Solar energy is playing an increasingly important role worldwide, including in Thailand, by transforming the public's role from consumers to "prosumers" who can both produce and consume, and sell surplus electricity.
The Thailand Development Research Institute (TDRI) revealed that the driving factors for solar rooftops in Thailand are its location in the equatorial zone, which receives intense sunlight year-round, and the rapid decrease in production costs over the past 5 years. The participation of the private sector and the public in electricity generation helps increase production sources, making energy operations efficient and ensuring the public has access to energy at appropriate prices.
Many countries worldwide have measures to support selling electricity back to the grid, starting with Feed-in Tariff (FiT) to incentivize large-scale investment, and evolving to Net Billing and Net Metering as production costs decrease. Malaysia is one of the countries that has used Net Energy Metering (NEM) since 2016 to complement FiT and large-scale solar projects.
Thailand is moving towards the Energy 4.0 era with Net Metering/Net Billing measures for energy security. Dr. Siri Jirapongphan, Minister of Energy, announced the concept of promoting the "Public Solar Project" to encourage free electricity generation and sale, creating income for the public. This aligns with the PDP 2018 (2560-2579) plan, which is expected to be completed in 2561, marking good news to end the year for the solar energy sector.
Widespread solar rooftop systems nationwide, coupled with a developed central transmission system and centralized electricity generation/consumption data, will enable efficient energy management and significantly reduce the burden of building new power plants in the future.
