Thailand is a coastal tropical country exposed to all kinds of severe weather – increasingly so under climate change.

So, reliability of electricity supply is particularly important to its residents, who face interruptions when extreme weather events and other environmental changes do occur.

At the same time, Thailand aims to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2065.

Researchers from SEI US have stepped in to help with this planning in recent years, providing technical expertise under the USAID and Australia Mekong Safeguards Program, a jointly funded initiative between the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and Australia, and implemented by The Asia Foundation.

Under Mekong Safeguards, SEI supported the Energy Policy and Planning Office (EPPO) of Thailand’s Ministry of Energy to introduce best practices for carbon-neutral power planning. This activity culminated in the spring of 2024 with a presentation of findings to inform Thailand’s electricity planning practices, which includes the Thai Power Development Plan (PDP), which will soon be due for final approval by energy authorities.

SEI researchers Taylor Binnington, Jason Veysey, and Silvia Ulloa provided technical support to EPPO.

They trained EPPO technical staff in using LEAP and NEMO, two flagship SEI tools used for electricity planning, and ran scenarios using government data to find out what kind of planning decisions would yield the best outcomes, or fewest negative trade-offs for Thai residents. In addition to informing the PDP, which is a national planning document, the object was to teach EPPO and the Electricity Generating Authority of Thailand how to use and update the model that formed the basis of these scenarios and empower them to adapt it to their purposes.

 “EPPO’s team acquired the knowledge to plan the PDP in the future,” said Supit Kamklad, the Director of EPPO’s Power Policy Division. “[With] this training and these tools, we feel more confident that we have our own tools to adjust the PDP.”

The approach they took is called integrated resource and resilience planning (IRRP); instead of simply finding the least-expensive solution, as is conventional in electricity resource planning, they also incorporated social objectives and accounted for critical uncertainties that could affect energy requirements and the power grid. These uncertainties include availability of hydropower amid potential rainfall changes; national electricity demand projections; changes in consumption patterns; future fuel prices for power generation; the availability of transmission lines during extreme weather events; and capital costs of electricity generation infrastructure.

The SEI researchers worked with local agencies and stakeholders to learn more about their goals and what questions they wanted to explore, as well as how they measure successful planning outcomes. After running about 500 scenarios through the year 2065, the year of the net-zero target, the outcomes of these scenarios could point to “low-regret” decisions that bring Thailand closer to its goals, regardless of which way the uncertainties break.

“You’re planning not for an optimal set of decisions in a deterministic future, but a tolerable set of decisions in an uncertain future,” Binnington said.

Currently, natural gas fuels about 62% of Thailand’s electricity generation, with coal making up 20% and other sources like renewable energy, biofuels and hydroelectricity in the mix. The country also imports hydropower from neighboring Lao PDR, which is subject to volatility when rainfall patterns change.

What the scenario exercise indicates is that building out more and more diverse renewable energy infrastructure does not increase the cost of electricity or impede other electricity goals in the country, such as maintaining or improving power system reliability. The country also holds lots of potential for solar-powered energy and energy storage, and could benefit from increased transmission ties between different power planning regions to lower costs and better pool electricity resources.

Scenarios suggest that gas can remain a source of electricity in the long run even while meeting the country’s emissions goals, but its share of the power mix will need to be reduced significantly over time when combined with cleaner electricity sources, such as solar.

Perhaps more important than the results are EPPO’s newly acquired skills using LEAP and NEMO. They learned how to update some of the assumptions in the underlying model, how to run additional scenarios, and answer specific policy questions using the electricity model of Thailand, built by SEI for the IRRP analysis.

In response, EPPO’s Director-General called for the creation of a core team of technical staff to maintain and use the model going forward. SEI looks forward to continuing to contribute its expertise to EPPO’s long-term vision of consolidating various modelling initiatives into a single cross-cutting model that covers all energy sectors, unlocking new model capabilities and enabling EPPO to tackle additional energy-related questions and priorities.