SINGAPORE will pump in $50 million over five years to encourage corporations and people here to go green with their energy use.

This was announced by the Environment and Water Resources minister Dr Yaacob Ibrahim in Parliament on Friday.

Called the Sustainable Energy Fund, it will be used to support programmes by the Energy Efficiency Programme Office which is an inter-agency set up by the National Environment Agency (NEA) last year.

The strategy sets out areas that Singapore will address to tackle various aspects of climate change.

Greening Factories

Manufacturing industries are the largest users of energy in the country and so will be a main target of the green plan.

The energy agency recognises that manufacturing facilities should be designed to be power efficient from the start therefore the design phase is key.

NEA will introduce a pilot scheme to co-fund design workshops for new industrial developments.

The agency has already made some headway in getting companies to go green with its Energy Efficiency Improvement Assistance Scheme which co-funds energy audits for corporations.

Up till the end of January this year, 87 factories and buildings have spotted measures to be more power efficient hence contributing to an annual energy savings of $23 million.

The environment ministry reports that power generation efficiency has gone up from 37 per cent to 44 per cent in the last 7 years with more companies using more efficient power generation technology called combined-cycle generation.

Electricity produced by natural gas has also surged in the same period from 19 per cent to 79 per cent.

These improvements have significantly reduced carbon intensity levels or CO2 per dollar of the 2006 Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to about 30 per cent below 1990 levels.

It is not just factories that will be encouraged to go green.

Power Efficient Buildings

Come April this year, the Building and Construction Authority plans to introduce mandatory green standards for new buildings which are equivalent to its Green Mark programme that rates buildings for their environmental performance.

The authority is also developing a grant to encourage existing buildings to upgrade their facilities to be more power efficient.

Green Vehicles

The transport sector had contributed about 19 per cent of Singapore's carbon dioxide emissions in 2005.

The government hopes to improve this by encouraging more people to use public transport during the morning rush hour and to get drivers to buy fuel efficient vehicles instead.

An additional measure is that it will be mandatory by April 2009 for car retailers to display fuel economy labels on cars in their showrooms.