KUALA LUMPUR, Jan 4 — Sustainable Energy Development Authority (Seda) Malaysia has approved a total of cumulative net energy metering (NEM) programme quota of 108MW as of November 2019.

Seda Malaysia chairman Wong Kah Woh said the total approved quota portrayed a positive growth of 7.8 times increment, to compare with the previous three years, which only stands at a 13.86MW take-up rate.

"This success is largely contributed by the newly improved NEM 2.0 programme,” he said in a press release on Seda Malaysia’s Report Card 2019.

Meanwhile, the cumulative NEM approved in 2019 was the highest at 94.14MW in 2019 as compared to 11.53MW in 2018, 2.33MW in 2017 and 0.01MW in 2016.

He said effective early this year, the NEM programme had been updated by adopting the true NEM concept, that allows excess solar photovoltaic (PV) generated energy to be exported back to the grid on a "one-on-one” offset basis.

The move, he said, reduced the period for return of investment (ROI) to a mere 3 years, especially for commercial and industrial installations which also benefited from various government incentives.

"In Q4 2018, Seda Malaysia introduced the e-bidding system for renewable energy (RE) biogas and e-bidding was extended to small hydro in 2019 applications under the Feed-in Tariff (FiT) scheme to facilitate price discovery for RE generated from resources and promote healthier competition.

"The average effective rate for the 1st e-bidding for Biogas in Q4 2018 stands at RM0.4055/kWh and the 2nd e-bidding in July 2019 stands at RM0.4058/kWh. This price is way lower than the effective rate of RM0.4669/kWh offered prior to the introduction of e-bidding,” he said.

According to him, this translated into total savings on the RE Fund at RM683 million throughout the 21-year power purchase agreement period for the two tranches.

Wong said FiT had been successful in driving the RE agenda in Malaysia over the past eight years with 10, 269 FiT applications with RE capacity of 614.93MW installed for commercial operations as of November 2019.

Since May 2018, he added, 394 projects which did not meet the targeted milestones had been revoked, reinstating 211MW back to the quota and saving about RM2.6 billion in terms of energy payment for the whole power purchase agreement period.

For 2020, Wong said Seda as an agency under the Ministry of Energy, Science, Technology, Environment & Climate Change (MESTECC) would continue to facilitate, promote and develop a cohesive way forward for the growth of sustainable energy (SE) in the form of RE and energy efficiency in Malaysia. — Bernama