NATIONAL STRATEGY
Singapore is an islandic nation located in the heart of South East Asia with a total land area of about 728 km2 and with a population of about 5.7 million as per data provided by Department of Statistics Singapore on 2020. In 2015, Singapore pledged to reduce its Emissions Intensity (EI, or GHG emissions per unit of GDP) by 36 per cent from 2005 levels by 2030 and stabilise emissions with the aim of peaking around 2030. The Government’s strategy to enable Singapore’s low-carbon transition consists of three thrusts.
This makes the country more determined to establish different energy efficiency measures and to harness alternative sources of energy.
MARKET INCENTIVES
The Green-e Renewable Energy Standard for Singapore allows Green-e Energy certification of renewable energy products throughout Singapore, in order to accelerate the development of renewable generation and renewable electricity markets, and to provide consumers a meaningful mechanism through which they can express demand for renewable electricity (Green-e, 2017).
Instead of subsidies, Singapore has taken proactive steps to introduce regulatory enhancements to facilitate the entry of renewable energy when such technologies become commercially viable (EMA, 2017). The Government's support for renewables mainly comes in the form of funding for Research & Development to develop capabilities within the industry.
Singapore Power Group (SP) has been authorised as a local issuer of International Renewable Energy Certificates (I-RECs) or tradable certificates of energy from renewables in Singapore, the first in Asia Pacific. Each megawatt-hour of renewable energy produced is recorded as one REC and uniquely numbered and tracked. It would be used for achieving renewable energy targets and for reporting consumed energy as coming from renewable sources (SP Group, 2019).
Enterprise Singapore has also formed a working committee TC114 on Marine Energy which actively involves the adoption of international standards to support clean marine energy initiatives of the Singapore government towards new industries such as aquaculture, desalination, electrification of marine operations, fisheries and tidal energy powered data centre systems, etc.
PUBLIC FUNDING PROGRAMMES
More than S$800 million public funding has been set aside by the Singapore Government for research in energy, water, green buildings and addressing land scarcity, of which S$140 million is allocated for research into clean energy technologies under the banner of the Energy Innovation Programme Office (EIPO) (EDB, 2015).
Ocean renewable energy has been identified as one of the prominent alternative energy by ERI@N specifically towards remote coastal and islandic region as part of its strategic research interests.
The government also welcomes clean technology companies to use Singapore as a ‘Living Lab’ to testbed and demonstrate innovative solutions before scaling up for the rest of the world. In 2017, the Singapore Economic Development Board (EDB) has also secured investments from six clean energy companies worth $500 million for next five years (EDB, 2017).
Over the past few years, Energy Market Authority of Singapore (EMA) has also awarded over $100 million to address industry-relevant challenges and opportunities in the energy sector that lead to long-term solutions for Singapore's energy challenges (EMA, 2019). The Singapore Government has also set aside S$49 million in Oct 2020 to fund low-carbon energy research for next five years (NCCS, 2020).
