The Malaysian Government has set an ambitious target to achieve a higher penetration of Renewable Energy (RE) in the Malaysian energy mix. To date, Malaysia has approximately 2% of its energy coming from RE generation sources compared to the total generation mix and targets achieving 20% penetration by 2025. The current energy mix for Malaysia power generation is mainly provided by natural gas and coal. The discussion will cover the traditional sources of generation including natural gas, coal and big hydro stations. In addition, the paper will cover in depth the potential of RE in the country, challenges, and opportunities in this sector. This study can give an initial evaluation of the Malaysian energy industry, especially for RE and can initiate further research and development in this area in order to support the Government target to achieve RE target of 20% by 2025.

The overhead transmission line system is one of the methods of transmitting electrical energy at a high voltage from one point to another, especially over long distances. The demand for electrical energy is increasing due to the increase in the world population, the evolution of transport technology, and economic expansion, thereby resulting in overloading to the overhead line (OHL) system. In building new infrastructure for transmission lines, several issues need to be addressed. Thus, optimizing existing power by increasing the ampacity of power line is a practical solution to meet energy demand issues. During long-term operation, the temperature of OHL conductors may increase beyond their rated temperature, which is typically 75 °C for conventional conductors such as aluminum-conductor steel-reinforced cable. This condition is defined as thermal stress, which results in lower sag vertical clearance, tensile loss, elongation and creep, and reduced life span of the conductors. This condition must be avoided to ensure that the line is not permanently elongated, which can disrupt the vertical ground clearance, and to expand the conductor’s life. Other factors such as lightning, wildfire, aging, and degradation of the conductor can also cause thermal stress on the conductors and have thermal effects on the conductor’s performance. Therefore, unwanted thermal stress needs to be examined and identified by monitoring the thermal effect and behavior of the lines. This paper presents the state of the art in monitoring technologies that can be used to identify thermal stress on OHL conductors, including the issues and challenges in monitoring. At the end of this paper, a few suggestions are included to address the occurrence and assessment of thermal stress in lines. Ultimately, this work may provide complete information to researchers and maintenance engineers to enable them to make better decisions on condition monitoring, operation, and maintenance of the system.

Improper placement of distributed generation (DG) units in power systems would not only lead to an increased power loss, but could also jeopardise the system operation. To avert these scenarios and tackle this optimisation problem, this study proposes an effective method to guide electric utility distribution companies (DISCOs) in determining the optimal size and best locations of DG sources on their power systems. The approach, taking into account the system constraints, maximises the system loading margin as well as the profit of the DISCO over the planning period. These objective functions are fuzzified into a single multi-objective function, and subsequently solved using genetic algorithm (GA). In the GA, a fuzzy controller is used to dynamically adjust the crossover and mutation rates to maintain the proper population diversity (PD) during GA's operation. This effectively overcomes the premature convergence problem of the simple genetic algorithm (SGA). The results obtained on IEEE 6-bus and 30-bus test systems with the proposed method are evaluated with the simulation results of the classical grid search algorithm, which confirm its robustness and accuracy. This study also demonstrates DG's economic viability relative to upgrading substation and feeder facilities, when the incremental cost of serving additional load is considered.