NATIONAL STRATEGY
Singapore is an islandic nation located in the heart of Southeast Asia with a total land area of about 729 km2 and with a population of about 5.5 million as per data provided by Department of Statistics Singapore in 2021. 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 unveiled the Singapore Green Plan 2030, a whole-of-nation movement to advance Singapore’s national agenda on sustainable development. The Green Plan charts ambitious and concrete targets over the next 10 years, strengthening Singapore’s commitments under the UN’s 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda and Paris Agreement, and positioning Singapore to achieve long-term net-zero emissions aspiration as soon as viable. The Green Plan has five key pillars:
MARKET INCENTIVES
In Singapore, several governmental bodies provide schemes and incentives to help promote the adoption of renewables. They are the Energy Market Authority (EMA), Building and Construction Authority (BCA) and Economic Development Board (EDB). 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, involved in 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. The Ministry of National Development’s SGD 50 million Research Fund for the Built Environment encourages and supports research and development for sustainability in the built environment. The NEA’s Innovation for Environmental Sustainability (IES) Fund allows Singapore-registered companies undertaking environmental protection projects to apply for up to an SGD 2 million funding for the applied research, test-bedding and demonstration stages of technology developments with a maximum duration of three years.
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. The inter-agency Energy Innovation Programme Office’s SGD 195 million Energy Innovation Research Programme (EIRP), which was launched in September 2013, promoted research and development in Building Energy Efficiency for a five-year period, which ended in 2015. Of the SGD 195 million, SGD 140 million is set aside for the EIRP. The BCA Innovation Grant for Green Buildings (iGrant) co-funds up to 70% of qualifying costs or SGD 20,000, whichever is lower, at the proof-of-concept stage to allow research and development projects involving the introduction of novel tools, methodologies and technologies that have high impact to improve the sustainable built environment. Subsequently, the BCA co-funds up to 70% of the qualifying costs or SGD 250,000, whichever is lower, at project implementation.
