World Bank supports multi-gigawatt cross-border renewable energy project in Malaysia

The World Bank will invest in a huge 4GW, 5.12GWh solar-plus-storage complex in Malaysia, part of a pan-Southeast Asian power grid initiative.

The Southern Johor Renewable Energy Corridor (SJREC) will be a roughly 2,000-square-kilometre area dedicated to solar PV and energy storage capacity. The US$6 billion project is backed by the World Bank’s private investment arm, the Iternational Finance Corporation (IFC), alongside the state investment firm of Johor, Permodalan Darul Ta’zim (PDT), and Ditrolic Energy, a Malaysian integrated energy company.

The project is part of a number of larger schemes, chiefly the ASEAN Power Grid Initiative, a plan to integrate power grids and energy supply across Southeast Asian nations. In this vein, the SJREC will be part of the Johor–Singapore Special Economic Zone (JS-SEZ) “masterplan”, able to transmit clean energy to Singapore, which sits on Johor’s southern border.  

As a densely populated city state, Singapore relies heavily on energy imports and has made significant plans for cross-border renewables transmission, perhaps most notably the mammoth AA PowerLink project in Northern Australia, which aims to deploy almost 20GW of solar capacity when fully operational and supply power to Singapore via undersea cables.