Singapore’s Sembcorp partners Bloom on low-carbon power

Singapore energy firm Sembcorp has signed a deal with US-based solid oxide fuel cell manufacturer Bloom Energy to produce low-carbon electricity.

Sembcorp will potentially use Bloom's solid oxide fuel cell technology called Energy Server, together with third-party carbon capture technology, to produce low-carbon power.

Solid oxide fuel cells run on fuels like natural gas and biomethane to produce electricity and are considered to be highly efficient. The Energy Server system can potentially deliver green energy in future by using low-carbon feedstock, said the firms.

The companies did not provide a timeline for the development of this system. Natural gas is currently used to produce 95pc of Singapore's electricity.

The partnership is in line with Singapore's launch of the Green Data Centre Roadmap, under which one of the targets is to develop sustainable data centres with more use of green energy. The low-carbon electricity produced by Sembcorp and Bloom can be used to power these data centres. The Energy Servers can also be used as a parallel grid system for utilities to manage grid constraints, according to the firms.

Sembcorp currently has an energy portfolio totalling 21.2GW, which includes 14.4GW of renewable energy capacity, across 10 countries.

Singapore aims to import up to 4GW of low-carbon electricity by 2035. It has made progress on progress on this in the past few months by signing cross-border power deals with countries such as Vietnam, Indonesia and Cambodia.

But the country still needs to invest in submarine cables and upgrade its power grid, an obstacle that the rest of southeast Asia is also facing. Grid capacity development across the region has made slow progress because of institutional barriers and the lack of private-sector investment.

By Prethika Nair