Shortsighted energy plan
Play
Officials have just announced that two tourist islands off Surat Thani will be supplied with additional electric power from the mainland. Estimated cost (which will surely go up) is Bt4.2 billion. And that's just for infrastructure. It doesn't account fo
The price of solar panels is coming down considerably (from over US$1/watt six months ago, to around 60 cents/watt now) while efficiency is going up. Better than spending Bt4.2 billion on some archaic fossil-fuel set-up on the mainland, and running kilometres of cables to the two islands, solar arrays would be smarter. Just the loss in efficiency alone, via cables, is considerable. Solar is the wave of the future, but Thai planners are two decades behind the eight ball.
There could have been a choice of options for islanders: Would they rather pay billions of baht, plus ever-increasing costs for electricity, or have a clean source of power that would pay for itself in several years, using a free energy source? Yet it’s doubtful the islanders were given any options. There was just a proclamation from a state-owned corporation on the mainland, and all the residents had no choice but to silently fall into line.
Ken Albertsen
Chiang Rai
