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Energy-Climate & Environment

Malaysia to raise transboundary haze issue at ongoing Asean meeting

9 October 2019

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Malaysia

KUALA LUMPUR (THE STAR/ASIA NEWS NETWORK) – Malaysia will raise the issue of transboundary haze at the Asean Ministerial Meeting on Environment which is being held in Cambodia, said its environment minister.

The item is on the agenda for the four-day meeting that started on Tuesday (Oct 8), said Energy, Science, Technology, Environment and Climate Change Minister Yeo Bee Yin.

“There have been specific discussions that were held (before) but Munirah will be raising the issue in the meeting,” she said, referring to her deputy, Ms Isnaraissah Munirah Majilis.

Last month, Malaysia had been plagued by haze coming from Indonesia due to peat fires that stemmed from illegal open burning practices.

According to Cambodia’s Ministry of Environment, other issues that will be discussed in the meeting include climate change, environmentally sustainable cities, biodiversity conservation, preserving coastal and marine environments, environmental education, water resource management, and chemical and hazardous waste management.

Ms Yeo said she had not received any update from the Indonesian government about the four Malaysian companies implicated in the Indonesian peat fires.

Oil & Gas

Indonesia’s Duri Oil Surges to Widest Premium Ever on Ship Rules

9 October 2019

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Indonesia

Indonesia’s Duri crude surged to the biggest premium over the nation’s flagship Minas grade in at least 23 years as demand for heavy-sweet oil surges ahead of the introduction of cleaner ship-fuel rules.

Duri oil can be directly blended to make low-sulfur shipping fuel, according to a company official at Indonesia’s state-owned marketer PT Pertamina, making it popular with buyers ahead of regulations mandating the use of cleaner-burning fuel that take effect Jan. 1. September shipments were $6.82 a barrel above Minas, the biggest premium in data compiled by Bloomberg since 1996.

Price of heavy-sweet Duri oil skyrockets against flagship grade

Duri — a dense and low-sulfur crude — is one of the few Indonesian grades that can be blended with other fuels to make low-sulfur fuel oil, according to a Pertamina official who declined to be named due to company policy. Other grades such as Minas are too waxy for this purpose, the official added.

In recent months, spot differentials for other heavy-sweet oil such as Pyrenees and Van Gogh has surged as refiners scrambled for crude that can be easily processed or blended to make fuel compliant with regulations known as IMO 2020. Market participants have been preparing for the biggest shift in ship-fuel standards in a generation, hoarding everything from low-sulfur fuel oil to diesel and light-cycle oil in the lead up to implementation.

Duri and Minas were popular in the 2000s as fuel for Japan’s utilities, with demand peaking in 2011 after a devastating tsunami knocked out nuclear power and prompted a surge in oil and gas-fired electricity generation. The price of Duri, which is typically set at a discount to Minas, was at a premium for a second straight month.

Others

Indonesia launches agency to manage environment funds

9 October 2019

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Indonesia

JAKARTA: Indonesia launched an agency to manage funds for climate change management on Wednesday (Oct 9) as part of its efforts to meet its climate goals.

“The objective is to have one pool for funds needed for environment recovery,” Ruandha Agung Sugardiman, director general of climate change at the Environment Ministry, told reporters.

The new agency is expected to start operation on Jan 1, 2020 and will have an initial fund of around 2 trillion rupiah (US$141 million).

The funds will come from land reclamation payments and fines the government collects from environment criminal cases, as well as from donors.

Finance Minister Sri Mulyani Indrawati told reporters the agency could potentially raise up to 800 trillion rupiah (US$56 billion) in environmental funds.

“With the establishment of this agency, we hope that donor countries and institutions will be more confident in committing to provide environmental funds,” she said.

The government aim to prepare regulation that will allow the country to launch a carbon trading programme that the agency could manage, Sugardiman said, although it does not have timeline yet.

Funds from the agency will be distributed as grants or investment to restore environmental damage and educate communities to prevent further damage.

Indonesia aims to cut carbon emission by 29 per cent by 2030 by its own efforts and 41 per cent with international assistance.

Read more at https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/asia/indonesia-launch-agency-manage-environment-climate-change-funds-11985144

Others

Cambodia jumps 12 spots in global energy sustainability survey

9 October 2019

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Cambodia

Cambodia’s ranking in the latest global energy sustainability survey has improved dramatically, indicating that the Kingdom’s efforts to solve its energy woes and providing an adequate power supply are making headway.

For in depth analysis of Cambodian Business, visit Capital Cambodia
.

