Assessment of the potential of renewables for Brunei Darussalam

This paper presents an assessment for the potential of renewable energy sources: solar, wind, ocean, biomass and hydroelectric for Brunei Darussalam. Long-term measured data of solar radiation, wind energy, ocean waves and rainfall have been used for this project. The assessment criteria for this project were to estimate the availability of renewables that could be harnessed. Despite the large potential for the development of renewables in Brunei Darussalam their exploitation remains insignificant. This study utilized renewable energy supply (RES) assessment software, HOMER (National Renewable Energy Laboratory, US) to compute the utilization of solar thermal energy for domestic and industrial water heating. The modelling results demonstrated that solar thermal energy can adequately and reliably meet the power demand for water heating in domestic as well as industrial applications and it can reduce by substantial amount of the non-renewable of energy consumption used for such applications. Monthly-mean-yearly-averaged amount of global, diffused and direct solar radiation are 18.90, 9.20 and 9.69 MJ m-2, respectively. The theoretical possible annual potential of wave, tidal and offshore wind power is 0.66 GW, 335 kW and 372 MW, respectively. Our preliminary estimates on biomass demonstrate that Brunei Darussalam has a potential to generate 13 x 105 kWh/year.