According to a joint statement by the Energy Market Authority (EMA) and JTC on Wednesday (22 April), Singapore has achieved its 2020 solar deployment target of 350 megawatt-peak (MWp) in Q1 of this year.
This achievement arrives as the Government and industry closely collaborating with the aim to shift to cleaner energy amid the deteriorating climate change.
Singapore will increase its adoption of solar energy since it is the country’s most viable source of renewable energy, said Ngiam Shih Chun, Chief Executive at EMA.
Set in 2010, the goal of 350 MWp target is enough to power up around 60,000 households per year.
This target was exceeded by the nation upon the completion of a 6 MWp rooftop solar installation at a CapitaLand industrial property at 40 Penjuru Lane, owned by Ascendas Real Estate Investment Trust.
Sembcorp Industries installed and operated these solar panels. With this, the industrial facility has been able to lower its carbon footprint whereas excess electricity generated is sold on the wholesale electricity market.
Now that the 2020 target has been achieved, the country’s new target is to achieve at least 2 gigawatt-peak of solar deployment by 2030. This will be enough to power up around 350,000 households per year.
To do so, for two of its solar initiatives, SolarLand and SolarRoof, JTC will extend them. Both initiatives help generate clean energy to the national grid by installing solar panels on empty lands and the rooftops of JTC’s buildings each.
In the next phases of the initiatives, solar installations will utilise over 740,000 square metres (sq m) of roof space and industrial land, which amounts to around 103 soccer fields.
This will generate around 78,000 MWh which can power more than 14,600 households and lower carbon emissions by over 32,000 tonnes per year. Also, it will contribute the 2030 national goal of reaching over 82 MWp of solar energy capacity.
According to JTC’s Group Director of Engineering, Calvin Chung, the SolarLand and SolarRoof programmes will address the challenges faced by the local solar market. These include high capital costs as well as limited space.
To create an extra 15 MWp of solar energy capacity, a tender will be issued in the first half of this year for the second phase of SolarRoof.
In addition to JTC’s industrial buildings, the agency will also explore allowing lessees to venture into a new contract to fix solar panels on their own rooftops.
Furthermore, Singtel announced in a separate statement on Wednesday that it has completed the company’s biggest generator of clean energy so far. The generator is a 1.65 MWp solar energy installation on the rooftop of its Bedok Data Centre. There are 4,292 solar panels occupying an area of around 8,205 sq m.
Singtel stated that the installation started last March, and it can power up 10 per cent of the data centre’s energy needs from the clean energy generated.
By 2050, Singtel hopes to achieve a net-zero emissions. To achieve this, the telco has invested in energy-efficient technologies to reduce energy consumption at its operations. It is also looking into the use of direct renewable energy for its infrastructure and larger-scale projects in Singapore and Australia.
The company’s green initiatives are “increasingly important to customers, particularly enterprises that outsource their ICT (information and communications technology) operations to us and want to reduce their own carbon footprint too,” said Andrew Buay, Singtel’s Vice-President of Group Sustainability.
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