Opinion Sur Joven

This isn’t a new problem, and today it’s more present than ever. Not only due to the increase in the price of fuel, but also because of rising demand and lack of resources. And another question has arised over the last years: How can we combine environmental care with the necessity of generating energy? In Argentina, the government has launched a program to reach that balance. But will it work? How can we help from home?

Argentina is facing energy shortages, according to most experts. This is no news: the country had experienced a similar crisis during the eighties. “Those days the problem was the lack of electricity and maintenance supply of SEGBA, the company in charge of that service those years” said EDENOR’s spokesman Alberto Lippi to Opinión Sur Joven. EDENOR has been in charge of providing electricity in some regions of the country for almost 15 years.

In the previous decade, the government attempted to solve the problem by privatizing the energy service. As we can now see, some things have changed for the better but others have been merely postponed.

Nowadays, Argentina is going through an energy crisis once again. To approach the problem, the current government is implementing a plan that involves changing the time zone during the summer, providing users with a certain amount of low-energy bulbs in exchange for their old incandescent lamps (filament bulbs) and reaching energy-efficient consumption at the 490 public buildings of the national administration.

Starting from home

Just like many other problems in life, energy shortages will be solved faster if we start doing something about them at home. Your home, my home, everyone’s home, our “small world”.

“The plan would succeed with a permanent program including a total renewal of the household lighting system, with publicity, maintenance and replacement, and a national management control network directly between users and the nation, without middlemen", Jorge Czajkowski explained to Opinión Sur Joven.

He’s a professor at Argentina’s National University of La Plata (UNLP) specialized in environment and energy and has published several books on these matters. When analyzing the situation, he prefers to be cautious about the scope of such a plan: “Could replacing a 75W regular lamp for an 11W low-energy lamp have an effect on energy demand? I think it could, but we should specify in which situations the replacement would make sense. We should analyze each home to determine what lamp is on the longer and turned on and off the least every day”.

For example, out of the total primary energy consumed in a house (according to studies at the UNLP), nearly 10% is represented by artificial lighting. “So in a two-bedroom house with approximately 8 to 10 incandescent lamps of 555 to 690W, replacing a single 75W lamp with an 11W energy-saving bulb would imply a 1.1% power reduction, an insignificant number regarding the enormous energy consumption growth produced by air conditioners”, Czajkowski describes with numbers, which may sometimes seem confusing, though they prove changing just a few lamps is far from solving the problem.

That’s why our interviewee proposes doing what he did in his own home. “I’ve replaced all incandescent bulbs with low-energy ones”, he says, and he adds it’d be a good idea to extend this concept to every home in the country, with a total replacement with 9W, 11W or 15W lamps. “The national power consumption average per home would decrease from 555W to 88W, with 84% power reductions for lighting”.

According to that scheme, the country could save approximately 4,800 MWh a day, or 144,000 MWh a month, or 1,728,000 MWh a year. “Thus, numbers are relevant, and maybe Argentina wouldn’t have to import energy from Brazil and there’d be more gas”, he added.

Regarding everyday use of electricity, we all know the most basic recommendation we can follow to make a contribution: use it as little as possible and only when necessary. There’s also a permanent doubt, especially in people with small apartments in large cities, where rooms are close to each other and not much lighting is needed: if I leave my bedroom for a little while, should I turn off the light or leave it on?

Czajkowski denies the urban legend and sets it straight: “If the lamps are incandescent, turning them on and off repeatedly doesn’t affect them much. It does affect low-energy bulbs. If you have one in your bathroom you don’t use it that frequently, so it’s better to turn it off. But in other rooms we must reduce the on/off frequency as much as possible for the bulbs to reach the useful life proposed by their producer”.

The word on the street

Marcos, a regular user, assures the light of the new lamps isn’t as good as the others’. “It’s not good for working. I’m sorry, but I’ll keep using the ones I’ve used all my life. They should’ve seen the shortage coming", he criticizes the government, and then he asks himself: “Since when do they care about the environment?”

However, at a hardware store in Belgrano neighborhood, city of Buenos Aires, one of the salesmen thinks selling energy-saving lamps is important and says he’s truly in favor of the “barter” because “at least it’s a step towards a healthier planet”.

But we don’t need to go over the whole city to realize the issue is lost in indifference or, even worse, rejection. María Pía, a woman from Chacarita neighborhood who’s still making improvements at her spacious home, assures: “I’d rather die than using those lamps (referring to low-energy lamps). Their light is awful; I’ll stick to the incandescent ones".

There’s a governmental project in Argentina to ban incandescent lights by 2010. Greenpeace has its doubts about it. Rosario Espina -the coordinator of said NGO’s campaign against Climate Change in Argentina- says to Opinión Sur Joven the project is “merely wishful, because it doesn’t define actual measures through a schedule that allows quantifying its effectiveness”.

“We think the fact of having a plan implies a good attitude, but it’s just a starting point. The government had no choice and talked about efficiency, but they must modify it to make it real and effective”, she asserts.

Espina also questioned some of the “plan Bs” president Cristina Fernández’s administration proposed: “Its investment plan in terms of energy is based on the worst environmental choices, such as carbon, nuclear energy or hydroelectricity; we must opt for using clean and renewable sources of energy". [1]

In that sense, Czajkowski remembers the energy combination in Argentina over the last years has had its main sources in natural gas and fossil fuels (the most dangerous ones for the environment); however, hydroelectricity supply has decreased due to droughts. The rest of the sources are basically nuclear, a hazardous source for the environment.

This is no minor issue. The struggle between profitable and ecofriendly energies seems to be one of the battles of the 21st century. A battle that starts at home, because changing our habits to use our energy resources more efficiently also depends on each one of us. On how we live and how we want to live.