This also means that Cambodia, which suffered a crippling power problem a few months ago, has recovered well from that crisis. After many of its hydropower dams dried up because of a lingering drought, Cambodia was forced to ration power in many parts of the country early this year.

The newly-released 2019 Energy Trilemma Index (ETI) ranked Cambodia 105 out of 128 countries, representing a 12-spot jump from last year. The 2018 ETI placed Cambodia in the 117 spot out of 125 countries included in the survey.

Cambodia is among several countries in Asia and Africa whose rankings have improved remarkably.

“The fastest improvers include Cambodia, Nepal, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Ethiopia, and Kenya, where policies and investments have prioritised accessed to grid and off-grid electricity and households have become progressively wealthier,” the World Energy Council (WEC) said.

The ETI, which is commissioned by the WEC and global management consulting firm Oliver Wyman, ranks countries on their ability to provide sustainable energy. Each country’s energy systems are ranked based on three dimensions: Energy security, energy equity, and environmental sustainability.

Energy security refers to the adequacy of energy supply and a country’s ability to recover from system shocks. Energy equity, meanwhile, measures energy access and affordability from the perspective of consumers, while environmental sustainability ranks a country’s efforts to avoid or mitigate environmental damage.

This year, the Kingdom was ranked 77 in energy security, 110 in energy equity, and 92 in environmental sustainability.

Globally, the ranking was dominated by Europe, with nine of the top ten countries being from that continent. Switzerland was ranked number one, followed by Sweden, Denmark, the United Kingdom, Finland, France, Austria, Luxembourg, and Germany. New Zealand, the only non-European country in the top ten, was ranked ten.

Singapore, which ranked 43 globally, was the highest-ranking country from Southeast Asia, followed by Malaysia (51), Brunei (56), Indonesia (69), Vietnam (91), Philippines (94), and Myanmar (104). Laos was not included in the survey.

Cambodia appears to have partially solved its chronic power shortage by buying additional power from neighbouring Laos, Vietnam, and Thailand.

Last month, Cambodia signed an agreement to purchase 2,400 megawatts from Laos.

From relying mostly on hydropower dams and coal-fired power plants, Cambodia has now started to diversify its energy sources.

By 2020, the government is aiming for solar power to make up 15 percent of the Kingdom’s total energy production. Since the power crisis, Cambodia has approved a host of solar energy projects in Kampong Speu, Kampong Chhnang, and other provinces, with more under consideration.

“This figure of 15 percent includes solar projects in Bavet, Kampong Speu, Kampong Chhnang, Battambang and Siem Reap provinces,” Keo Rattanak, director-general of the state-owned utility company Electricite du Cambodge, told the local media earlier.

The Kingdom is also looking at harnessing its wind power potential. In May this year, the French company Blue Circle completed a feasibility study for a project to build wind turbines in the Kingdom.

Others

Vietnam cities embrace smart technology

8 October 2019

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Vietnam

In efforts to embrace the fourth industrial revolution (Industry 4.0), cities and provinces in Vietnam are pushing smart city programmes, combining technology with internet-connected devices to enhance municipal management and economy.

Smart cities, with new technologies and integration based on sensor collection and analysis of data, are expected to drive economic, environmental and social benefits in many cities and provinces in Vietnam – optimising traffic flows in real time, reducing energy consumption and automating waste management.

However, despite the countless benefits of smart city projects, major cities including Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, which are pioneering in this field, are facing difficulties and challenges when it comes to deployment due to city-specific requirements and needs of new policies and regulations from the government and relevant sectors.

Speaking at the Industry 4.0 summit held in Hanoi last week, Ho Chi Minh City deputy chairman Tran Vinh Tien said the city had been building its smart city project for two years with consultation from Vietnam Posts and Telecommunications Group and Viettel Group. The city has gathered experience from many cities around the world and discovered that smart cities are different.

“From East Asia to South Asia, from the US to Europe, all smart cities are different. We are advised that we should conduct a smart city project suited to the characteristics of the city because the application of Industry 4.0 will solve specific problems of each city such as traffic congestion, flooding and environmental pollution,” Tien said.

However, to develop it, Tien said the city would need an information centre allowing interaction among local authorities, businesses and people. In which, the state and businesses would be able to exploit each other’s data while people could share contributions and ideas. All of these interactions must be digital.

Therefore, the government should build a legal corridor for data management soon.

“The data area is even more important than land. If we want to manage the data area effectively and synchronously we need to have a legal corridor.”

Tien also proposed that the government set up a smart city architectural blueprint for all cities and provinces nationwide, ensuring synchronisation – which is the most basic principle of technology – and efficiency.

