Malaysia’s electricity utility, Tenaga Nasional Bhd (TNB) pledges to connect data centers to the grid within one year after approval by the relevant authority, Bernama reports quoting the utility’s chief distribution network officer Ahmad Sazree Abd Aziz.
“… once it’s been approved by the ministry-chaired committee, we pledge to get data centers connected to the grid in one year’s time,” he said at an event in Singapore yesterday.
The commitment is dependent on three measures that TNB is pursuing to accommodate exponential demand from energy-hungry data centers; namely demand forecasting, network capacity planning and targeted infrastructure development. Ahmad emphasized that strong domestic transmission and distribution networks were crucial to ensuring that Malaysia could fully benefit from the Asean Power Grid (APG). The regional grid aims to strengthen regional electricity security, but, this can only come about if the domestic network especially transmission and distribution is strong enough.
TNB is also ensuring that its networks were modernised and digitalised to facilitate renewable energy interconnections at the distribution level.