The Bank of Bhutan (BoB) and the Worl Wildlife Fund (WWF) Bhutan signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to formalise the partnership between the two on the Iconic Building Project in the capital today.
The partnership will see the BoB’s buildings adopt innovative energy management technology, which is an initiative to help support government energy efficiency and conservation goals.
Under the MoU, the BoB and WWF Bhutan will collaborate on building an iconic building project. This means the two agencies are working on installing equipment to monitor the energy consumption in the BoB’s main office building, located in the main town, in Thimphu.
“We are installing some equipment to record all energy consumption data in the building. From that, we are trying to learn which areas or which equipment are consuming more energy than what is required. So based on the data we want to see for the future if we can put in other measures to maybe minimise or reduce energy consumption in the building. It’s a very small step but yet we wanted to create awareness to our people saying that through this small step we can learn a lot and try to reduce energy consumption across the country slowly,” said Dorji Kadin, the CEO of the Bank of Bhutan.
The Department of Renewal Energy will provide technical guidance to the bank to save energy.
“Basically, there are four steps towards understanding the energy consumption pattern of the building itself. And then acting on a real-time basis you will have a monitoring system where the consumption is more and how can we optimise that. How it will actually make sense to make other people aware of such initiative and at the end of the day it will all be for energy efficiency and saving,” said Phuntsho Namgyal, the Director for the Department of Renewal Energy under the Ministry of Economic Affairs.
The main objective of the project is to promote energy efficiency interventions in buildings in the country.
According to the Department of Renewal Energy, Bhutanese buildings are dubbed as one of the highest energy consumption sectors in the country.
The project is part of WWF’s global initiative of making buildings more energy-efficient. Prior to Bhutan, the WWF has initiated such partnership projects in four countries of Vietnam, Columbia, Peru and Chile.
Choni Dema
