Page 10 - AsiaElec Week 35

AsiaElec
NEWS IN BRIEF
AsiaElec
we have laid out how we will achieve our Paris 2030 targets to the last tonne in our A$3.5bn ($2.4bn) Climate Solutions Package,” Taylor said. “We will meet our international obligations without wrecking our economy.”
Australia to hit 2020 green target ahead of schedule
Unprecedented investment in large wind and solar power projects has put Australia on track to meet the federal government’s 2020 large- scale renewable energy target.
e government had previously indicated that 6,400MW of large-scale renewable capacity had to be built between 2017 and 2019 to generate su cient electricity to meet the target of having 33,000 gigawatt hours of additional energy by next year.
Clean Energy Regulator chair David Parker said that milestone was met ahead of schedule last week a er the approval of four large wind and solar power stations, with a combined capacity of 406 megawatts.
“It is now certain Australia will generate enough renewable energy to meet the 2020 large-scale renewable energy target,” Parker said. “ is achievement represents the hard work of a growing and dynamic renewables industry.”
e federal government said it was supporting record investment in renewable energy.
“In 2018, Australia led the world in clean energy investment, with more than double the per-capita investment of countries like France,
Germany and the United Kingdom,” Energy and Emissions Reduction Minister Angus Taylor said. “With the renewable energy target set to be exceeded, investment is not slowing down.”
e recent approval of the 148.5MW Cattle Hill Wind Farm in Tasmania, owned by Goldwind and partners, saw the milestone surpassed, according to the regulator. e Cattle Hill Wind Farm is built on the hills above Waddamana Power Station, Tasmania’s rst hydro scheme which was opened in 1916.
BNEF India chief warns utilities of power volatility
Renewables have become the most competitive part of the Asian energy
sector, as the market as a whole has been transformed by the rise of green energy and the accompanying decline in fossil fuels.
Shantanu Jaiswal, head of India Research
at Bloomberg New Energy Finance, said
today that “renewables have become the most competitive source of electricity – the whole landscape has ipped over in the last ve years and we are seeing this transition happening in most of the countries that we are looking at”.
He told the Powergen Conference in Kuala Lumpur that the rise of renewables has come in parallel with a decreasing importance of fossil fuels and predicted that “in the next 30 years, renewables will be able to provide 50% of all electricity and the role of fossil fuels will be to support renewables”.
Jaiswal said that “future power systems
will be more volatile – and that volatility will continue to 2050” and added that the key to managing that volatility was greater exibility, highlighting some markets that are already leading the way, including the UK, Germany and California.
Flexibility was also going to be key for utilities, he said, not least in adapting their traditional business models. He said they would no longer simply supply electricity, bit would also branch out into energy management, electric vehicle infrastructure, microgrids and home monitoring.
“Gone are the days when changes were linear – change is now coming from various directions and the time for utilities to address this is running out,” he warned.
Malaysia needs $7.8bn
investment to hit renewable
energy target
Malaysia needs investments totalling MYR33bn ($7.8bn) in order to achieve its target of 20% electricity generation from renewable energy (RE) sources by 2025, said Energy, Science, Technology, Environment and Climate Change Minister Yeo Bee Yin.
She said the investments would be contributed by the government, public-private partnerships and private nancing.
“ e Securities Commission has already done a six-month study on green nancing; it had formed the nancing taskforce (for this purpose). It gave a report on 21 action items to facilitate the MYR33 ($7.8bn) billion investment in RE and the government will look at all the action items and implement them accordingly,” she told reporters a er o ciating the inaugural 5-In-1 Power and Energy Asia Series exhibition here today.
Meantime, Yeo said, the government would continue all the current incentives such as
the Green Technology Financing Scheme
and the Green Investment Tax Allowance to incentivise the growth of RE.
She said the third round of large-scale solar (LSS3) bidding, which ended last month, saw the cost of generating per kWh from solar energy was lower than energy generation from natural gas sources.
She said the lower cost of solar generation was due to the advanced solar panel development technology that allowed
the project to be bid at a cost of as low as MYR0.177 ($0.04) per kWh.
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Week 35 03 •September•2019