An artist rendering of the East Zone in SIT's upcoming Punggol campus.

22 March 2022 – Singapore Institute of Technology (SIT) announced today an additional investment of up to S$8 million by SP Group (SP) to enhance the capabilities of the earlier planned microgrid at SIT’s future Punggol campus, more than doubling SP’s investment first announced in 2017. The microgrid will be the largest private microgrid in Singapore when it is completed in 2024, and the first Multi-Energy Microgrid (MEMG) to be constructed on a university campus in Southeast Asia.

SP, a leading utilities group in the Asia Pacific that focuses on low-carbon, smart energy solutions, will design, build and operate the MEMG to fully support SIT's energy demands according to electricity generation capacity. It will supply more than 2000 MWh of electricity annually from photovoltaic solar panels, equating to 4% of the total energy needs of the campus. The microgrid is customised for Singapore’s tropical climate and will provide a sandbox environment to testbed Singapore’s future energy system while minimising risks of disruptions to operations. It will be able to integrate electricity, thermal and renewable sources of energy into a unified smart energy network, to support applied learning, research and experimentation in a real-world environment.

With the new investment, the microgrid will be enhanced to integrate various low-carbon solutions including building-integrated photovoltaics and distributed energy storage systems. SIT and SP will also design a system that can further island buildings and certain floors from the national grid. The enhanced microgrid will also boast a hybrid AC (Alternating Current)/DC (Direct Current) building level grid and will allow for different building management systems to be tested and deployed.

With the enhanced functionality, the campus’ MEMG will be a microcosm of Singapore’s future energy system, supporting:

• technology and policy research in support of an increasingly distributed national grid with both AC/DC sub-systems, and various forms of distributed grid architecture and microgrid controllers to optimise for cost, resilience and carbon;
• next-generation power electronics to facilitate increasing bidirectional grid power flows; and
• innovative energy services to cater to the needs of different consumer segments.

Professor Chua Kee Chaing, SIT President, shared, “We are pleased that our collaboration with SP Group over the past few years has matured to a stage where we can explore new ground in areas that will help Singapore address issues of energy resilience and energy management. This augurs well for the country as we approach a future that is increasingly going to rely on sustainable and green sources of energy.”

As a university of applied learning, SIT places priority on authentic learning, bringing real problems into the classroom. The MEMG takes this idea further, bringing the classroom out into the world. The microgrid will be a platform for interdisciplinary research in emerging energy technologies, cyber security, sustainable infrastructure, and green building designs involving students from Engineering and Infocomm Technology. For industry, the microgrid provides a high-fidelity system to experiment, innovate and develop the technologies and policies that would support the energy transition.