Carbon Emission Pinch Analysis for Regional Planning of Rural Electrification

Rural electrification is an ongoing issue in Sarawak, a state in East Malaysia. About 7 % of Sarawak's rural population is still inaccessible to electricity. However, adding more fossil fuel resources to electrify Sarawak fully will result in increased carbon emissions. This will contradict Malaysia's plans to reduce 45 % of carbon dioxide emission from 2010 levels by 2030. Therefore, low carbon energy resources must be deployed to meet rising energy demands in rural areas. Before deploying these energy resources, it is necessary to determine minimum targets to achieve carbon emission reductions. This can be planned via carbon emission pinch analysis (CEPA). Thus, this study presents a regional planning model built upon CEPA that would assist in optimising the energy generation planning and the technical selection of energy generation technologies. This study will also analyse the usage of low carbon energy resources considering the carbon emission reduction targets to meet electrical demands in rural communities. An energy planning case study for a region in Malaysia, known as Sarawak, is solved to illustrate the carbon emission pinch analysis method. The results from the case study show that the consumption of carbon-intensive resources reduces when the additional capacity for new low carbon resources is allowed in the model. As a result, the consumption of coal, natural gas and diesel in 2040 has reduced to 4,449,151 MWh, 24, 673,913 MWh and 480,074 MWh, respectively, compared to the consumption in 2020.