Singapore's Water-Linked Climate Strategy
Tengah, Tengeh, and the Tuas Nexus
by Futoshi Tachino
In equatorial Singapore, the late-afternoon thunderheads pile up like mountains, then dissolve into warm rain that runs from green roofs to canals and finally to the sea. The city’s response to climate change is not a single showpiece but an interlocking loop: cool the homes, power the water, harden the shores, and close the carbon cycle. The hum here is chilled water in buried pipes, biogas in co-digesters, and solar panels riding the reservoir’s skin. The strategy is small-state pragmatism at system scale.
A town that lives its theory
On the island’s western flank, Tengah is rising as Singapore’s first “smart energy town,” with a car-free town centre and a residential centralised cooling system delivered as a utility service. Instead of every flat owning a compressor, modular chiller plants on rooftops circulate chilled water through buildings; residents pay for cooling the way they pay for electricity or water. Planners designed the core to be people-first—vehicles run underneath the town centre—and every road has dedicated walking and cycling paths to make active mobility the default. Early projections touted up to 30% energy savings versus conventional split-unit air-conditioning; after costs rose, the operator revised the expected household savings to about 17%—still meaningful for both bills and peak demand.
Digital plumbing beneath the concrete
Tengah isn’t just hardware; it’s telemetry. HDB’s “Smart Hub” and estate-level sensors support predictive maintenance, solar generation monitoring, and fault response across lifts, pumps, and lighting. The idea is dull by design: fewer breakdowns, safer estates, more data to tune demand. In other words, a city that learns.
Designing for the storm you know will come
As seas climb and downpours intensify, Singapore is rewriting its shoreline. PUB is developing a national Code of Practice for coastal protection and flood resilience, while the Urban Redevelopment Authority’s “Long Island” concept along the East Coast would reclaim land at higher elevations to form a continuous line of defence and a new reservoir with gated outfalls—Marina Barrage logic, scaled. The point is redundancy: hold stormwater back during high tide, flush it when the sky clears, and gain multi-use public space in between.
Pushing the frontier onto water
Where land is scarce, water pulls double duty. At Tengeh Reservoir, a 60-MWp floating solar farm spreads across 45 hectares—about 45 football fields—supplying enough electricity to power Singapore’s five local water treatment plants and offset roughly 7% of PUB’s annual energy needs. The project cut about 32 kilotonnes of CO₂ a year—equivalent to removing some 7,000 cars—and made the nation one of the few with a fully “green waterworks system.”
Turning waste into watts (and carbon into concrete)
Farther west, Tuas Nexus fuses two megaprojects: the Tuas Water Reclamation Plant (DTSS Phase 2) and the NEA Integrated Waste Management Facility. Sludge from used-water treatment co-digests with sorted food waste to boost biogas yields; combusted at the IWMF, that biogas helps the nexus achieve full energy self-sufficiency and projected annual carbon savings north of 200,000 tonnes. Excess electricity can be exported to the grid. It’s the water-energy-waste loop, closed.
The materials loop is tightening, too. At Tuas Port’s Phase One, Pan-United supplied around 360,000 m³ of CO₂-mineralised ready-mix; industrial CO₂ is injected during production and permanently bound as carbonate in the concrete matrix. Company disclosures estimate more than 113.8 million kg of CO₂ emissions prevented—essentially turning a bulk commodity into a distributed carbon sink.
Cooling the core, quietly
Downtown, SP Group’s district cooling network under Marina Bay—billed as the world’s largest underground system—has delivered zero supply disruptions since 2006. The utility is expanding capacity (toward ~90,000 RT) and layering in thermal energy storage, including an ice-storage pilot tied into an electricity substation to shave peaks by up to 2 MW. District cooling might sound esoteric, but in a warming, humid climate it is one of the most effective ways to cut urban electricity use and cap the hottest hours.
Culture as infrastructure
Habits cement infrastructure. By 2030, Singapore plans about 1,300 km of cycling paths, with eight in ten HDB residents only minutes from a local network, supporting “first and last mile” trips that don’t need a car. Tengah’s car-free heart slots neatly into that geometry. When heat and rainfall are givens, the city’s durable advantage may be less technology than choreography: aligning incentives so the easiest choice is also the lowest-carbon one.
Quiet economics, loud lessons
Skeptics often assume these systems only work with lavish subsidies. The evidence suggests otherwise. Marina Bay’s district cooling customers typically cut cooling energy by ~20%; Tengah’s cooling-as-a-service model targets double-digit savings; and Sembcorp’s floating PV avoided land costs that can make urban solar prohibitive. Meanwhile, Tuas Nexus bundles costs across agencies but returns energy, materials, land, and resilience. The through-line is procurement as climate policy: buy services (cooling, sludge treatment, clean water) in ways that decarbonise the supply chain.
Horizons beyond the horizon
Singapore’s national targets have hardened: reduce emissions to around 60 MtCO₂e by 2030 (after peaking earlier), then net-zero by 2050; in 2025 the government also submitted a 2035 NDC of 45–50 MtCO₂e. Those numbers are not slogans—they are constraints. Tengah’s chillers, Tengeh’s panels, and Tuas’s digesters are the grammar of a system speaking net-zero as a first language. The rains will keep coming. The question for other cities is whether they can translate this water-linked dialect—cooling loops, floating solar, co-digestion, carbon-smart concrete—into their own climate and culture, until it reads as naturally as an evening storm.
