Singapore reached its 2025 target of installing 1.5 gigawatt-peak (GWp) of solar at the end of last year, putting it on track to meet its 2030 target of at least 2 GWp of solar deployment, senior minister Teo Chee Hean revealed in parliament last week.
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“This is ahead of schedule, and more than triple where we were in 2020,” said Teo, who is also chairman of the country’s Inter-Ministerial Committee on Climate Change and was responding to questions from members of parliament about Singapore’s progress towards its 2030 national climate target.
Putting the figure into context, Teo said that the city-state’s electrical power consumption today is about 8 GW. This suggests that Singapore’s planned 2 GWp of solar deployment could potentially cover one-fourth of its current electrical power consumption, under ideal conditions where solar power output is maximised. This is equivalent to around 3 per cent of the country’s 2030 projected electricity demand, based on previous government estimates.
In the past few years, the land-scarce nation has explored innovative ways of harnessing solar power – currently the most viable renewable energy source for the city-state – from rooftops and floating solar farms.
In 2021, Singapore built one of the world’s largest inland floating solar farms with the ability to produce as much as 60 megawatts (MW) of power. Construction work for the city-state’s largest floating solar farm – which will be able to produce 141 MWp of clean power – is set to begin this year and contribute to around 7 per cent of its 2030 solar deployment target.
Yet, even after maximising the country’s solar potential, energy think tank Ember has estimated that solar power will generate under a fifth of its projected 2035 electricity demand.
Renewables constraints have led Singapore to explore more nascent clean energy technologies like nuclear power – which its prime minister has signalled a growing interest in deploying. Thus far, the country has developed about 40 nuclear energy and safety experts, as part of its plans to build a pool of 100 such experts.
New carbon trading pact inked
While Teo did not directly respond to a question from People’s Action Party member of parliament Poh Li San on the amount of carbon credits Singapore will depend on to meet its target of reducing emissions to around 60 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent by 2030, he mentioned that Singapore signed a new carbon trading agreement with Bhutan earlier that morning.
Singapore’s pact with the carbon-negative nation follows similar deals with Ghana and Papua New Guinea. These agreements allow Singapore to use carbon offsets from partner countries to meet its climate targets, in line with Article 6 of the Paris Agreement.
To prevent double counting, countries with signed agreements also have to set out a legally binding framework for what sort of credits can be correspondingly adjusted for, where the host country will have to add to its greenhouse gas inventory in order for the buyer country to offset its emissions.
The republic’s director-general for climate change at the National Climate Change Secretariat had previously said that the “crux of the issue which bedevils a lot of cooperation” is that countries are unsure what they can correspondingly adjust for and might only want to sell such credits when they are certain they can meet their own climate targets.
Accounting for AI in 2035 climate target
Opposition Workers’ Party member of parliament Dennis Tan also raised a question on whether Singapore’s artificial intelligence (AI) ambitions have been factored into its 2035 nationally determined contributions, which were just submitted to the United Nations (UN) last month.
Tan asked if there is an estimate of how Singapore’s energy demand may increase with the widespread push for AI adoption, and suggested looking into developing voluntary guidelines that could eventually mandate the reporting of energy consumption by AI models.
“This would encourage [AI] developers to explore and adopt energy efficient practices to reduce the carbon intensity of their products,” he argued. “Developers will be pushed to use smaller, task-specific AI models instead of large, general purpose models.”
Tan also pointed to the ripple effect such regulations would have within the AI ecosystem. It could spawn increased demand for products and services to support energy consumption disclosures of AI models, alongside hardware that shows AI developers their data centre power consumption more easily, he said. Downstream businesses would also start becoming more discerning of the AI models they adopt, added Tan.
“By being an early adopter of such regulation, Singapore can enable local AI developers and related businesses to integrate carbon conscious practices early and stay ahead as global demand for sustainable AI solutions grows,” he said.
In response to Tan’s question, Teo said that the Ministry of Digital Development and Information would speak more about the country’s plan to green its data centres in the agency’s committee of supply debate this week.
