Opinion: Energy, Secured – Why Grid Resilience is Key to Singapore’s Clean Energy Transition

As an island with scarce natural resources, Singapore relies on energy imports to keep the lights on. However, we will need more, given that our electricity demand is expected to grow between 3% and 5% annually over the next decade.

A conundrum facing Singapore today is to reconcile our rising energy needs with a commitment to sustainability. The power sector currently contributes around 40% of our carbon emissions, necessitating a shift towards cleaner energy sources. This leads us to two crucial questions we need to address as we stride towards our ambitious goal to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2050: how do we continue to green our energy mix, and how do we maintain a reliable supply of clean electricity imports?

At the Singapore International Energy Week 2024, Deputy Prime Minister Gan Kim Yong outlined three pillars that will shape the Republic’s approach to clean energy transition—resilience, reliability and responsiveness. But our focus on incorporating renewable energy must also be complemented by improving energy efficiency today to support carbon emissions reduction.

Towards a Greener, More Energised City

With a small land area and high urban density, Singapore is geographically restricted when it comes to scaling up renewable energy infrastructure. Natural limitations such as low wind speeds and the lack of fast flowing water to generate wind power and hydropower, respectively, also hinder our efforts to harness alternative energy. As such, our pathway to drive decarbonisation involves four switches—natural gas, solar, regional power grids and low-carbon alternatives. Here is where energy imports come to the fore as we pursue a greener energy mix.

Singapore is targeting 6 gigawatts of low-carbon electricity imports from regional power grids by 2035. Plans are already in motion—the Republic has announced a slew of conditional licences and approvals to import low-carbon electricity from countries like Indonesia, Cambodia and Vietnam.

While this will be key to a sustainable future for Singapore, renewable sources of electricity can often be impacted by unpredictable weather, which will be intensified by climate change. So how should Singapore ensure grid stability, when there are, for instance, already proposals in the pipeline to increase local solar deployment and import other forms of renewable energy such as solar or wind-generated electricity from around the region?

Innovate to Protect

Pairing sustainability with energy security requires Singapore to build robust physical and digital infrastructure to ensure our electricity supply can always meet demand. This augments our already strong grid resilience—in 2023, the city achieved 0.15 minutes under the System Average Interruption Duration Index for electricity, meaning that each customer experienced an average of only 9 seconds of interruption the entire year.

SP Group has deployed rooftop solar panels on substations island-wide, with a total installed capacity enough to power more than 4,500 four-room HDB flats for a year (SP Group)

As the national grid operator, SP Group is the guardian of our grid, offering technical expertise to maintain our power supply and facilitate green energy imports. For instance, we have deployed rooftop solar panels on substations across the island to green the grid, and battery energy storage systems to ensure a quick response when solar installations are affected by cloud cover.

In order to harness these distributed energy resources to enhance grid stability, SP Group and the Energy Market Authority will be developing a Virtual Power Plant, or VPP. This digital platform will aggregate distributed energy resources to provide energy and ancillary services such as contingency reserves and frequency regulation to balance and stabilise the grid when required. This will form part of Singapore’s Future Grid Capabilities Roadmap, which envisions the enhancement of our grid reliability through a combination of research and development, pilot projects and deployment efforts.

The VPP also ties in with another prong of the Republic’s grid resilience efforts—demand response. This relatively new approach helps to balance the energy supply by encouraging consumers to voluntarily reduce their electricity consumption via their electricity retailers. By drawing less power from the grid, the network is stabilised during peak demand periods and by allowing greater flexibility in integrating more renewable energy sources that may be susceptible to aberrant weather.

At the same time, the Grid Digital Twin, comprising the Digital Asset Twin and Digital Network Twin, represents a pre-emptive approach that ensures our grid infrastructure’s long-term performance. Using virtual replicas of our grid network and assets, we can identify and prioritise maintenance and renewal to prevent avoidable operational failures.

Greater Efficiency, Lower Carbon Footprint

Even as we buttress our grid to incorporate more renewable sources into our energy mix, we must also proactively reduce our carbon footprint by ensuring energy efficiency.

According to the Building and Construction Authority (BCA), air conditioning consumes about half of a building’s total energy usage. That could increase in the coming years as the National Environment Agency reported that the last ten years (between 2014 and 2023) were Singapore’s warmest decade on record, and temperatures are expected to rise further.

With its various sustainable features, Labrador Tower is expected to use 40% less energy annually compared to other conventional similar-sized buildings (SP Group)

For commercial and industrial building owners, SP Group developed a suite of green digital solutions that integrates different building systems and diverse data sources, combined with artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things, to reduce wastage and lower both electricity consumption and carbon emissions. These solutions have been deployed in places like Republic Plaza and the Singapore Institute of Technology, resulting in energy savings between 18% and 30%. They have also been deployed at Labrador Tower, which contributed to its certification as a Green Mark Super Low Energy building by the BCA.

Enabling green mobility is another priority. SP Group currently operates one of the largest charging networks across the island to meet the growing demand for electric vehicles (EVs). Doubling down on transport electrification will see us take a big step towards decarbonisation, with the Land Transport Authority estimating that EVs produce half the emissions of internal combustion engine vehicles.

Amalgamating these efforts is the Distributed Energy Resources Management System, an integrated system that runs simulations on how Singapore can manage the increasing number of renewable energy assets while also optimising their performance through real-time monitoring.

These solutions highlight Singapore’s proactive stance to safeguard energy security on the road to net zero. And while we have reached significant checkpoints, there is capacity to do more.

Partnering with the Government

As Dr Tan See Leng, Minister for Manpower, emphasised in his speech at the Association of the Electricity Supply Industry of East Asia and Western Pacific CEO Conference 2024, power grids play a critical role in enabling the shift to sustainable energy. This is where the power sector and the government must work as one. Collaborations between the two have long been a game changer in Singapore’s clean energy transition and boosting energy efficiency, both of which contribute to carbon abatement.

The Marina Bay district cooling network has achieved zero downtime since operations began in 2006 (SP Group)

One example is the Marina Bay underground district cooling system—the world’s largest—which is supported by the URA. Designed, built and operated by SP Group, the system uses centralised chiller plants that optimise energy consumption to cool buildings efficiently. The system reduces carbon emissions by up to 20,000 tonnes annually, which is equivalent to removing more than 17,000 cars from our roads. Today, the network serves 24 developments in the surrounding area, and its connection could be expanded to 38 in the coming years.

The URA has also offered incentives to developers who establish or join district cooling networks. Under the initiative, these buildings would gain additional floor space that could be repurposed for commercial uses.

Maintaining this public-private synchronisation will ensure that Singapore is fully aligned with global sustainability standards, and reinforces our commitment to strengthen energy security. This means laying the foundation for an efficient electricity grid powered by clean resources.

We cannot create a sustainable future out of nothing. The onus is on us—from individuals to corporations and the government—to realise Singapore’s vision for a greener tomorrow.