What does the future of power grids look like?

This post was brought to you by TNB.

If you drive down an expressway, you will probably notice the huge transmission towers and long cables high above the streets. This is the National Grid operated by Tenaga Nasional Berhad (TNB) that brings electricity to your home.

With the government investing more and more into green energy and the environment, TNB is also thinking about how the grid can adapt to this new energy demand.

TNB recently launched the ‘Grid of The Future’ programme which aims to make the National Grid smarter and better suited for green energy. They envision a ‘smart grid’ that distributes excess energy to the users who need it.

The investment in this smart grid will cover many different aspects. Let’s go through TNB’s investment categories for this programme.

Refurbishment, grid connections, and micro grids

One of the most important things that TNB plans to do is refurbishment. For a grid that started back in 1964, renovating and maintaining the transmission towers and power lines is a must. 

What’s more, they plan to integrate more power plants, solar farms, and housing units into the network so that electricity can be stored and distributed when needed.

The future of Malaysia’s power grid could also include micro grids, which are local grids that are disconnected from the main grid that operate autonomously. This could be done in neighbourhoods or housing estates and will make them unaffected by outages.

Save energy with smart meters

TNB also wants Malaysians to save money and electricity with smart meters. These are devices that measure the amount of energy used in your household every half an hour. You can then read the measurements remotely through the myTNB Portal and understand your power usage in a more meaningful way.

There will be a total of 1.8 million smart meters installed in Malaysia by the end of the year, and TNB plans to provide 9.1 million free smart meters to all customers by 2027.

Knowing how much power your household consumes at certain times can be useful as you can adjust your usage habits accordingly.

The smart grid can heal itself

The smartest thing about the smart grid is its self-healing. Along with the smart meters, there will be sensors along the grid as well that will be used by the engineers to identify faults remotely.

Once everything is integrated, power can be rerouted remotely and blackouts can be resolved in a matter of minutes. An engineer from another state could detect a problem, press a button, and bypass the problem area remotely. 

The future of smart grids

In the next two years, TNB is planning to invest RM27 billion in smart grid technologies and is expecting to make RM20 billion in GDP impact while creating 300,000 jobs in the process.

This money will be used to fund the technologies mentioned in this article, as well as help with the integration of renewable energy.

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