Singapore secures energy future with diverse sources

Singapore is preparing to weather the increasingly challenging global energy landscape marked by supply crunches and growing resource nationalism, said Minister for Energy, Trade and Industry Tan See Leng on Oct 26.

To navigate these headwinds, the city-state is strengthening the diversity of its energy sources and taking steps to ensure it has the infrastructure required to support them, he said at the opening of the Singapore International Energy Week conference at Marina Bay Sands.

And even as the country strives to ensure its energy security in the near-term with new fossil fuel partnerships, it will also step up its deployment of low-carbon options such as solar energy to meet future energy needs in a climate-friendly way, the minister said.

Singapore is also exploring emerging energy options that are not yet commercially viable, including nuclear and geothermal energy.

Tan, whose ministry was renamed the Ministry of Energy, Trade and Industry on Oct 1 to reflect the growing importance of energy for Singapore, was mapping out how Singapore will strengthen the energy sector. The ministry was previously known as the Ministry of Trade and Industry.

Tan said, "We must ensure our system resilience continues to be a source of confidence, harness energy to bolster our competitiveness, pursue low-carbon energy pathways, and deepen connectivity with our partners … while keeping costs in check."

His remarks come two days after Indonesia reduced natural gas supplies to Singapore.

The amount of gas cut is less than 2 percent of the city-state's total daily gas demand, Singapore's energy regulator, the Energy Market Authority, or EMA, later clarified. Singapore relies on natural gas to meet about 95 percent of its needs.

Tan said the trend of resource nationalism is particularly concerning, especially if it undermines established contractual agreements.

He added that such moves increase business risk and deter investments in the energy sector, with negative long-term implications for energy importers like Singapore.

He also cited the disruption of global energy flows caused by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Coming just four years after the 2022 energy crisis, the situation could escalate further following recent attacks on Saudi Arabia.

When Singapore started importing gas, all of its gas was piped from neighboring countries. Today, about half of the country's gas is imported as liquefied natural gas from a global portfolio of sources, such as the US and Australia, said Tan.

He pointed out that the EMA requires Singapore's power plants to also run on diesel, allowing them to tap the city-state's reserves when there is a severe disruption to gas supplies.

This will be shored up with the signing of an agreement between Saudi Arabia and Singapore on Oct 26, which aims to enable the storage of Saudi crude oil in the Jurong Rock Caverns from the second half of 2027.

Located 150 meters beneath Jurong Island, the facility has a total storage capacity of 1.47 million cubic meters.

Tan said, "We cannot predict every disruption, but we will always ensure that Singapore is prepared for them."

And as Singapore prepares to meet growing electricity demand by tapping a variety of different energy sources, it will need to ensure it has the infrastructure to support this.

Five-year plan

A five-year plan on how Singapore plans to expand its power system from 2026 was also rolled out on Oct 26.

"This will be the most significant buildup of our energy infrastructure in decades," said Tan.

The plan features five new power plants, seven new substations and more underground transmission cables, as well as potential energy infrastructure on offshore Pulau Tekong. It also aims to triple the energy storage systems' capacity to 1 gigawatt-hour.

Energy storage systems help maintain balance in the power system by storing excess electricity during periods of high solar generation and releasing the stored energy when solar output is lower or when the system is under stress, explained Tan.

Elaborating on Singapore's plans for solar energy, Tan said Singapore intends to expand the deployment of its "most viable indigenous renewable energy source" to 4 gigawatt-peak by 2035.

This is up from its refreshed target of 3 gigawatt-peak by the end of this decade, and amounts to about 5 percent of the country's total electricity demand projected for 2030.

The city-state is also working with Chinese firm GCL on a proposed pilot for next-generation solar panels that could generate more solar energy with the same amount of space, Tan said. Traditional solar panels are made of silicon, while next-generation ones made of a material known as perovskite could potentially increase efficiency.

In a drive to develop low-carbon technologies for cleaner and more secure power generation, Tan also announced a $75 million initiative that will fund research in promising technologies.

Despite Singapore's bigger push for solar energy, it will need other sources of low-carbon energy, noted Tan, who laid out how the country is seriously studying tapping nuclear and geothermal energy.

While Singapore has not yet decided whether it will tap nuclear energy, it is working to build up its local expertise to help the country make an informed decision.

THE STRAITS TIMES, SINGAPORE