MBIPV Project Brief

19. The National Electricity Board (now Tenaga Nasional Berhad) initiated the use of PV system forrural electrification in the early 1980s. The first of these was the installation of stand-alone PVsystems for 37 houses in Langkawi, followed by other projects in Tembeling (seventy houses)and Pulau Sibu (fifty houses). Later in the 1990s two rural electrification pilot projects, of 10kWp and 100 kWp respectively were implemented in Sabah with the support from the NewEnergy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO) of Japan. In the late1990s the Ministry of Rural Development has undertaken the provision of photovoltaic systemfor rural electrification. It is estimated that the total capacity for stand-alone systems in Malaysia,including Sabah and Sarawak, in the year 2000 was 1.5 MWp, however, some of the installationshave been dismantled.Fig. 1: Solar Irradiance Map of Malaysia20. The favorable environment for rural PV application in Malaysia has prompted the giant PVmanufacturer BP Solar (49% ownership) together with Projass Sdn Bhd (51% ownership) to setup PV module fabrication plant in this country. The plant, which was launched in April 2000, iscapable of producing 5 MWp per year when operating at full capacity. In the past 3 years, theannual production of the plant was approximately 500 kWp.21. Only recently, Malaysia demonstrated several pilot grid-connected solar PV technologies. TheMalaysia Electricity Supply Industry Trust Account (MESITA), Ministry of Science, Technologyand the Environment (MOSTE) and Tenaga Nasional Berhad (TNB) mainly funded theseinstallations. The projects employed mainly add-on PV technology and did not specifically applyimproved PV applications such as BIPV. The target of these projects was mainly to showcase thegrid-connection of PV systems rather than the reduction of the PV system cost. Since the onset ofgrid-connected PV applications in the country in 1998, an annual installed capacity of about 908