Singapore agrees to import ‘low carbon’ electricity from Cambodia

Singapore (VNA) – Singapore’s Energy Market Authority (EMA) said on March 16 that it has granted conditional approval for the local conglomerate Keppel Energy to import 1 gigawatt (GW) of electricity from Cambodia to the country.

The approval, the first to be awarded by EMA for large-scale electricity imports, marked a significant milestone in Singapore’s ambition to import up to 4GW of low-carbon electricity by 2035. The import is expected to commence post-2030.

The electricity from solar energy, hydropower, and potentially wind power, supported by battery energy storage systems or pumped storage hydropower, will be transmitted from Cambodia to Singapore via new subsea cables of more than 1,000km.

Singapore and Cambodia signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) on energy cooperation in October 2022.

The MOU and the conditional approval are important steps towards the vision of an ASEAN power grid after the implementation of the Laos-Thailand-Malaysia-Singapore Power Integration Project (LTMS-PIP) last year. As part of the project, Singapore will import up to 100 megawatts of renewable hydropower using existing interconnections, marking the first multilateral cross-border electricity trade involving four ASEAN countries./.