The Climate Change Policy commits us to enacting a series of stringent programmes to further improve existing energy management programmes. The Policy reaches across the organisation with a set of common goals, while leaving the development of programmes and targets for division-specific formulation.

The Corporation consumes energy principally in the form of electricity provided by the two government-franchised electricity suppliers in Hong Kong. To date, neither of these suppliers offers any significant choice in alternative energy supply to customers, thus limiting our choice of supply, thus limiting our choice of supply and prohibiting the Corporation to create its own direct energy supply. As a result, the Corporation's GHG emissions are affected due to the carbon intensity of purchased electricity which, in 2007, contributed to increased emissions on our part.

As a major component of our annual operating expenditures, electricity management is a business priority. Current initiatives focus on property management and rail operations, which have been identified as the organisation's principal sources of electricity consumption and subsequent GHG emissions (98% of total in 2007). The corporate electricity consumption increased by 3.4% (from 107,743 MWh in 2006 to 111,442 MWh) in 2007 driven by higher rail patronage and an expanded property portfolio. Combined with increased carbon intensity of the electricity purchased from a provider from 0.53 in 2006 to 0.57, there was a 9.8% increase in actual GHG emissions for 2007.

To monitor and control consumption and related emissions, the Energy Management Committee oversees ongoing initiatives including the optimisation programme to increase railway operating efficiencies and the USE programme which amongst its goals, fosters conscientious habits at the workplace. In real terms, these initiatives were effective in reducing consumption (14,258 KWh in electricity use reduced against budget) but not enough to offset the total increase due to placing more trains in service to accommodate passenger load demands. On a comparative basis, rail operations maintained the previous year's traction energy consumption on a per KWh/car km.

Similarly, on the property side, several small initiatives in addition to regular energy audits and the application of appropriate new technologies to improve efficiencies and performance did not offset the increased consumption due to the expanded portfolio of properties under management. However, on a comparative basis to previous year's performance, the annual electricity consumption for property management was reduced by 2.02% against budget, the equivalent to a saving of 5,200,609 KWh.