Federal Ministry of Energy, Green Technology and Water, State Ministry of Infrastructural Development and Sabah Electricity Sdn Bhd should introduce immediate solutions to address Sabah power disruption issue following incident of power outage that hit Sabah and Labuan, affecting about 500,000 consumers yesterday. Sustainable Energy Development Authority (SEDA), an agency under Federal Ministry of Energy, Green Technology and Water, is urged to allocate all Renewable Energy (RE) quota under Feed in Tariff (FiT) mechanism is part of the said solutions.
According to Managing Director of SESB, Abdul Razak Salim, “We need an anchor plant in both the East and West coast areas to ensure that there is no repeat of such major power breakdown in the future.” But what he said is in fact mid to long term solution, as two IPPs in Kimanis which can generate 300MW in total are in the pipeline to be commissioned in this year, and a 300MW LNG power plant is proposed in East coast, which is only possible to be commissioned 4 to 5 years from now.
New paradigm is needed in addressing the power disruption issue. Instead of talking about constructing mega or anchor power plant, power generation decentralised could be the immediate viable solution. As pointed out by SESB, the whole state power outage was caused by power trip, failure of fail-safe mechanism in grid system which lost 352.8MW or 50% total collapse of power supply. Emergency Response Plan (ERP) was immediately activated in islanding mode at six regions, namely Melawa, Salut, Labuan, Pangi, Tawau and Sandakan.
Each regions achieve fully restoration for some 2 hours to 10 hours since 11am yesterday and SESB need to wait for power to stabilise at all the islands before connecting it. Lessons learnt from this incident probably is power generation for each island could not highly dependant on one or few big power plants. For instance, Kota Kinabalu area took the longest time to restore power fully thanks to it’s dependency on big Independent Power Producer (IPP) power plants located in Sepanggar.
Instead of mega power plant built in years, small scale RE generation, especially Solar PV, should be encouraged as the short term solution to Sabah’s power disruption problem. As the Solar PV technology evolves, it is learnt that Solar PV power plant could be put on line within half a year. Green and clean energy should be fully utilised in the state since Sabah consumers, for the first time, imposed a surcharge of 1.6% in our electricity bills this year as contribution to RE Fund under FiT mechanism which is governed by SEDA.
As of end October last year, the FiT mechanism has benefitted 775 house owners in Peninsula who had installed solar PV systems on their roofs top, why shouldn’t Sabah power consumers benefitted by the scheme as well? In order to guarantee fairer share and addressing critical power demand in Sabah, it is suggested that SEDA should allocate all the RE installation capacities cap this year, particularly for Solar PV quota, to the state. For instance, according to SEDA web portal, Solar PV quota has been allocated for the first six months of this year are as follow: 0.03MW for individual, 0.87MW for non individual <500kW, and 29.53MW for non individual >50kW.
Power consumers expect better service from SESB following the rise of electricity tariff starting January. Better service from SESB could not be realised without supportive actions by Federal Ministry of Energy, Green Technology and Water, State Ministry of Infrastructural Development, and SEDA. It is hoped that Datuk Seri Dr. Maximus Ongkili (KeTTHA), Tan Sri Pairin Kitingan and Datuk Yee Moh Chai (SEDA) would consider the suggestion as all of them are Sabahan leaders who in charge of the above mentioned authorities.