22/09/2012 (Bernama) - The Sabah government is embarking on aggressive policies to promote large-scale use of renewable or green energy.

State Minister of Industrial Development Datuk Raymond Tan Shu Kiah said Sabah, with abundant availability of residues produced from palm oil and wood waste as well as strong potential for power generation and eco-products manufacturing, is keen to collaborate with the European Union-Malaysia Chamber of Commerce and Industry (EUMCCI) who are currently executing the EU co-funded project "Enhancing EU-Malaysia business dialogue and cooperation in the service sector".

"In Sabah, today's biomass production contributes 34 megawatts (MW) of electricity, and two of our biomass-based plants in Sandakan have been in existence for the last 10 years.

"That means we are quite ahead in terms of producing green energy. In fact, the two plants or operators that are already generating biomass electricity today acquired their technology from Europe, and this has started for quite some time.

"The thing is we are not doing big enough (to promote green energy through the use of biomass) and this is the biggest challenge for us, " he said in his remarks at the EU-Sabah Biomass Seminar on Renewable Energy Solutions for Sabah here today.

Tan said although the 34 MW of green energy produced in Sabah is small, it is the largest green energy production in the whole of Malaysia.

"Sabah is number one in this area. Looking at the potential of biomass that we have, with the technology coming from Europe, we can see the potential of Sabah going to produce a large amount of greeen energy.

"This is what we need to address, the emphasis is not only on the Federal government but also the state government in order to make this happen," he said.

He said Sabah is adopting an advanced green energy policy to reduce pollution.

"In Sabah, we promote Sabah as a green state. We don't have a coal plant, we rejected (the proposal to set up) a coal plant in the past. We use natural gas and we use waste that will be converted into energy.

"There is no other state in Malaysia that can challenge us, today you may see we don't have enough electricity but we have already planned. Give us until 2015 when there will be an injection of 700 MW of electricity from natural gas," he added.

Tan said Sabah is providing power to the people at a rate cheaper than any state in Malaysia.

On the EU-Sabah Biomass seminar, he said the state has identified several areas of cooperation with the EU, including in the production of higher value-added usage of biomass to provide future energy solutions and other downstream uses of biomass such as "waste and energy concepts'.