Singapore Awards 670 MW Gas Unit as EMA Projects Decade of Accelerating Power Demand
EMA forecasts 2.4% to 4.8% annual demand growth through the mid-2030s, with peak load potentially hitting 11.4 GW by 2031.
Singapore's Energy Market Authority has awarded Tuas Power Generation the right to build, own, and operate a 670-megawatt combined cycle gas turbine unit, with commercial operations targeted for December 2031 — a timeline that lines up almost exactly with the authority's own demand projections for the decade ahead.3
The EMA simultaneously published a forecast showing Singapore's electricity demand growing at between 2.4% and 4.8% annually over the next ten years. The range is wide, but the lower bound alone implies significant new generation capacity. By 2031, the authority projects peak electricity demand to land between 9.6 GW and 11.4 GW — a spread of nearly two gigawatts that reflects genuine uncertainty about how fast data centre and industrial load will materialise.3
The Tuas Power unit, at 670 MW, addresses only a portion of that potential gap. EMA said the installed capacity could meet the electricity demand of roughly 1.2 million four-room HDB households annually, a framing that makes the project sound substantial in residential terms but sidesteps the commercial and industrial load picture entirely.3
Data centres are driving much of the regional calculus. Wood Mackenzie estimates Southeast Asian data centre power demand will quadruple from 2.6 GW to 10.7 GW between 2025 and 2035, reaching 3% to 4% of regional peak demand by mid-decade, up from around 1% now. Singapore, as the region's most mature financial and connectivity hub, sits at the front of that demand curve.2
The broader regional financing picture adds pressure. Bain & Company and Standard Chartered's 2026 Southeast Asia Green Economy Report projected that meeting the surge in electricity demand across the region would require investments exceeding $200 billion, with more than half of that flowing into data centres. But the same report found that only around 60% of the $540 billion in announced green investments across power and EV supply chains is considered likely to proceed under current conditions.1
Renewable energy projects across Vietnam, Thailand, and Indonesia have seen 50% to 60% cancellation rates over the past five years, blamed on regulatory uncertainty, permitting bottlenecks, and limited grid capacity, the report noted. Annual grid investment shortfalls across the region are estimated at $18 billion by 2035.1
None of those headwinds apply with the same force to Singapore, which operates a more tightly regulated market with EMA setting explicit capacity objectives. Gas-fired generation remains the backbone of the island's power mix, and a CCGT unit secured through a competitive award process carries a different risk profile than a merchant renewable project in a frontier market. Still, the choice of gas — rather than nuclear, hydrogen, or additional solar imports — reflects where Singapore's planners see firmness of supply sitting for the next decade.3
JKM, the Asian LNG benchmark, was quoted at $22.61/MMBtu on Friday (2026-08-21), giving potential buyers of Singaporean LNG-fired power a rough sense of the fuel cost environment the new unit will face when it enters service. NYMEX Henry Hub front-month was trading at $2.78/MMBtu on Friday (2026-08-21), but that spread is only relevant to Singapore through the Atlantic LNG arbitrage and Pacific Basin regas capacity — the local reference point for contracted supply will be closer to JKM than to US domestic prices.3
The 2.4%-to-4.8% demand growth range deserves scrutiny. At the low end, Singapore's growth trajectory would be roughly in line with long-run Southeast Asian averages. At the top end, it would imply a near-doubling of demand within fifteen years — a pace driven almost entirely by how aggressively hyperscalers and colocation operators expand on the island. That uncertainty is not academic. A developer planning a 670 MW plant with a 2031 commercial operations date is effectively betting on which part of that range proves correct.
EMA's peak demand projection of 9.6 GW to 11.4 GW by 2031 creates a further ambiguity. The 1.8 GW spread within a five-year planning window is larger than the entire Tuas Power unit being awarded. If demand arrives at the upper end and other capacity additions are delayed, the buffer could be thin. If growth disappoints, Singapore will carry higher reserve margins than its efficient market structure typically tolerates.
The number to track as the Tuas Power project advances toward 2031 is not the installed MW figure but the rate at which announced data centre projects in Singapore convert to operational load — and whether EMA issues further capacity tenders before the end of the decade.3,2