According to the plan of the Housing and Development Board, until the second quarter of 2020 more than 2400 blocks found in the administration of the board will benefit from green solar energy. This is possible due to the fact that HDB just picked the new winner for its solar leasing tender, the third of this kind. Thus, under the SolarNova programme, SembCorp Solar Singapore Pte. Ltd and Kurihara Kogyo Co., Ltd (Consortium) will make sure that the selected buildings will have green energy coming from solar photovoltaic panels. The majority of the buildings included in this program will residential blocks, more precisely a number of 848, but there will be some government sites as well that will get solar energy, about 27 of them.
It is well-known that HDB is looking for ways to offer clean energy to the households of Singapore and considering that the country is marking the Year of Climate Change for Singapore this year, we must say that the announcement of this project is more than welcome. According to the statement released by Dr. Cheong Koon Hean, the chief executive officer of HDB, there is visible and steady progress when it comes to spreading solar energy across the island. Out of the 10,000 blocks managed by HDB, approximately one quarter are enjoying solar energy at the moment and, in two years only, over half of them will be in the same situation, the same Dr. Hean added.
The SolarNova program made it possible for an affordable solar energy technology to be available even for the ones that didn’t have an elevated demand for solar PV. Due to this aspect, the government of Singapore had the change to adopt and implement such systems relatively quickly. Besides HDB, the Singapore Economic Development Board is also involved in making this program successful. The target set for 2020 is a national peak of 350 megawatts resulted solely out solar energy. At the moment, the progress made is significantly helping the country to reach its target in this sector. In December 2015, the first solar energy tender was awarded, with the purpose of creating a solar energy system with a capacity of 76 MWp that was going to serve 800 blocks of the HDB. Since then, the HDB is been making efforts to keep up the pace and make solar energy available to as many of its blocks as possible.
But, among all the players involved in making Singapore a cleaner country with the help of solar energy, HDB is, by far, one of the most important stakeholders. In the past years, this Board deposited a lot of efforts into increasing the available solar capacity of the island. Concerning the last tender, the third at the same time, it is planned to start in the third quarter of 2018 and marked as complete in the second quarter of 2020. Until then, the first and second SolarNova tenders are expected to finish installing their last solar systems on the designated sites, something that should be done until the third quarter of 2019.
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