“In addition, as the government has approved the digitalisation project, we want to volunteer. If we do not digitalise, technology of the city will be not effective,” Tien added.

‘We lack standards’

Hanoi People’s Committee deputy chairman Ngo Van Quy said the Vietnamese capital is building an e-government and smart city. It has achieved some initial results in the construction of information infrastructure, applying corporate information, state management and residential data, moving towards a smart city model, including smart transport and travel.

“During the implementation process, there are several problems that need to be solved. We lack standards relevant to the building of e-government and smart cities. The Ministry of Information and Communications (MIC) has developed this content, but it is not yet completed. It should be issued as soon as possible,” Quy said.

Regarding information application, Quy wanted the government to build software for localities from the central to the grassroots level. “If each locality researches and develops their own software, it is wasteful while causing difficulties in integration and connectivity.

“Recently, I saw some very good implementations, such as corporate management software of the Ministry of Planning and Investment and software to manage drugstore and pharmacies of the Ministry of Health,” he said.

Technology solutions are just a part of the smart city programme, Quy said, adding that the capital is facing shortages in human resources. The general trend of qualified information technology (IT) staff is moving to work for non-state enterprises, which pay a higher salary.

“We expect the state to have special policies to encourage IT staff to work for the state management agencies, building e-government and smart cities,” Quy said.

According to the MIC, smart cities are the basic driving force for socio-economic development of the nation and regions across the country. Vietnam has more than 830 urban areas with the urbanisation rate of 38.6 per cent.

Economic growth in urban areas averages 12-15 per cent, 1.5-2 times higher than the national average. About 30 cities and provinces nationwide have implemented smart urban construction projects, including Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi.

However, the MIC says the current development of smart cities is still inadequate. Some localities have started deploying some basic applications and services for smart cities. Meanwhile, ministries and agencies continue to research and complete building guidelines, mechanisms and policies for smart cities.

Deputy Minister of Information and Communications Nguyen Thanh Hung asked localities to see the development of e-government as a key factor to building smart cities, in addition to ensuring cyber security.

“We should select capable businesses to organise the implementation of smart city projects. Lastly, it’s essential to develop human resources suitable for a smart city. It is indispensable for leaders who have decisive vision and qualified human resources to operate technology solutions in smart cities,” Hung said.

Others

Vietnam is set to build a US$4.2 billion smart city near Hanoi. Why? Because it can.

8 October 2019

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Vietnam

Vietnam is growing economically.

In fact, thanks to the trade war between the U.S. and China, the Southeast Asian nation has benefited the most as companies look to Vietnam for production purposes.

Its economy is also expected to grow 7 percent yearly. Heck, in a recent report released by Google and Temasek, Vietnam’s internet economy is also growing exponentially on a year to year basis.

Now, it’s going to spend US$4.2 billion to build a smart city close by Hanoi after Vietnamese developer BRG Group and Japan’s Sumitomo Corp, a trading company, struck a deal.

Through a 50-50 joint venture, a whopping 270 hectares of land located some 20-minute away from Hanoi will begin development in early 2020.

Some 7,000 apartments will be built in the first phase with the project expected to complete in 2022. Roughly 20,000 to 25,000 people are estimated able to be able to live in these apartments.

The second phase of the project will see office buildings and commercial facilities built.

Next, an airport and a rail station will be developed to connect the smart city with others.

“City planning is an effort without a fixed goal. We will create a city that suits Vietnam,” Sumitomo President Masayuki Hyodo says.

The city will be state of the art in that it will employ the “internet of things” technologies to ensure energy is conserved.

The internet of things is the next level of tech where objects can transfer data from one to the other without human-to-human or human-to-computer interaction.

The city will have surveillance cameras that come with the capabilities to recognize faces together with artificial intelligence.

The entire project is expected to complete by 2028. Things are certainly looking up for Vietnam.

Electricity/Power Grid

New approach for modern power grids that increases efficiency, reduces cost

8 October 2019

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Singapore

Modern power grids are rapidly developing due to the increasing penetration of renewable energy sources such as solar photovoltaic and wind power. This trend is expected to rise in the near future, as attested by major countries worldwide in their commitments to the production of large renewable power penetration.

A modern power grid, with its reduced dependence on non-renewable energy, has indisputable advantages in terms of environmental safeguards, but its introduction does not come without a cost.

Renewable energy generation technologies are highly variable and not fully dispatchable, resulting in new challenges to the existing power system operational paradigm. In fact, when uncontrollable resources such as a renewable energy resource fluctuates, classical optimal power flow (OPF) solutions can provide very inefficient power generation policies that result in line overloads and potentially cascading outages.

