Page 14 - AsiaElec Week 30 2021
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AsiaElec RENEWABLES AsiaElec
Sunseap invests $2bn in floating solar
INDONESIA SINGAPORE’S Sunseap Group is to invest $2bn helping to promote sustainable development
in developing a 2,200-MW floating solar plus in the region, and to bring affordable and stable
storage project, the largest such solar project to clean energy to Batam and beyond.
date world-wide, on the Indonesian island of “This hyperscale project is a significant mile-
Batam. stone for Sunseap coming soon after we had
The company signed a memorandum of completed Singapore’s first offshore floating solar
understanding (MoU) with the island’s invest- farm along the Straits of Johor.
ment and development authority, Badan Pengu- “We believe that floating solar systems will go
sahaan Batam, to build the floating project on the a long way to address the land constraints that
Duriangkang Reservoir on Batam Island. urbanised parts of Southeast Asia face in tapping
The development would span around 1,600 renewable energy.”
hectares, and have storage capacity of over 4,000 Sunseap said the energy generated and stored
MWh. will supply non-intermittent solar energy 24/7.
Sunseap said the solar farm was expected to Part of the output will be consumed within
generate more than 2,600 GWh of electricity per Batam, while the balance can potentially be
year, potentially offsetting 1.8mn tonnes per year exported to Singapore approximately 50 km
of CO2. away via a subsea cable.
The project will be financed through a mix- BP Batam chair Muhammad Rudi said: “This
ture of bank borrowings and internal resources. investment by Sunseap will be a timely boost
Construction is slated to begin in 2022 and be for Batam’s industries as they seek to reduce the
completed in 2024. carbon footprint of their operations. At the same
Sunseap co-founder and chief executive time, it will create jobs and transfer skills to Bat-
Frank Phuan said: “We are honoured to be am’s clean energy sector.”
given the opportunity to partner BP Batam in
HYDROGEN
IOC looks to build India’s first
green hydrogen project
STATE-RUN Indian Oil Corp. (IOC) intends to the fuel cells entirely India-made, are expected
build the country’s first green hydrogen plant at to [be deployed] in the second half of 2021. Since
its 8mn tonne per year (160,000 barrel per day) running these buses would require hydrogen,
Mathura refinery in Uttar Pradesh, chairman IOC is setting up a plant, whose capacity could
Shrikant Madhav Vaidya said this week. be anywhere between 200 tonnes and 400 tonnes
The company intends to power a hydrogen per day.”
electrolyser with electricity generated from its In addition to using renewable power in the
wind farm in Rajasthan State, Vaidya told local production of hydrogen, IOC is also looking at
newswire PTI on July 20. He added that the ways to reduce the carbon footprint of new refin-
hydrogen would displace some of the fossil fuels ery capacity currently under development.
consumed by the refinery’s operations. “We are going to add 25mn tonnes [500,000
Vaidya noted that the company had picked bpd] of our refining capacity by the year 2023-
Mathura refinery because of its proximity to 24. We are 80.5mn tonnes [1.61mn bpd] now
the Taj Trapezium Zone (TTZ), which is a including [Chennai Petroleum Corporation Ltd]
10,400-square km area around the Taj Mahal CPCL, we are going to be 105mn tonnes [2.1mn
that is designated as a low pollution zone. bpd],” Vaidya said.
The executive dubbed hydrogen a “fuel of IOC wants to power this new capacity with
the future” and said his company intended to set supplies from the grid and from onsite thermal
up several hydrogen production pilot projects. power plants (TPPs), as has traditionally been
These will include a project at Gujarat refinery the case.
that will produce 99.9999% pure hydrogen for “We have got a number of expansions down
fuel cell buses. the line which are already approved. We will not
“Today, 50 buses in Delhi are being fuelled have a captive power plant and will utilise power
by hydrogen-spiked compressed natural gas from the grid, preferably green power. This will
[H-CNG], which has 18% hydrogen content,” help decarbonise some part of the manufactur-
he said. “About 15 fuel-cell-powered buses, with ing,” the chairman said.
P14 www. NEWSBASE .com Week 30 28•July•2021
