Apex Securities said the introduction of Atap was in line with the broader policy shift that balances consumer incentives with grid cost recovery.
PETALING JAYA: The rollout of the Solar Accelerated Transition Action Programme (Atap), which replaces the Net Energy Metering (NEM) scheme, offers continuity and renewed impetus for rooftop solar adoption, say analysts.
However, Apex Securities said that while Atap is “structurally more sustainable, it’s economically less lucrative than NEM”.
The government will launch Atap in December 2025, following the expiry of the NEM scheme in June.
Atap will be open to all Tenaga Nasional Bhd
customers, both domestic and non-domestic, including existing NEM and the self-consumption (SelCo) programme participants.
“Even so, it should help revive rooftop solar demand, particularly among high-consumption households, small and medium enterprises, and larger commercial and industrial (C&I) users, as it allows larger system sizes compared to the NEM net offset virtual aggregation sub-programme,” Apex Securities said in a report.
Overall, the research house said the introduction of Atap was in line with the broader policy shift that balances consumer incentives with grid cost recovery.
Unlike the previous NEM framework’s one-to-one retail tariff offsets, Solar Atap operates a market-based mechanism.
Under this approach, offsets are calculated based on the system marginal price (SMP), the wholesale clearing price that reflects the cost of the last dispatched power plant.
For context, SMP in 2025 traded at between 20 and 30 sen per kilowatt-hour, which was well below the prevailing retail tariffs, noted analysts.
Phillip Capital Research said the Atap programme is expected to revive interest in the residential segment, given that the SelCo model has struggled to address the mismatch between solar generation, which peaks during daytime hours, and residential consumption, which typically rises after 6pm.
“For C&I users, Solar Atap introduces better flexibility, giving them the option to participate directly or adopt SelCo with battery energy storage systems, depending on their specific energy usage patterns.”
According to the research house, its estimates show that Solar Atap offers 44% lower savings compared to the earlier NEM Rakyat scheme.
“For a household with a 10-kilowatt-peak rooftop solar system and an average monthly electricity bill of RM1,000. Atap would reduce the monthly bill to RM700 after accounting for solar savings.
“In comparison with NEM Rakyat, the same household would have seen the bill fall further to RM467.”
It explained the disparity was due to the reduced offset rate under the new programme, effectively lengthening the payback period.
Meanwhile, Apex Securities expects job flows for the large-scale solar five plus (LSS5+) programme to begin in the first half of financial year 2026, going by the typical timeline of achieving financial closure within six months of developer appointment.
It estimates that the combined four gigawatts of capacity awarded under the LSS5 and LSS5+ auction cycles would translate to around RM12bil to RM14bil of solar engineering, procurement, construction, and commissioning (EPCC) opportunities.
However, considering the prospect of a modest recovery in global solar module prices, supported by China’s anti-involution measures to address oversupply, Apex Securities believes the winning bidders will likely adopt a cautious stance and time their execution in order to secure competitive costs.
“Within this space, we expect the largest beneficiaries to be Solarvest Holdings Bhd and Samaiden Group Bhd, given their significant exposure to utility-scale solar projects and strong financial positions, which place them in a favourable position to capture a larger share of the upcoming EPCC job flows.”
The research house’s channel checks indicated that solar module prices have recently risen by about 10%, and this implies near-term cost pressure for local solar EPCC contractors, particularly for fixed-price contracts where additional costs cannot be passed through.
This in turn poses execution risks for both contractors and project developers.
