SEPTEMBER 17 — Malaysia closed 2025 with renewable energy accounting for 31 per cent of its installed electricity generation capacity, meeting the target set under the Malaysia Renewable Energy Roadmap on schedule.

The government has since set a target of 32 per cent for the end of this year, then 35 per cent by 2030, 40 per cent by 2035 and 70 per cent by 2050 under the National Energy Transition Roadmap, with coal to be retired from the system by 2044.

Since that roadmap was launched in July 2023, roughly 5.5 gigawatts of new renewable capacity has been approved and at least RM25 billion in investment attracted.

Judged by targets and money committed, Malaysia is doing well.

Judged by how the system actually delivers, three things need saying.

First, the ambition is not the problem.

Malaysia is not short of energy policy.

The Feed-in Tariff, Net Energy Metering, Large Scale Solar, the Corporate Green Power Programme, the Green Electricity Tariff, the National Energy Policy, the transition roadmap and the New Industrial Master Plan all point in the same direction.

Anyone arguing that the country lacks commitment to renewable energy is arguing against the record.

But installed capacity is the easiest quantity in an energy transition to count, and meeting a capacity target is largely a procurement achievement.

It says nothing about how long a project waited for approval, how much electricity it went on to generate, or whether the next one will move any faster.

Second, delivery is scattered across too many hands.

Consider who governs renewable energy in this country.

The Ministry of Energy Transition and Water Transformation leads policy and national coordination.

The Sustainable Energy Development Authority runs promotion instruments such as the Feed-in Tariff and Net Energy Metering.

The Energy Commission regulates and licenses electricity supply and administers Large Scale Solar.

Tenaga Nasional Berhad plans and operates the grid every project must eventually join.

The Ministry of Economy owns much of the transition and investment agenda, the Department of Environment handles environmental approvals, and state governments control the land.

Each mandate is defensible on its own terms.

Together they behave bagai enau dalam belukar, melepaskan pucuk masing-masing, like the enau palm in the thicket, each shoot pushing up on its own.

Every institution can be doing its own work properly while the system as a whole fails to move together, because no one is answerable for the sequence rather than the step.

The federal structure sharpens this.

National targets are set at the federal level, but the land a solar farm sits on, the planning permission it needs and the development priorities it must fit are matters of state authority.

Sarawak operates under its own electricity supply ordinance, so the federal schemes that drive solar uptake in the peninsula do not apply there, and the state has built its own pathway around hydropower, hydrogen and low-carbon industry.

Penang has moved in another direction, investing in sustainability monitoring and planning frameworks.

This variation is constitutional and not a defect to be abolished.

It does mean the national percentage is an aggregate of several quite different systems, with no standing forum in which federal and state planners work through sequencing before a project reaches the counter.

Two consequences follow.

Investors read the landscape accurately, and studies of renewable energy financing across Asia consistently rank approval complexity, shifting implementation mechanisms and grid access uncertainty above the availability of capital as barriers.

A developer can price a tariff and a technology risk.

What cannot be priced is not knowing how many counters a project must pass and how long each will hold it.

The second consequence is quieter.

Reporting is spread across institutions using different systems, cycles and definitions, so we can state our capacity share with confidence but struggle to answer the questions governance needs answered: how much of that capacity generated electricity last year, how long approvals took, and which state is holding things up.

Third, the fix is coordination rather than restructuring.

It does not call for another roadmap or a reorganisation of agencies.

Three measures would do it.

One, a standing national coordination platform for renewable energy, chaired at ministerial level and empowered to sequence decisions across agencies rather than merely convene them.

Two, a formal federal-state coordination unit, so that land, planning and approval questions are settled alongside national targets rather than after them.

Three, one shared data and monitoring platform built on common definitions and published openly, covering approvals, project timelines and actual generation, not capacity alone.

None of these requires any institution to surrender its mandate, and that is precisely their appeal.

Coordination reform is the cheapest energy policy available.

It adds no capacity, buys no equipment and subsidises no tariff.

It only reduces the friction between the parts we already have.

The public is not a bystander in any of this.

Households and businesses with suitable roofs can take up Net Energy Metering and self-consumption solar, which moves part of the transition into thousands of small decisions no agency has to sequence.

Commercial and industrial users can subscribe to the Green Electricity Tariff and ask their suppliers where their electricity actually comes from, because demand signals travel through utilities faster than through policy documents.

Residents can follow what their state assemblies and local councils decide on land use, planning approvals and rooftop installation rules, since those are the counters at which projects stall.

And all of us can ask, publicly and repeatedly, for the numbers to be published.

Institutions coordinate faster when someone outside is keeping score.

The arithmetic ahead is unforgiving.

Moving from 31 per cent to 70 per cent while retiring coal by 2044 means each increment gets harder, as the good sites are taken, the grid grows more constrained and every additional actor adds to the coordination burden.

Malaysia has shown it can set energy policy and meet its targets.

The harder and far less celebrated task is building the institutional machinery that turns a target into a working system.

* Megat Amirul Saifulnizam Megat Kamarul Bahrin is Senior Manager at the Malaysia Productivity Corporation and a Master of Public Policy candidate at the International Institute of Public Policy and Management, Universiti Malaya. Azizi Abu Bakar is a Research Officer at the Sustainable Development Centre, Universiti Malaya, and Data Steward for Universiti Malaya Open Science.

** This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of Malay Mail.