COMMENT | A conversation on renewable energy with Peter Yee

COMMENT | In an earlier article, I started looking into the challenges faced by the move towards greater sustainability in the Malaysian context, by leaning away from the individual and towards larger agents: in this case capital and the private sector.

Here, I shift the focus back to the individual again, but in this case, the subject of the interview is Peter Yee, Executive Director of AMG Asset Management Sdn Bhd, who kindly agreed to speak in greater detail on the subject of renewable energy (RE), in particular the business and investment aspects – where we are now, and where we are going.

An edited and condensed transcript of our interview follows below.

WT: Could you comment a bit more on how successful the Sustainable Energy Development Authority (Seda) has been in changing the situation on the ground with regard to RE, and whether this extends to other government departments or agencies?

PY: What I can say is that initially, it was mostly the engineering and technical people who saw an opportunity and were the first to jump into RE, in areas such as the solar business, biodiesel, biogas, biomass, and small hydro - specifically mini-hydro projects, with a less than 30-megawatt capacity).

A few companies from the pioneer batch are listed on Bursa Malaysia, and now public-listed and private companies are getting into this game because they realise this is the future.

WT: What kinds of RE projects can be operationalised in Malaysia?

PY: Besides solar, which is the easiest type of RE to operationalise technically, mini-hydro projects are probably the next most popular, but you can’t see them as much because they are all in the jungle.

Not wind – apparently some experts have studied the feasibility before and realised that even on our South China Sea coast, the wind is...