Classical OPF dispatch is typically computed based on simple predictions of expected loads and generation levels for the upcoming time window. Although these predictions can be fairly precise for traditional power grids, they may be highly unreliable in the case of renewable generators, thus explaining its failure in these latter situations.

Despite the increasingly larger investments, which are costly and subject to several regulatory and policy limitations, power outages due to the uncertainty introduced by renewable power generation still occur frequently. This situation shows that a strategy based solely on investments in technological improvements of the transmission lines and controllable generation capacity is not sufficient anymore. Instead, radically new dispatch philosophies need to be devised to cope with the increasing uncertainty due to unpredictable fluctuations in renewable output.

One of the major challenges in today’s power grids is to design a dispatch policy that minimizes generation costs, while ensuring not to violate generation and transmission constraints for all admissible values of renewable power and variable demand.

Researchers from the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD), Singapore, CNR-IEIIT, Politecnico di Torino, Italy and the Pennsylvania State University, USA proposed a novel probabilistic dispatch strategy for modern power grids that not only reduces the generation cost and possibly the amount of greenhouse gas injected into the atmosphere, but also ensures that all constraints in the power network are satisfied, preventing overload and cascading outage. Their research was published in IEEE Transactions on Control of Network Systems.

The researchers proposed a randomized algorithm based on the novel concept of scenario with certificates and convex relaxations of power flow problems. The effectiveness of the proposed solution, shows that one can significantly decrease the probability of constraint violation without a significant impact on the nominal power generation cost. Moreover, the approach is shown to be very efficient from a computational viewpoint.

“One of the advantages of the probabilistic approach pursued in this research is to avoid conservatism associated with the existing methods. Instead of requiring that the network constraints are satisfied for all possible values of uncertainty, we pushed the boundaries and allowed for a small well-defined risk of constraint violation to develop this new approach,” explained lead author Dr. Mohammadreza Chamanbaz, Senior Research Fellow, SUTD.

Others

Big Oil’s renewable shift seen flooding shareholders with cash

8 October 2019

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Singapore

[SINGAPORE] Shareholders of global oil giants will be “drowned” in cash from dividends and buybacks for the next 20 years as the firms shift their capital structure to finance renewable projects, according to Rystad Energy, an energy research company.

Majors such as Exxon Mobil Corp and Chevron Corp have traditionally had to hoard cash as they looked to their own balance sheets to fund billion-dollar megaprojects, founder Jarand Rystad said at his firm’s annual summit in Singapore. That will change as they gravitate to wind and solar projects, which tap debt markets backed by project financing for as much as 95 per cent of their cost, he said.

The shift will create huge amounts of surplus cash that majors can return to investors as they increasingly tap pension funds and other lenders for lower-risk renewable projects, said Mr Rystad. It underscores the massive changes oil and gas giants will need to undertake as they transition to wind and solar projects, the fastest-growing sources of energy.

“Shareholders will be drowned in capital paid back by energy majors in the next 20 years,” Mr Rystad said. “Basically the whole energy sector needs to decapitalise and to increase leverage.”

Major oil companies are poised to do a record number of clean-energy deals this year, with Royal Dutch Shell plc leading the pack, according to data compiled by BloombergNEF last month. So far this year, they’ve done about 70 deals in sectors including solar, wind and biofuels, close to surpassing the total for all of last year, the data show.

Guaranteed returns

Investment in upstream oil and gas projects tends to be high-return but risky as the results aren’t always apparent at the outset. In contrast, renewable projects follow a model more closely aligned with utilities, in which power-purchase agreements with grids or end-users offer relatively low but guaranteed returns sought by banks and pension funds.

While owning a solar farm won’t provide the kind of returns attractive to Big Oil’s investors, these companies can tap their engineering and operational expertise to develop projects and sell them when they’re complete or de-risked, Mr Rystad said. They can also find new profit streams closer to the end-user by adding bespoke services to the energy they provide, he said.

“Clearly Chevron and Exxon and everybody have ambitions to be an energy major 30 or 40 or 50 years from now,” he said. “Current energy majors are only 15 per cent debt, but the future energy majors will be 85 per cent debt. That’s why it will change the capital structure of the industry.”

A middle ground between the two can be found in the shale industry, Mr Rystad said. Because shale development resembles manufacturing, with almost no dry holes encountered, and because companies can hedge their commodity price risk, its capital structure is about 30 to 50 per cent equity, with the rest coming from debt, Mr Rystad said.

“It’s natural for Big Oil companies to start to invest much more in shale, change their capital structure gradually and then go further into renewables,” he said.

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