FITs cause run on PV in Malaysia
After only a few hours, the budget for solar feed-in tariffs in Malaysia had been used up. By 2020, more than a gigawatt of PV is to be installed in the country.
On December 1, Malaysia rolled out a new policy to promote renewables, and it led to a run on the program. Within just a few hours, 209 systems had applied for feed-in tariffs at the e-FIT online registration service, thereby completely consuming the budget. "When the e-FIT system went live, the run on our servers was greater than during the stress tests we previously conducted," explains Pn Badriyah Abdul Malek, who handles applications for feed-in tariffs at the Sustainable Energy Development Authority (SEDA) in Putrajaya, Malaysia.
At 201 applications, photovoltaics made up the biggest piece of the pie by far. The maximum volume of commercial PV projects that Kuala Lumpur will be supporting from 2012 to 2014 – 144 megawatts – was already taken after just two hours. At that time, only nine megawatts was still available for private PV projects. The demand shows that Malaysia is finally ready for solar power. Up to now, "Malaysia has hardly had any solar projects," explains Konrad Bauer of Germany's Energy Agency (Dena), even though "global insulation is very high." The government currently has a goal of more than three gigawatts of renewable capacity by 2020, a third of which is to be photovoltaics. SEDA is currently reviewing the applications and plans to take approximately 2 weeks for review.
Because of the great demand, the Malaysian government is considering raising the ceiling, but customers would have to be willing to accept one-percent higher retail rates in return. At present, a surcharge of one percent is tacked onto the retail rate to cover the cost of renewables in Malaysia. Overall, the government expects customers to pay some 80 million dollars (roughly 60.5 million euros) up to the end of 2012 for renewable power. SEDA says it will keep an eye on market prices for renewable power and adjust feed-in tariffs accordingly.
The new feed-in tariffs adopted on April 28 replace the former Small Renewable Energy Program (SREP). The new policy does not apply on Borneo, which has its own power supply system and other policies. Guaranteed for 21 years, the rates range from 0.299 euros per kilowatt-hour for systems with a capacity of up to four kilowatts to 0.207 euros for systems from 10 to 30 megawatts. "There is also a bonus for building-integrated PV and domestic content," Bauer says, adding that "Malaysia is the fifth largest producer of solar panels, but the firms are all foreign. Low wage costs and tax incentives have attracted foreign firms to Malaysia."(Sven Ullrich / Craig Morris)
