Trip to Solar Farm and Palm Oil Mill

On 7^th December, I am fortunate enough to be invited to attend a site visit to a solar farm in Sepang and also a palm oil mill in Labu which produces biomass and also a test bed for biogas.

I have seen quite a number of the solar farms from the internet and also television but I have never actually visited the actual one here in Malaysia. Even though I knew that solar farm produces electric through the conversion of sunlight into electric, I am still having some perceptions for example it must be hot at the solar farm with so many mirror-like solar panel and also the place must be noisy with all the equipment and machinery in place.

We gathered at KL Sentral as instructed by Sustainable Energy Development Authority (SEDA) at 8.30am before we depart to our first stop, which was the solar farm at Sepang. The journey to the solar farm was pleasant with the screening of “The Inconvenient Truth” documentary in the bus as a bonus. Such a nostalgic feeling listening to the lecture of Mr. Al Gore as it was my first ever assignment where I have to summarize the documentary when I was still studying in the university. Thanks to my lecturer, I got exposed to the climate change and global warming through this documentary. Not to forget, kudos to the SEDA’s staffs for screening this documentary in order to instill the knowledge of climate change to the others in the bus.

After an hour of a rather pleasant journey, finally we have arrived at our first stop. This solar farm is owned by Fortune 11 Sdn Bhd which is partly own by SunEdison . The size of this plant is 36 acres in an oil palm plantation site under lease from Malaysia Airports (Sepang) Sdn Bhd. The project area is in the Sepang District of Selangor State in Malaysia under the FiT scheme of the Malaysian FiT Programme 2011.

The installed capacity for this plant is 5MW (can power up to 2000 houses) and also the solar photovoltaic modules are mounted on a tracker system that tracks the movement of the sun from sunrise to sunset so as to maximize the generation from the solar cells.  Please see figure 1 for better understanding of the tracker system.

Figure 1: Solar tracker system, where the solar photovoltaic (PV) modules will track the movement of the sunlight of a day and will adjust its angle according to the direction of the sunlight.

What is a solar photovoltaic (PV) system?

Photovoltaic (PV) literally means “light” and “electric.” Photovoltaic technologies are used to generate solar electricity by using solar cells packaged in photovoltaic modules.

The most important components of a PV cell are the two layers of semiconductor material. When sunlight strikes the PV cell, the solar energy excites electrons that generate an electric voltage and current. Extremely thin wires running along the top layer of the PV cell carry these electrons to an electrical circuit.

A photovoltaic module is made of an assembly of photovoltaic cells wired in series to produce a desired voltage and current. The PV Cells are encapsulated within glass and/or plastic to provide protection from the weather. Photovoltaic modules are connected together to form an array. The array is connected to an inverter which converts the Direct Current (DC) of the PV modules to Alternating Current (AC). Please see figure 2 for better understanding.

Figure 2: A typical solar PV system. 

Source: http://www.solar-green-wind.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/photovoltaic_solar_panels_installers-3576.jpg

As you can see, more solar irradiance means more energy can be produced through the solar PV system. Therefore, with the installation of the tracker system, this project is able to harvest a more constant solar power compared to other systems. Since the launching, this project has generated more than 100 working opportunities for the workers during construction and also 20 direct employments during operations and maintenance stage.  Its annual generation of about 7615 MWhr of green energy every year has saved about 5254350kg of carbon dioxide gas per year.

After spending an hour on site, we moved to our second destination in Labu, which is an oil palm mill that focusing on the development of the biomass and also biogas technology.

 The MPOB Palm Oil Mill Technology Center (POMTEC) was been built in Labu, Negri Sembilan using a grant provided by the Government to spearhead research on all aspects palm oil milling technology. The objectives of the mill is

• to provide a test pad for research and development of the cutting-edge technologies required for tomorrow’s palm oil mill.

• to demonstrate the application of new concepts and techniques in palm oil mills for coping with problems and challenges.

• to provide training facilities for palm oil mill personnel on all aspects of new and up-to-date palm oil milling technology.

POMTEC has carried various testing projects within the plant in order to achieve the objectives mentioned above for example the trash removal, continuous sterilisation, plant wide automation, new boiler technology, phenolic pilot plant, empty fruit bunch processing plant and also new effluent treatment technology.

With the new effluent treatment technology in place, the effluent will be sent to the anaerobic tank digester to facilitate the taping of the biogas for electrical power generation. Moreover, the already installed tertiary treatment system would constitute a radically new pond-less effluent treatment system for palm oil mills with a significantly reduced retention time compared to the traditional ponding system.  In conclusion, better environmental quality assurance and also the generation of biogas to produce electric.

And we got the chance to climb up the digester tank and saw this view…

Imagine if this green biogas technology can be utilized in all oil palm mills, we will not need those effluent ponds for the betterment of the environment.

The trip ended at 6pm on the same day. I would like to thank SEDA for organizing this trip as it is indeed an eye-opening trip for all. Thank you very much.