Singapore to import low-carbon electricity from Vietnam

THE Singapore government will be importing 1.2 GW of low-carbon electricity from Vietnam, largely powered by offshore wind energy.

The Energy Market Authority (EMA) has granted a conditional approval to Sembcorp Utilities – a subsidiary of Sembcorp Industries : U96 0% – along with its partner Petrovietnam Technical Services to implement this project, Second Minister for Trade and Industry Tan See Leng announced on Tuesday (Oct 24).

This marks the city-state’s fourth cross-border electricity contract with its regional neighbours, in its bid to decarbonise the power sector to achieve its net-zero by 2050 target.

Sembcorp said operations could commence in 2033 at the earliest, subject to approvals from the authorities.

Sembcorp and Petrovietnam will next embark on the project proposal development, and work towards obtaining the conditional licence and import permit from EMA, as well as the export permit from Vietnam.

The contract with Vietnam follows similar tie-ups with Indonesia for 2 GW of electricity, and Cambodia for 1 GW of electricity. The very first clean-energy import into Singapore commenced in June last year, importing 100 MW of renewable hydropower from Laos through the Lao People’s Democratic Republic-Thailand-Malaysia-Singapore Power Integration Project.

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With this latest development, Dr Tan said Singapore will be able to meet its goal of importing 4 GW of low-carbon electricity by 2035, when these projects are implemented.

“Given the good progress of this initiative so far, we are now studying the possibility of taking in more electricity import projects, taking into account energy security and cost considerations,” said Dr Tan, who was speaking at a Singapore International Energy Week conference.

EMA said the electricity will be transmitted from Vietnam to Singapore via new subsea cables that will span a distance of around 1,000 km.

Starved of domestic renewable energy resources, Singapore has been working with fellow member states in Asean to ramp up its supply of low-carbon electricity.

A Singapore-US study found that subsea interconnections in the region will bring about emissions reduction, lower generation capital and product costs, and increase renewable energy deployment. Furthermore, there are investment opportunities to develop subsea transmission infrastructure.

Singapore’s Ministry of Trade and Industry and the US Department of Energy said these findings will drive a mindset change towards how regional grid interconnections and cross-border projects could unlock renewable energy potential. They added that this will contribute to the development of the Asean power grid, which has stalled for years.

Dr Tan announced that both countries will be planning for a second phase of the study, which will focus on governance and financing frameworks for implementing cross-border energy trading projects.

To better manage energy demand, EMA and Singapore Power (SP) will pilot a programme in which households can track their electricity consumption with smart meters, and reduce their usage whenever overall system demand is high.

EMA has been running this programme for commercial and industrial consumers, who receive payments as an incentive for reducing their electricity usage during certain periods. There has been a 1.5 times increase in demand-side resources at about 100 MW. The programme’s extension to households is targeted to be launched by the second half of next year.

Households participating in this demand response pilot will receive alerts from SP’s mobile application to temporarily reduce or defer their electricity consumption during peak demand periods, in return for some payments.

Besides importing low-carbon electricity, Singapore has also been ramping up domestic solar energy resources. It has now surpassed 1 GW-peak of solar deployment – more than half its target of 2 GW-peak of solar deployment by 2030, said Dr Tan.

Given that solar generation systems and other small-scale distributed energy resources (DER) such as electric vehicles will increase in numbers over the next few years, SP has launched a pilot system to better manage them.

Called the DER management system, this platform aims to monitor and control these DERs to support the grid’s network operators with real-time information, and control capabilities to optimise DER connections.

“When fully developed, this system will allow the seamless integration of DERs into our grid, manage their impact to system reliability and costs, and reduce the risk of grid congestion that we see in other countries,” said Dr Tan, who is also manpower minister.

In line with building up the grid’s capabilities, SP is planning to pilot a digital tool that can remotely monitor and analyse the condition and performance of the grid’s physical assets, as well as anticipate potential risks in grid operations.

SP plans to deploy the tool as a pilot by 2025. As costs of sensors, digital and communication solutions fall, they can be applied to a large number of distribution assets, such as the 18,000 transformers across SP’s 12,000 substations.

The grid operator is looking to deploy another digital solution that uses modelling and simulations to determine the impact of additional loads and DERs on the grid. The software solution will help to assess the impact of significant demand changes expected in the distribution grid as the energy sector decarbonises. EMA aims for it to be usable by 2025.