China Green Lights extends
its benefits to the global market

Around two billion people light their homes and businesses with fuel-generated electricity, consuming more than 2000 TWh of power and producing 2900 million tons of CO2 each year (about 9 percent of total emissions). Lighting can account for as little as 5 percent of national electricity use in countries such as Belgium and Luxembourg, to 19 percent in Israel and 86 percent in developing countries such as Tanzania.

Reforming the world’s lighting industry and encouraging the development and use of new, energy efficient products has the potential to make a significant impact on carbon emission and global warming.

With China supplying 80 percent by volume, but not value, of the world’s lighting products the US$ 26.2 million (GEF grant US$ 8.1 million) China Green Lights project has the potential to go beyond its original objectives of reducing the country’s lighting energy use and greenhouse gas emissions by 10 percent by the year 2010 and providing millions of low income families with low-cost lighting to strengthening China’s lighting industry, creating new employment, providing access to high quality markets and thus producing global energy-saving and greenhouse gas reduction benefits.

The project, a joint initiative between UNDP/GEF and the Chinese government, employed a ‘technology push/demand pull’ strategy and was named as one of 10 key energy efficiency projects in China’s five-year plan. By organizing workshops, seminars and training sessions, building the capacity of energy management companies, fixing standards for lighting products (by the end of the project 600 products in eight different lighting categories had been certified) the project succeeded in extending the working life of high efficiency lamps and lighting ballasts, securing a 46 percent increase in the output of high efficiency lighting products and an estimated 40 percent increase in their exports from China over the years 2002-2003.

‘Demand pull’ was accomplished by a comprehensive awareness-raising programme that included extensive TV exposure, CD distribution, articles in newspapers and magazines and the distribution of promotional brochures and literature. A schools’ initiative, which operated under the slogan ‘Children to Parents to Society’, was also successful and lighting was made a focal point of China’s national Hi-tech week in 2002 and in Energy Conservation Week in 2005.

In 2004 – a year before the four-year project ended - total energy savings in Chinese lighting resulting from project activities was estimated at 15.78 billion kWh (equivalent to US$ 986 million savings in electricity costs to the consumer). The cumulative savings in lighting energy since the project began in 2001 were 25.54 billion kWh (equivalent to US$1,596 million savings in electricity costs to the consumer).