Sources
– Housing & Development Board (HDB). “Tengah—Smart Energy Town.” Updated January 18, 2024. https://www.hdb.gov.sg/about-us/hdbs-refreshed-roadmap-designing-for-life/tengah-showpiece/tengah-smart-energy-town
– Housing & Development Board (HDB). Our Town, Tengah: Town Design Guide. (PDF, n.d.). https://www.hdb.gov.sg/cs/infoweb/-/media/doc/DDG-UPG/TDGs/Tengah-Town-Design-Guide.pdf
– Land Transport Authority (LTA). “Cycling Path Networks.” Updated June 13, 2025. https://www.lta.gov.sg/content/ltagov/en/getting_around/active_mobility/walking_cycling_infrastructure/cycling.html
– Ministry of Sustainability and the Environment / National Climate Change Secretariat (NCCS). “Singapore’s Climate Targets—Overview.” Updated February 10, 2025. https://www.nccs.gov.sg/singapores-climate-action/singapores-climate-targets/overview/
– National Environment Agency (NEA). “Tuas Nexus—Singapore’s First Integrated Water and Solid Waste Treatment Facility Begins Construction.” September 8, 2020. https://www.nea.gov.sg/media/news/news/index/tuas-nexus-singapore-s-first-integrated-water-and-solid-waste-treatment-facility-begins-construction
– PUB, Singapore’s National Water Agency. “Sembcorp and PUB Officially Open the Sembcorp Tengeh Floating Solar Farm.” July 14, 2021. https://www.pub.gov.sg/Resources/News-Room/PressReleases/2021/07/SEMBCORP-AND-PUB-OFFICIALLY-OPEN-THE-SEMBCORP-TENGEH-FLOATING-SOLAR-FARM
– PUB, Singapore’s National Water Agency. “Deep Tunnel Sewerage System (DTSS).” Updated March 4, 2025. https://www.pub.gov.sg/Professionals/Requirements/Used-Water/DTSS
– PUB, Singapore’s National Water Agency. “Tuas Water Reclamation Plant (WRP).” Updated March 4, 2025. https://www.pub.gov.sg/Professionals/Requirements/Used-Water/DTSS/Tuas-Water-Reclamation-Plant
– PUB, Singapore’s National Water Agency. “Coastal Protection.” Updated November 12, 2024. https://www.pub.gov.sg/Public/KeyInitiatives/Flood-Resilience/Coastal-Protection
– SP Group. “District Cooling & Heating—Singapore.” (Marina Bay underground district cooling network; Tengah residential centralised cooling.) Accessed August 11, 2025. https://www.spgroup.com.sg/sustainable-energy-solutions/district-cooling-and-heating
– SP Group. “Experience Living in Singapore’s First Eco-friendly Smart Energy Town.” (Tengah cooling energy-savings explainer.) 2020. https://www.spgroup.com.sg/about-us/media-resources/energy-hub/sustainability/experience-living-in-singapore-s-first-eco-friendly-smart-energy-town
– Channel NewsAsia. “SP Group to cut cooling system usage rate… after Tengah home owners’ complaints.” November 7, 2023. https://www.channelnewsasia.com/singapore/sp-group-cut-cooling-system-usage-rate-waives-fees-until-year-end-after-tengah-home-owners-complaints-3894456
– Energy Market Authority (EMA). “EMA and SP Group to Pilot Thermal Energy Storage System at Electricity Substation.” August 29, 2022 (media release and factsheet). https://www.ema.gov.sg/news-events/news/media-releases/2022/ema-and-sp-group-to-pilot-thermal-energy-storage-system-at-electricity-substation and PDF: https://www.ema.gov.sg/content/dam/corporate/news/media-releases/2022/20220829_MediaRelease_EMA-SP-Group-pilot-thermal-ESS-at-electricity-substation.pdf.coredownload.pdf
– Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA). “How Will ‘Long Island’ Protect the East Coast?” Draft Master Plan 2025. https://www.ura.gov.sg/corporate/planning/Master-Plan/Draft-Master-Plan-2025/Long-Island
– Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA). “A Cool City in a Warming World.” Draft Master Plan Themes. https://www.uradraftmasterplan.gov.sg/themes/strengthening-urban-resilience/a-cool-city-in-a-warming-world/
– Pan-United Corporation Ltd. “Pan-United Boosts Decarbonisation as Singapore’s Largest Supplier of CO₂-Mineralised Concrete for Tuas Port.” News release, February 21, 2023. (SGX announcement PDF.) https://links.sgx.com/FileOpen/Pan-United_Boosts_Decarbonisation.ashx?App=Announcement&FileID=747210
– Pan-United Corporation Ltd. Sustainability Report 2023. April 8, 2024. https://panunited.listedcompany.com/misc/sr2023.pdf
– Ministry of National Development (MND). “HDB Green Towns Programme.” April 28, 2021. https://www.mnd.gov.sg/our-work/greening-our-home/hdb-green-towns-programme
Futoshi Tachino is an environmental writer who believes in the power of small, positive actions to protect the planet. He writes about the beauty of nature and offers practical tips for everyday sustainability, from reducing waste to conserving energy.
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About the Creator
Futoshi Tachino
Futoshi Tachino is an environmental writer who believes in the power of small, positive actions to protect the planet. He writes about the beauty of nature and offers practical tips for everyday sustainability.
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