The world is undergoing a significant shift in the energy sector, from a system based on fossil fuels to renewable sources. Global greenhouse gas emissions have reached a tipping point and are changing the world’s climate.
Singapore responds to various challenges, such as climate change, energy security, and rising energy costs. Over the last 50 years, the country and large parts of the world have moved from oil to natural gas for cleaner power generation. It has also seen an increase in the use of solar energy, particularly on rooftops and reservoirs.
Climate change is reshaping the way people use and produce energy. And energy demand is expected to rise further with accelerating economic development. Singapore’s energy sector will need to evolve to achieve our vision of a clean and efficient future.
Climate change remains high on Singapore’s priority lists, even though Singapore produces just 0.1 per cent of the world’s global greenhouse gas emissions: as an island nation with limited land and people resources and alternative energy sources, deploying renewable energy sources such as solar and wind becomes particularly challenging.
The country’s officials have also been working on carbon market rules, more stringent national emissions reporting, climate action and multilateral discussions on reducing international transport emissions.
Over the next decades, the power industry’s transformation will affect consumers’ daily lives in numerous ways. One of the initiatives under the Singapore Green Plan 2030 aims at encouraging the use of electric vehicles with the provision of 60,000 charging points at public car parks and private premises by the end of this decade.
However, high prices and a lack of charging stations might delay a large-scale switch to EVs for now. There are also only a handful of electric car models available for sale in Singapore, and they come at a high price.
Many moving parts
To address climate change, Singapore will need to direct efforts at harnessing energy from solar and low-carbon alternatives. Petroleum products make up 60 per cent of the primary energy consumption, according to Statista.
Over 96 per cent of electricity is generated from natural gas. By 2030, the city-state aims to achieve at least two gigawatt-peak (GWp) of solar energy—enough to power around 350,000 households for a year, according to National Climate Change Secretariat Singapore.
With open land being a challenge, most solar PV deployments will go on housing buildings, canopies and car parks, and commercial centres, as well as some floating solar PV parks.
Becoming more energy efficient is central to the country’s sustainability efforts. Singapore is on track to complete the installation of advanced electricity meters for all 1.4 million households by 2024, enabling consumers to monitor their electricity usage via the Singapore Power Utilities mobile app.
Singapore’s approach to alternative energy
Singapore is investing in research and development as well. It is looking to improve the performance of solar PV systems and develop innovative ways of integrating them into the urban environment.
The Housing and Development Board install solar panels on high-rise public housing developments rooftops. The Economic Development Board and Public Utilities Board are building floating PV projects to pilot solar panel installations on water surfaces at reservoirs.
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To safeguard energy security, the city-state is exploring a variety of different options, including regional power grids standard in other parts of the world like the United States to gain access to cleaner energy produced in neighbouring countries, and the usage of emerging low-carbon alternatives such as low-carbon hydrogen, as well as carbon capture and storage.
Searching for predictability
More renewable and diverse energy sources and increasingly stringent environmental requirements call for clever use of data. Similar trends are playing out in other parts of the world and can offer insight into what Singapore’s power future will look like.
As in Singapore and other parts of the world, extreme heat or cold, major weather events, and demand fluctuations can still cause outages. Utilities need to know where and when to get power to maintain the required grid frequency, particularly if the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing.
Renewables are variable. Grid operators must compensate for that variability with as little dependence on fossil fuels as possible.
To meet this complex array of demands, global utilities use data to determine where to allocate their budget for new projects, predict which assets are most likely to fail, and replace them before that happens.
A European multinational power company uses data analytics to predict failures of wind turbines before they happen.
It has built models from past projects and fine-tuned forecasts using live monitoring data. This approach eliminates “gut feel” decisions and reduces maintenance and downtime costs.
Utilities are also turning to analytics to understand the supply and demand, price points, and infrastructure needs to be updated or deferred. The data from a smart meter in a customer’s home or a business premise is being merged with customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) data that the utility has on the customer. This may include billing details, rates, and tariffs, as well as historical credit card information.
Analysing that collected data can help utilities understand whether the customer’s energy usage is going up or down or whether they qualify for rooftop solar. Sifting through demographic information might indicate whether someone is a likely buyer of an electric vehicle.
As the power industry becomes greener, more competitive and complex than ever, the industry must also become smarter. And that can only happen through smarter use of data across the organisation.
At Hitachi, we are working to address some of our time’s biggest social and environmental challenges.
In Singapore, Hitachi Energy is developing a project with Nanyang Technological University and Singapore’s Energy Research Institute to supply battery energy storage and smart controls to Singapore’s first virtual power plant (VPP) to validate methods for integrating more renewable energy onto the city-state’s electricity networks.
The project will help integrate electricity from different distributed energy resources (DERs), including solar, in a way that simulates the workings of a utility-scale power system.
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