Do you know that in 3 months’ time, they will start flooding the Bakun reservoir, and at full capacity, it will flood an area the size of Singapore ?

Solar power is good, but commercially it hasn’t reached the viable economic sizes of gas or coal or nuclear plants. In the US, they encourage you to have your own energy saving device at home, or even in commercial buildings, but here they discourage you because it will result in even bigger losses for the utility if everyone has their own solar panel on on their roof.

Everything about this government is lip service only. Ten years ago, they gave hundreds of solar devices to the rural aborigines under a UN sponsored programme – these broke down within the year, and now the interior is littered with solar panels that no longer work. Then TNB came up with so called initiatives for biomass plants – all publicised when the current Malaysian ambassador to the US was chairman of the utility. They conveniently forgot that the cost of interconnection – running transmission lines hundreds of kilometres to the TNB substations would cost more than the biomass plant itself. So these also died a natural death.

And to be fair to this government, we are not alone in paying lip service to renewable energy – India and China are the biggest culprits in this game.

I visited a 2GW Coal-Fired power station at the weekend in Johor – very interesting, and even beautiful in places! What strikes me is that the site occupied an enormous area. Malaysia is very close to the equator, so a good deal of its electricity supply is used to remove energy from houses and offices (aircon removes the heat from solar radiation). Why are there no solar-power projects in Malaysia? A solar power installation the size of the plant I visited would receive many times more GW of solar power from the sun than the plant generates. What’s more, I noticed vast roofs at the power plant for keeping rain off the coal nearest the plant.

If a solar power station was built in the same style as those roofs, industrial, office or even residential units could be built beneath. There is no reason to build such a roof without gaps (leaving gaps between the panels would keep the air beneath fresher, allow some natural light to fall on the area below, and reduce roof load from air movement and rain.

I was running some computers 24/7 for a project recently, so we were using an average of about 1.25kW. According to the annual mean insolation map at Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insolation
Malaysia receives around 240W/m2 average insolation, so my 120m2 terraced house plot receives an average of 28kW. If we were to roof over our plot with photovoltaic panels, we’d need it to be better than 5% efficient to meet our needs for electricity. According to that well-known source of Democratic Truth wikipedia, the market average efficiency is 12-18%. Bingo!

There are a couple of gains hidden in there: shading the house would reduce the need for aircon. Perhaps a builder would be able to tell me whether its cheaper to build a house with small windows or larger ones – you could have large, untinted windows in a house built under shade. And your plastic table and chairs you use outside, and the kids’ toys (and plastic parts on parked cars) would last longer! On the other hand, it wouldn’t rain properly, so gardeners need a solution for that (and possibly to grow more shade-tolerant species!), and it might take longer to dry laundry (balanced possibly against it being less likely to be rained on).

Done on a single house basis, I don’t think the margins are great enough for energy security. There’s no reason why roads and shared spaces should not also be under such a roof. Something that would have an additional benefit would be to put pedestrian walkways and shopping precincts under such a roof. Malaysians always tell me they don’t walk because its too hot. I understand Malaysian history slightly pre-dates the invention of the motor car, so this seems more like an excuse than a reason to me. If Malaysians walked more (because it wasn’t quite so unpleasant), they’d have longer, more productive lives – and look better in tight clothing.

It would be nice to see some credible research projects – particularly in places with electricity supply problems – that investigated the feasibility of such developments. Not only would Malaysia have some showcase projects to flip out when comparing green credentials, if there is a potential of such a project being feasible on a large scale, we could be market leaders for a change. It would also give something credible for our local research institutions to do work on.

Sooner or later we have to accept that the ‘termite model’ of development – where we just dig up, scrape off and burn everything of value while we live up each other’s back passages in great mounds to increase the conversion rate – is not going to deliver a secure future for our grand children’s retirement. People need aspirations – solid, not hollow ones – to unite them. I don’t think it would hurt Malaysia, while it strives to solve its social and economic issues, to attempt to do it in a way that doesn’t leave an uninhabitable concrete toilet for its future generations.

The only slogan that is compatible with BN is this: Cakap tak serupa bikin.