The Launching of Gemilang Cahaya Komtar

Speech by Chief Minister of Penang

At The Launching of Gemilang Cahaya Komtar

3 October 2017

 

Two weeks ago, I have the pleasure of giving away letters of appreciation to the technical team that was engaged in the Revitalisation Project of Komtar, which won the Best Project 2017 awarded by CIDB. The award was given based on the engineering knowhow and skills required to implement the project. However, the Komtar Revitalisation Project must not only be excellent in terms of engineering but must also be aesthetically attractive as well. Hence at the inception of this Revitalization project, efforts were made to ensure that the Revitalized Komtar would be lighted up so as to be more attractive at night.

When Komtar was first built, spot lights were installed to shine on the building at night. The initial plan was to have the building brighten up every night. Later it was shortened to light up only on special occasions such as Hari Merdeka, Hari Raya Aidilfiri, Chinese New Year, Christmas Eve and New Year Eve or 7 nights a year. The main reason for doing this was to reduce the electricity cost, which came to about RM264 per night or about RM96,560 per year.

Taking advantage of the energy-saving LED and the computer technology, the new light installed in Komtar consumed energy as low as RM10 per night or RM3, 650 per year. And Komtar can be seen at night almost every where in Penang. We are proud that Komtar has light up Penang at night.

This is a tremendous amount of energy saving, which is in line with the current world-wide trend of lighting up the building green. Lighting up the building Green means lighting up the building with minimal carbon emission.

Apart from energy saving, we also took into consideration the maintenance aspect during the design stage. There are now a lot of buildings in KL and Melaka that enclosed the whole buildings with wire mesh netting and installed LED lights on the nettings. This results in very brightly lighted buildings but when thousands of light bulbs are installed on the nettings maintenance becomes very difficult and blown bulbs are left unreplaced. In the end the buildings look ugly. So in Komtar we made sure such mistake is not repeated here.

Also, instead of a single yellow light shining on the building as done in the past, under the Reviltalisation Project, with soft and soothing rainbow colours to make it more contemporary and more appealing.

I would like to congratulate GigaTera (M) sdn bhd for the design and completing this job on time (in fact ahead of time) and on cost (without VO) of RM930,000(If including GST is RM985,800). I would also like to thank PDC, PDC Setia Urus and OWG for implementing this lighting project well.

Thank you.