Page 11 - AsiaElec Week 45

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NEWS IN BRIEF
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Vietnam pushes for renewables
Vietnam is powering ahead of the rest of Southeast Asia as it pushes for greater reliance on renewable energy.
The region, long criticized for lagging behind in its efforts to adapt to more sustainable ways, is still heavily reliant on coal consumption. Vietnam, however, has bold ambitions to use more renewable energy such as wind and solar.
The country is aiming to boost its power output produced by renewable energy to about 23% by 2030, according to Andreas Cremer, director of energy and infrastructure for Europe, Middle East and Asia at German investment firm DEG.
Citing the German Corporation for International Cooperation, a development agency, Cremer highlighted that 10.7% of the energy mix will be from renewables and 12.4% will be from hydro.
“The power development plan of Vietnam is evolving continuously,” Cremer told CNBC at the Asia Clean Energy Summit last week. The government’s renewables and hydro targets for its energy mix was raised from 16% in 2011 to 23% in 2016.
“That is actually quite impressive if you realize that they only changed their power development plan in 2016 and basically beginning of this year, they basically had nothing,” he said.
However, he said, the country was able to take more than 4 gigawatts of renewable energy capacity online by June — and that accounted for about 8.28% of Vietnam’s electricity supply mix, according to the country’s largest power company Vietnam Electricity.
“So I think that is quite an achievement,” he added.
Global energy consultancy firm, Wood Mackenzie, said Vietnam is now the leader in Southeast Asia’s solar photovoltaic (PV) market and has the largest installed capacity in the region. Solar PV is a technology that converts sunlight into electrical energy.
In an October report, Wood Mackenzie said Vietnam’s cumulative solar installation will reach 5.5GW this year — which makes up about 44% of Southeast Asia’s total capacity. In comparison, Vietnam produced just 134MW in 2018.
Wood Mackenzie said in its report that although Southeast Asia as a whole is still an emerging region in solar PV installations, its cumulative solar PV capacity is expected to reach 12.6 gigawatts this year, and is expected to grow almost threefold to 35.8 gigawatts in 2024.
“Large-scale solar will dominate the installation capacity for the next five years,” and the firm “expects small-scale solar to account for 32% of the capacity additions in 2024,” it wrote.
Chinese data centres look to renewables
Interest in renewable energy in China is growing, and leading Chinese companies are riding on the opportunities to go with renewable energy, according to Greenpeace.
The environmental campaign group is set to bring out a new release of the Chinese edition of its Clicking Clean report, which investigate the use of renewables within the IT sector.
The renewable energy market in China is increasingly open, Yuan Ying, programme manager of Climate and Energy at Greenpeace East Asia, told DCD in advance of the publication of China Clicking Green 2019, a new release in Greenpeace’s Clicking Clean series of studies report, which examines the sustainable energy usage of Chinese IT and data centres.
The report is due to be published at the end of the year, and Ying is scheduled to release some information from the report at a “Clicking Clean China Report Unplugged” session at DCD>Beijing in December.
Chinese companies have been quietly adopting renewables in small pilots, with some embarking on notable largescale deployments, she observed. For instance, Alibaba’s data centre in Zhangbei in Hebei province – a mammoth cloud facility hosting over 600,000 servers – purchases wind power directly from local wind farms there. Elsewhere in China, a Baidu data centre in Shangxi province purchased 550 GWh of
wind power in 2018.
“These examples show that renewable
energy is increasingly becoming available in China and top IT and data centre companies are demonstrating great potential to lead
the sector to make a shift towards 100% renewable energy,” said Yuan. At the moment, she says the data centre sector’s renewable energy intake is around 23%.
Wind, solar plants built around Fukushima
Japan’s northeastern prefecture of Fukushima, devastated during the 2011 earthquake and nuclear disaster, is looking to transform itself into a renewable energy hub, Nikkei has learned.
A plan is under way to develop 11 solar power plants and 10 wind power plants in the prefecture, on farmlands that cannot be cultivated anymore and mountainous areas from where population outflows continue.
The total cost is expected to be in the ballpark of JPY300bn ($2.75bn), until the fiscal year ending in March 2024.
The government-owned Development Bank of Japan and private lender Mizuho Bank are among a group of financiers that have prepared a line of credit to support part of the construction cost.
The power generation available is estimated to be about 600MW, or equivalent to two-thirds of a nuclear power plant. The produced electricity will be sent to the Tokyo metropolitan area.
The plan also envisions the construction
of an 80-km wide grid within Fukushima to connect the generated power with the power transmission network of Tokyo Electric Power Co.
Week 45 13•November•2019
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