BALI (Aug 24): Tenaga Nasional Bhd (TNB) plans to deploy an additional RM35 billion between 2025 to 2030 towards upgrading Malaysia’s power grid, to ensure the infrastructure does not become an obstacle in the nation’s energy transition (ET) endeavours.

During a session at the ASEAN Energy Business Forum (AEBF) 2023 on Thursday (Aug 24), TNB president and chief executive officer Datuk Baharin Din said this is on top of the national utility giant’s RM54 billion non-ET investment allocation for the grid over the same five-year period.

This means that TNB plans to invest a total of RM90 billion into Malaysia’s grid in the coming five-year period. This is nearly double the RM46 billion the group allocated for 2018-2024, Baharin highlighted, which comprises RM40 billion for non-ET and RM6 billion for ET.

Elaborating on the rationale behind TNB’s move to ramp up investment in the nation’s power infrastructure, Baharin cited the grid-related issues developed markets faced when they embarked on their respective RE journeys, a problem the utility group hopes to avoid.

“Taking cues from more mature markets, we see that the grid is potentially becoming a bottleneck that is delaying the scale-up of renewables.

“This can also be observed across the UK, and even the US and others as each country’s connection queues for wind and solar projects [to be plugged into their grids] ranges between a staggering 50GW (gigawatts) and 200GW,” Baharin said.

“Therefore, for Malaysia, we want to make sure that we build this grid infrastructure early so that it will not become a bottleneck in the adoption of more RE,” he added.