KUALA LUMPUR: Malaysia has 18 data centres with a total electricity demand of at least 800MW, and the number is expected to increase to 81 by 2035, says Deputy Energy Transition and Water Transformation Minister Akmal Nasrullah Mohd Nasir (pic).
He said the government is making efforts to ensure a sufficient supply of renewable energy (RE) for data centres in Malaysia without disrupting the national energy grid or increasing electricity tariffs.
While acknowledging that the data centre industry is energy-intensive, he said the government had introduced Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) to ensure that energy efficiency would be a priority in new data centres.
He said that the ministry recognised that access to green electricity supply is a prerequisite for the development of these data centres
“The government has committed to gradually and systematically increasing the renewable energy (RE) capacity mix in the national electricity supply,” he said in Dewan Rakyat on Monday (Feb 17).
He said the gradual increase of the green electricity composition in the country’s power supply is targeted to be 31% by 2025, 40% by 2035, and 70% by 2050.
He added that there would be arrangements where data centres can pay for easier and direct access to green electricity supply from RE generators.
Data centres and other corporate companies can pay for a system to access green electricity from RE generators through the use of utility grid network services, he said,
The payment, he said, will be used to cover part of the costs of strengthening the electricity supply system and grid network.
“This step is crucial to reduce the tariff increase for electricity users because the costs required for strengthening the grid network system to accommodate data centres are very high,” he said in Dewan Rakyat on Monday (Feb 17) in response to Datuk Ali Biju (PN-Saratok).
He asked about what steps are taken to meet renewable energy (RE) needs in data centre development and whether the supply of RE to data centres would disrupt the overall energy supply and cause an increase in electricity tariffs in the future.
