If I told you that Malaysia is most dependent on natural gas to generate power, you probably wouldn’t bat an eye. Why would you? Malaysia is, after all, an oil-rich nation and using its by-product makes economic sense (though in our climate-challenged times, increasingly less so).
However, did you know that despite our status as an oil-rich nation and despite the fact that we receive an overabundance of a readily-available renewable resource – solar energy – we are increasingly becoming dependent on coal to generate our electricity?
Malaysia’s consumption of coal increased from 767 ktoe (kilotonne of oil equivalent) in 1998 to 17,101 ktoe in 2016. This is a whopping 17-fold increase in the consumption of coal in a short 18 years.
And as of 2018, coal generated 43% of all the electricity we use, making it the single largest electricity generator in the country.
How did we get here?
Coal is arguably the worst type of fossil fuel available. Coal-fired power plants only operate at an efficiency of around 44%, which means the rest – 56% – is just lost to the environment. They also emit twice the amount of carbon dioxide as gas-fired power plants and a staggering 15 times more carbon dioxide than renewable energy plants.
To boot, we don’t even produce much of our coal – 98% of the coal we burn is imported. So why coal? Probably because it’s the cheapest reliable source of energy available.
But taking such a simplistic view of its seeming attractiveness will ultimately be to our detriment. Sure, it’s cheap to acquire and burn, but what about its dastardly environmental and health effects?
In 2005, 70% of Malaysia’s greenhouse gas emissions were due to energy production. Unsurprisingly, in 2014, it had climbed to 80%, mirroring our increased use of coal.
The greenhouse gases it emits pollute our air, compromising our health and killing us slowly in the process. In a 2015 study, the prestigious journal Lancet linked 6.5 million deaths globally to air pollution. One out of four deaths in low and middle income countries such as China, India and Kenya are due to diseases arising from pollution.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the number of deaths in Malaysia due to air pollution is around the same ballpark figure.
By profligately burning coal, we’re effectively contributing to the impairment of the health of our populace, which will undoubtedly cost us more long term in medical bills, insurance claims and productivity (a less healthy population is a less productive one).
This increasing investment in coal will also act as a disincentive for those who are bold and ambitious enough to venture into the renewable energy arena to find ways of making it more cost-effective.
It’s about time we bit the bullet and accepted the fact that yes, renewable energy might be slightly costlier in the short term, but with increasing adoption and improving technology, it’ll eventually become cheaper in the long term.
The biggest problem with renewable energy such as solar and wind is intermittency – there’s plenty of power when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing but when they cease to do so, where do we get power from?
To counter this, we need breakthroughs in battery storage technologies. They will act as the much-needed buffer to take renewable energy mainstream. Today, even though there’s plenty of talk about the importance of renewable energy sources, they actually only account for a minuscule amount of energy that’s being generated.
For instance, as of 2018, renewable energy sources (excluding hydroelectric power) only contributed a paltry 1% to Malaysia’s electricity generation portfolio. To call this abysmal would be an understatement.
This is in spite of the fact that the 8th Malaysia Plan and the Fifth Fuel Policy of 2000 aimed to install 500MW of renewable energy (excluding hydropower) by 2005. However, only a fraction of it – 41MW – had been installed by 2010.
The Renewable Energy Act of 2011 and its introduction of the Feed-in-Tariff (FIT) was a bright spot, and finally helped renewable energy installations gain some momentum. But we need to do more.
Tesla has proven that it’s possible to build grid-level batteries that can solve the intermittency problem and make renewable energy feasible but they are yet to reach mass-adoption due to the higher cost.
But a national focus on renewable energy can achieve just this – it could spur innovation in the renewable energy sector and lead to breakthroughs that could make us a leader in clean energy technologies.
To this end, we need to focus our efforts on solar and nuclear energy. They are the most promising, have the best track-record and are the least polluting sources of energy available.
And it’s best we get started now, we’ve got a planet to save.
The writer can be contacted at [email protected].
The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of FMT.