They say people who live in glass houses should not throw stones. Yet affluent westerners insist on lecturing the world’s developing nations on the need to protect the environment.
As Sri Lanka’s finance minister Sandresh Ravindra Karunanayake recently put it: “Advanced economies ruined the climate and now they are pontificating as to how it’s going to be cleaned up. We like to hear about sustainability but at the same time we can’t afford it if it is costing us.”
Professor Hans B. (Teddy) Püttgen of Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University, a global authority on sustainable energy, shares those sentiments.
Having spent much of his career exploring the links between economic well-being and access to electricity, he finds it hypocritical for affluent, industrialised countries to call on the populations of the emerging world to abandon their pursuit of better living standards in the name of protecting the planet. That’s why he is leading a broad R&D effort to come up with a solution.
“In developing nations there is a fully justified aspiration for a better quality of life. And it is well recognised that an improved quality of life is tightly connected to better and more affordable access to electricity,” he explains. “What we’re trying to do is meet these ambitions without causing irreparable damage to the environment.”
Prof. Püttgen’s unconventional answer to the developing world’s energy deficit is taking shape on a Pacific island located some 8 kilometres South of Singapore.
Within the confines of a 6.4 hectare plot of land on Pulau Semakau, he and a team of researchers are overseeing the construction of a pioneering electricity production and distribution system based entirely on renewable sources of power.
The Reneweable Energy Integration Demonstrator – Singapore, or REIDS, will produce all of its electricity from locally-available alternative forms of energy – solar, wind, tidal and bio-energy from waste and algae. In doing so, it will also deploy a broad range of energy storage systems, which are essential wherever renewable power sources form a key part of the energy mix.
“South East Asia has broad access to renewable sources of energy,” he explains. “So it makes sense to see whether you can build an electricity grid – or system of small, inter-dependent micro-grids – that take into account and harness the idiosyncrasies of the local geography.”
In developing nations there is a fully justified aspiration for a better quality of life...What we’re trying to do is meet these ambitions without causing irreparable damage to the environment.
If successful, the project could be replicated to transform the lives of many of the planet’s poorest communities.
Most of the 1.3 billion of the world’s population that have no access to electricity live in South East Asia and Africa. One reason is a lack of funds.
But another is geography.
In these regions, there are few large urban centres. Instead, populations are scattered across vast and varied geographic zones encompassing deserts, mountain ranges and archipelagos.
In South East Asia only one person in six lives in cities. In Indonesia alone, 300 million people are spread across 17,000 islands.
Such topography makes it is virtually impossible to build centralised electricity transmission and distribution systems to serve rural communities.
Currently, many of the islanders in South East Asia get their electricity from dirty and expensive-to-run diesel-powered generators—distributing and shipping the fuel from central depots adds considerably to the cost.
“The main issue is not that these diesel generators pollute, necessarily, but that the cost of operating them is very high due to cumbersome and expensive supply chains,” Prof. Püttgen says.
That’s why micro-grids such as the one being developed by the REIDS team offer a potentially better solution. Just as cloud computing and the internet have replaced computer mainframes, micro-grids are gradually beginning to supplant vertically integrated electricity generation and distribution systems.
Such networks are in fact already mushrooming in the US and parts of Europe, proving particularly popular for industrial hubs, university campuses and newly built residential districts. But while these grids are also usually plugged into national networks, the REIDS system is completely off-grid. Essentially, it will be 100 per cent self-sufficient.
“Power networks in South East Asia and Africa require micro-grids that are ‘off-grid’ or independent of any central system. The system requires localised energy production and localised energy distribution because there is no central system back-up,” Prof. Püttgen explains.
Another distinguishing feature of the project – which is being funded by a private-public consortium that includes several large global energy companies and Singapore’s Economic Development Board – is that it is being designed according to the principles of the circular economy.
Under the circular approach, power production and distribution infrastructures are considered part of a much larger system, one that not only encompasses energy flows but also the inputs and outputs of all economic activity, be they raw materials, finished goods or waste products.
In other words, REIDS aims to make the most rational use of resources that might otherwise not be fully utilised or discarded.
We are building a seawater desalination and purification plant which will be fed using solar energy produced on the island.
“For example,” Prof. Püttgen explains, “Semakau Island is home to a large fish hatchery – small fish that feed on algae. Fish hatcheries need large quantities of fresh water, which in this case, is barged in from Singapore. So we are building a seawater desalination and purification plant which will be fed using solar energy produced on the island.”
The REIDS team is also exploring ways to use the waste from the hatchery tanks. When fish excrement is combined with hydrogen in a process requiring energy, for REIDS, it can produce synthetic fuel.
“This is the very essence of circular thinking – where everything has more than one use or becomes recyclable,” Prof. Püttgen says.
Perhaps the most technically-demanding aspect of the project involves tying the different renewable energy sources and energy storage technologies together to create a system of inter-connected off-grid, micro-grids.
Solar energy, for instance, requires different energy storage systems from biomass. At the same time, the grid must be sophisticated enough to switch from one energy source to another as weather conditions change.
The micro-grid must also be scalable as energy demand rises.
“If you start to provide more electricity to an island or an isolated village, experience shows the population will become more energy hungry. So the micro-grid needs to evolve to meet the future aspirations of the population,” Prof. Püttgen says.
“If you have to redesign it each time demand rises, it won’t work because it will be too expensive. So the microgrid needs to become ‘plug and play’ – you must be able to simply plug in more supply, plug in more loads, plug in more storage and it must be able to reconfigure itself along the way, similarly to lap-tops when external devices are connected.”
There are obstacles to the widespread adoption of these micro-grids, however. Cost and complexity are two. Incorporating different sources of power into a grid is tricky and expensive, requiring sophisticated control systems. Moreover, the regulatory framework in many of the regions where micro-grids would work is also inadequate. Micro-grids could also operate on direct current (DC), rather than the alternating current (AC) upon which almost all conventional grids are based. Making the switch from AC to DC will be not be cheap.
Still, Prof Püttgen believes the REIDS could prove a beacon to a developing world eager to provide its ever more energy hungry populations the energy they require to improve their quality of life.
“If we can prove that this vision is feasible – and I am sure we can – this is something we believe we can develop into solutions that can work in many different parts of the world.” And spare emerging economies finger wagging from the rich world.
