I have been fairly muted regarding this matter even when the percentage increase – almost 22% ($0.0538 per kilowatt per hour) – has definitely shocked and riled everyone. This is up from $0.2507 for July – September 08, which means we pay $0.3045 per kilowatt per hour from October – December 08.

Understandably, it drew a wave of protests. Some bloggers have even called for the opening up of the energy market in Singapore to keep Singapore Power honest.

I would have been reasonably outraged previously whenever I hear about tariff increments. And if you asked me why I am cool now that is because when I posted the post titled ‘Friday Morning Craps’, I already had the idea that while energy tariffs may appear to rise in tandem with crude oil prices, they might not rise in the same proportions.

On top of that, our energy production is by naturally gas. And though the prices will be affected by that of crude oil, I suspect it would already have mitigated the effects somewhat. Anyway, I just didn’t have the figures to prove it… and all I did last Friday was pull whatever figures out of the Internet to make my point.

So I was trying to look for some hard facts to prove what I have been thinking about all along and I discovered that Singapore Power have published all their press release on their website since the year 2000. You can just go there and click on newsroom to check it out.

They have what I was looking for all along right here (see below). I’ll leave it to you to draw your own conclusions.

That being said, it doesn’t mean I have to accept this rise lying down. On a separate discussion with another blogger, we talked about other possible means to lower our energy consumption level, not only at the household level, but at the national level. It is our opinion that whatever we pay for per kilowatt per hour in household usage, some of that amount would have been used to cover all that public lighting we enjoyed.

So looking beyond solar energy – which we agree may cost a bit to implement – we talked about the reduction of street lighting which we felt is too much especially when the cars have their own headlights to illuminate the road ahead of them. We even mentioned that if it costs too much to remove the lamp posts already in place, then we might need to look at a way to have alternate lights powered up on alternate days. In effect, it would also save us a lot of money in maintenance, since we would have fewer light bulbs to replace. On top of that, new roads built should have lamp posts spaced further apart. Fewer lamp posts to maintain would also save us a lot of money in the long run, no?

Next, public corridor lighting. When you go for your clubbing and come back in the early morning, you will notice that all our HDB flats and light up nice and pretty. But is there a necessity in doing so? While it did concern us in our discussion that muggers may hide in the shadows to waylay someone coming home late or going to work for an early shift, there is no guarantee that one wouldn’t get mugged under bright light anyway since help is hard to come by.

Our idea is to have the corridor lighting be linked to the lifts, so when a lift lands on a particular level, the lights for that particular level will turn on. There should also be a manual backup for the resident to thump and turn on the lights should the lift’s sensors fail. In fact, we even go on to discuss how we can finance this because it would be ridiculous to ask for the people to pay for this. And guess what, the money is already there – the town council’s sinking funds – which they have happily used for investment. And considering the current market conditions, they might as well use the money in some infrastructure works to aid the economy.

I am not even talking about aggressively going green here. But basically, we have to admit we are not making enough effort on a national level to cut down our carbon footprint and we are also wasting a lot of energy. I suspect that maybe the reason why our electricity is one of the most expensive in the world.

So, if this is not a good time to do something about it, when will we ever start?