Dhana Raj Markandu shared his insights for the research and was quoted in Bernama
By: Sakina Mohamed, Shaza Al Muzayen, & Fahmi Abdul Aziz
A PROBLEM IN THE MAKING
Good quality solar PV panels last between 25 and 30 years.
The country may have started implementing solar into its energy landscape in 2011, but its usage of renewable energy (RE) sources existed long before that.
“Malaysia started utilising solar energy on a wider scale in the early 2000s. Smaller scale usage of solar existed prior to that, but mostly at an individual level,” says Dhana Raj Markandu, a senior analyst with Malaysia’s Institute of Strategic & International Studies (ISIS).
He has had over 20 years of engineering and management experience in the country’s energy sector.
The math indicates that the PV panels installed some 20 years ago would have now reached the end of their lifespan – but that is only a small part of the equation.
Malaysia is about to embark on a journey that will see it exponentially increase its usage of PV panels.
In August of 2023, the country launched the National Energy Transition Roadmap (NETR) in its bid to achieve net-zero emissions by 2025.
To meet that objective, coal, which makes up 26.4 percent of the current energy mix, is to be almost completely phased out by 2045.
Instead, the installed capacity of RE will be increased from 25 percent to 70 percent by 2050. The rest of the mix will be made up of natural gas.
“Solar will make up nearly 60 percent of the total power installed capacity and 40 percent of the total generation mix,” Malaysia’s Energy Transition and Water Transformation Minister Datuk Seri Fadillah Yusof tells Bernama in an interview.
To achieve this, Malaysia will need to install 59GW of solar PV panels by 2050, as stated by NETR.
