Empowering Distributed Solar PV Energy For Malaysian Rural Housing: Towards Energy Security And Equitability Of Rural Communities

Abstract

This paper illustrates on how Malaysia’s development landscapes has been powered by cheap oil and gas making it dependent and addicted on using large amounts of fossil fuels. As a country that is primarily depended on fossil fuels for generating power supply, Malaysia needs to cogitate of long-term energy security due to fossil fuel depletion and peak oil issues. Loss of these resources could leadto thereduction of power generation capacitywhich will threaten the stability of the electricity supply in Malaysia. This could potentially influence in an increase in electricity costs which lead to a phase of power scarcity and load shedding for the country. With the risk of interrupted power supplies, rural households, especially those of low-income groups are particularly vulnerable to the post-effects of a power outage and an inequitable distribution to the people. Distributed generation of electricity by solar PVs diminishes the vulnerability of these households and can also offer an income to them by feeding the power supply to the national grid through Feed-in Tariff scheme. At the moment, the deployment of solar PV installations is still in the introductory stage in Malaysia, where roof-mounted PV panels are only available to commercial and urban residential buildings. This is due to the lack of a suitable renewable energy policy for rural householdsandthe high cost of the solar PV technology. This paper will put forward an analysis for incorporating solar photovoltaic on roofs of rural houses by identifying the energy consumption of these households and the extent to which PVs can alleviate electricity insecurity. The results present significant potential for distributed PV power generation in rural areas in Malaysia which shown a considerable amount of electricity needed to be harvested from roof-mounted solar PV for rural people in Malaysia