Bright Outlook for Largest Solar Farm Here
It is on track to be operationally ready soon despite Covid-19 delays.Workers piecing together solar panels and floats before they are towed out to their designated positions in the reservoir during construction in March.
Covid-19 may have caused delays to shipments of key equipment, but that has not derailed the timeline set out for building Singapore’s largest solar photovoltaic (PV) system to date.
Spread across 10 solar-panel islands – equivalent in size to 45 football fields – on the surface of Tengeh Reservoir, it is also one of the world’s largest inland floating solar PV systems.
It is set to be operationally ready in a few months, with national water agency PUB poised to tap the farm’s 122,000 solar panels to power its water treatment plants which convert reservoir water into drinking water.
The farm can produce enough electricity to power around 16,000 four-room Housing Board flats for a year.
Last year, solar PV systems generated only 0.56 per cent of the total electricity generated nationwide.
Then Trade and Industry Minister Chan Chun Sing, who is now Education Minister, announced a climate target – a quadrupling of solar energy capacity to 1.5 gigawatt-peak (GWp) by 2025.
That would power about 260,000 households annually, meeting about 2 per cent of Singapore’s projected electricity needs in 2025.
The target accelerates the country’s goal of deploying 2 GWp of solar energy by 2030.
Since 2015, the capacity of solar PV systems that have been contributing to the national grid has grown from around 60 megawatt-peak (MWp) to around 428 MWp at the end of last year.
This newest solar farm in Tengeh, which has a capacity of 60 MWp, will lead to carbon savings equivalent to removing 7,000 cars from the roads and contribute 4 per cent to the 2025 target.
Source: straitstimes
