RIYADH — The Kingdom is heading toward implementing serious measures to rationalize the high domestic energy consumption that is thought to locally exhaust around 20 percent of the country's annual oil production, Saudi officials told a conference here Monday. Minister of Water and Electricity Abdullah Al-Hussayyen said organizing the two-day Saudi Heating, Ventilation, Air-Conditioning Conference & Exhibition in collaboration with the Saudi Energy Efficiency Center came with purpose of sharing knowledge and exchanging experience among experts and stakeholders on energy efficiency in heating, ventilation and air-conditioning. The minister revealed that the trial implementation of the royal order three years ago to apply insulation in buildings resulted in household energy savings of up to 50 percent. He said: “Accordingly, effective of today, compulsory implementation of the order will apply to new buildings in Riyadh, in an initial phase, and it will be implemented in other parts of the Kingdom soon. “To guarantee proper implementation of the order, both the Saudi Electricity Company and the Ministry of Municipality and Rural Affairs agreed to monitor the implementation of this directive and they have full authority to cut electricity to any building that violates this order.” Prince Abdulaziz Bin Salman, Deputy Minister of Petroleum and Mineral Resources and head of the national program for energy saving, said the energy consumed by air-conditioning represents around 70 percent of the energy used by buildings and account for half of the total electricity consumption in the Kingdom. “Therefore a number of measures have been taken to reduce that rate through a series of workshops and meetings that resulted in a commitment to raise the rate of energy efficiency in air-conditioning units used in the Kingdom from the current level of 7.5, considered the lowest in the world for any type of A/C set, to 9.5 by 2014 and 11.5 by 2015, a level similar to that in developed countries. “An agreement was reached between the Saudi Energy Efficiency Program and the Saudi Standards, Metrology and Quality Organization to include the new rate as a specification for new air-conditioning units locally manufactured or imported.”
