Yahoo! Finance
Summary
Singapore has gone from a mudflat swamp with fishing villages to an island metropolis boasting one of the world’s highest incomes and population densities—in a little more than 150 years. It’s going to have to go through a different kind of transformation in less than 30 years, if it’s to meet its newly set goal of reaching net-zero emissions by 2050.
While Singapore’s gameplan has its critics, it’s made progress in several pockets that many small-island countries can learn from. Singapore has deployed and scaled up some of the technologies that will prove crucial for any island country’s survival in the 21st century. Last month, we got to tour a number of them.
Five floors below the luxury shops at Marina Bay Sands, SP Group runs a giant cooler. It provides cooling to dozens of skyscrapers and developments in the vicinity, saving a huge amount of premium space in each building that would otherwise be taken by air conditioning equipment.
Crucially, the bigger a cooling network, the more energy efficient it can be. In one test, when SP Group connected an existing building with its own cooling system, its energy use dropped 40%, said Foo Yang Kwang, SP Group’s chief engineer of sustainable energy solutions.
The plant can also act like a huge ice battery. During off-peak hours, such as at night, the plant has vast stores of water that can be cooled to near freezing temperatures. Then in the day, it can tamp down electricity consumption by using the freezing waters to supply the cooling network.
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