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   Industry Spotlight & Innovation
A Bright Future for Solar Energy in Sunny Singapore
Singapore is increasing its efforts to combat climate change, and solar energy will be an important asset in its arsenal. How can a land-scarce country like Singapore make a real difference,
and what kinds of challenges will
need to be overcome?
TAN Congyi
Head of the National Solarisation Centre, SERIS
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conventional fossil-fuel-based thermal generation. But how can such a densely populated and urbanised country as Singapore meet its ambitious solarisation goal by 2030?
Ground-based solar energy installations require a lot of space. One of the largest solar complexes in the world is India’s Pavagada Solar Park located in Karnataka’s Tumakuru district. If constructed in Singapore, this gigantic 2 GWp solar park will provide enough solar power to hit Singapore’s 2030 solar target. Unfortunately, it occupies an area of 53 km2, equivalent to around 7% of the entire land area of Singapore. For comparison, this is bigger than every Planning Area in Singapore, except the Western Water Catchment. Clearly, building a large solar park in Singapore would not be feasible. We need to explore more innovative solutions instead.
Rooftops
Where Singapore lacks in land, it makes up for in roofs. There are around 130,000 buildings in Singapore, and many of them have perfectly usable roof spaces that can be utilised for deploying solar energy systems. These roof spaces typically also house water
  At the 2019 Singapore International Energy Week, Minister for Trade and Industry Mr Chan Chun Sing announced an ambitious target for Singapore to deploy at least 2 GWp of solar energy by 2030. To put it into perspective, this is almost a seven-fold increase compared to the installed capacity of 300 MWp as at Q3 2019, and about a six-fold increase compared to the 2020 target of 350 MWp.
In the next 50 years, one major challenge for Singapore will be to build a sustainable, reliable and affordable energy supply system. Solar energy is one of the "four switches" to achieve this, alongside natural gas, regional power grids and emerging low-carbon alternatives. The addition of more solar energy systems helps Singapore to meet its international commitments to combat climate change by slowing down and ultimately capping carbon dioxide emissions. Undeniably, solar energy will have an increasing share of Singapore’s electricity generation mix going forward.
Policies aside, we currently stand at a juncture where rapidly falling prices of renewable technologies like wind and solar have resulted in competitive electricity prices vis-à-vis new, but also existing
tanks and cooling equipment, but there are still plenty of unused areas that can be tapped. Singapore’s Housing Development Board (HDB) saw an opportunity here in 2008 and spearheaded the first solar test- bedding project in Singapore to install solar energy systems on top of existing housing blocks. The solar energy harvested from the HDB rooftops is used to power common services such as the lift motors and water pumps during the day. The testbed proved to be a resounding success, which led HDB to commit a target of 220 MWp of solar panels on roughly 5,500 HDB blocks by 2020 through the SolarNova programme. Taking another bold step forward, HDB further committed to include “solar-ready” roofs for all new public housing blocks where possible, thereby facilitating the continued growth of rooftop solar energy systems on HDB blocks. Already today, the “roofscapes” for many HDB estates have been changed, with the arrays of solar panels adding a refreshing dash of azure blue to otherwise grab grey concrete slabs.
Looking into the future, it may even be possible to co-locate urban farms, rooftop terraces and solar PV systems all on the same roof. In fact, there already appears
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