Solar panels, electric vehicles on front line of green energy revolution
The push for renewable energy typically conjures images of vast solar farms and towering wind turbines, but the real game-changer in the battle against climate change in Southeast Asia could be the small-scale, distributed energy resources (DER) such as rooftop solar panels and electric vehicles (EVs).
Such sources could eventually account for up to half of the region’s renewable energy output with proper policies in place, Gabrielle Kuiper, a distributed energy resource specialist and guest contributor at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA), told the Post.
“All of these technologies could be very effective in Southeast Asia,” she said, adding that the region had an edge because it had technology centres to facilitate such a transition, especially with its solar resources and production centres for batteries.
DER refers to any small-scale unit of power generation or energy storage technologies, operating either as part of a local distribution network or off-grid. These can range from individual solar panel installations on home rooftops to electric vehicles and battery storage units that feed power back into the grid.
DER systems allow for the management of energy at or near the point of use, which energy analysts say increases flexibility and efficiency.
Kuiper said DER systems could help Southeast Asia unlock billions of dollars worth of renewable energy potential and accelerate the region towards its goal of becoming a clean energy hub.
A report by IEEFA published last month estimated that DER systems could deliver A$19 billion (HK$98 billion) of total economic benefits to Australia by 2040. Kuiper explained that the economic impact stemmed from the flexibility and efficiency of DER systems.
“An EV is just a battery on wheels. You can have a power point in your car or your truck, and you can plug in whatever, whether it’s a power tool [or something else],” Kuiper said, adding that it was possible to upload or download energy with DER just like data from the internet.
“The really important part of the energy transition is EVs are likely to be the majority of our distributed battery storage going into the future … A lot of car companies in China and South Korea are working on cars that will feed [energy] back into homes or the grid,” she added.
Another benefit of DER systems was that they were more resilient to climate change events, Kuiper noted. She highlighted the example of residents using their homes and EV batteries to help their neighbours during recent bushfires in Australia and prevent refrigerated food from spoiling when the affected households did not have access to traditional power sources.
However, Kuiper acknowledged that there were technical roadblocks to prevent DER systems from realising their full potential. “The main thing is our electricity system has been designed for very, very large generators of mainly oil and gas. It does not have the technical standards, the regulations or market access for all these smaller devices,” she said.
Tim Buckley, the Sydney-based director of the Climate Energy Finance think tank, said the adoption of DER systems, particularly rooftop solar panels, should be scaled up significantly in Asia to reach their potential.
“DER is a massively underutilised resource, particularly for land-constrained nations who have good solar resources like India and others in Asia,” Buckley said.
Citing an example in Denmark, Buckley said construction was under way to build the world’s largest solar rooftop power plant. When completed, the plant on top of a logistics centre in the city of Horsens will have 35 megawatts of capacity, equal to a typical solar farm.
While Asia may not be home to such ambitious DER projects yet, scaling them up could happen relatively rapidly compared with large-scale power plants, Buckley said.
“Residential solar projects in Australia can be established in only a day, while commercial and industrial projects can take a couple of months and just a fraction of the time to install thermal power plants, which is five to six years,” he said.
Regulatory reforms were needed to drive the adoption of DER, but regulators often had to take into consideration the interests of power utilities or grid operators, Buckley said.
A mindset change among those running or regulating electricity systems was required for DER systems to reach their potential, Kuiper said.
Policymakers should treat them as equally important to the clean energy transition as large-scale energy generation and transmission, she argued.
Such a transition would not be easy in Asia, even in a developed country like Singapore, as it would take considerable time for the effectiveness of DER systems to be seen, industry executives say.
During the unveiling of Singapore’s 2024 budget last month, the city state announced a S$5 billion (HK$29 billion) Future Energy Fund aimed at reaching its goal of net-zero emissions.
“While Singapore has been focusing on centralised renewable energy sources, it’s not entirely neglecting decentralised systems,” said Sanjana Ramesh, power system engineer at VFlowTech, an energy storage solutions provider. “However, as distributed systems mature, they should be considered for their resilience, flexibility and most importantly, their sustainability.”