A solar panel goes up on a roof in Kajang. That day it joins the 31% the government calls clean energy. At night the panel makes nothing. The 31% does not move.
Malaysia measures its shift to clean energy two ways, and only one of them gets announced. In April, the deputy prime minister, Fadillah Yusof, said the country had reached 31% renewable energy at the end of last year. That figure counts equipment. A British think tank called Ember counts the other way. It gathers electricity figures from more than 200 countries and publishes them for free. It says 21% of the electricity Malaysia used in 2025 came from clean sources.
Neither number is wrong. They measure different things, and the difference is physical. Equipment is counted by size. For example, a big solar farm is rated at 100 megawatts, which is its output on a bright afternoon with everything working. That rating is what goes in the figure, whether the sun is out or not.
It is like counting what your wallet can hold instead of what is in it. Across a whole year it will produce about a fifth of what its size suggests. A gas plant produces about three-fifths, because it runs whenever it is told to.
How wide the gap is
Solar and wind made 2% of Malaysia’s electricity last year. Dams and burnt waste made the rest of the clean fifth. Coal and gas made 79% between them. Ember puts the world average for clean electricity at 43%, twice Malaysia’s share.
The national figure also hides a split. Sarawak’s wires do not connect to the peninsula’s, so it runs mostly on its own hydropower dams. Peninsular Malaysia, where about three-quarters of the country’s demand sits, runs mostly on coal and gas. The 21% is an average of two very different systems.
The plan does not close it
The government’s energy transition roadmap wants renewable equipment to reach 35% of the total by 2030 and 70% by 2050. Ember ran the numbers on that in 2024. Its answer for 2050 is 52%, with gas supplying the other 48%.
Ember is not alone in reading it that way. Rosman Hamzah is a Malaysian energy consultant. He told a climate conference late last year that gas would keep growing even as its share of the equipment shrank. Gas is about 40% of the equipment today, he said, and that share drops to the low twenties by 2050. The plants keep coming anyway. Malaysia will still be building gas plants in 2050 and importing more gas to run them.
Malaysia is not short of sunshine. Ember found the roadmap’s solar plans would use about 5% of what Malaysia’s own Energy Commission says the country’s sunlight could produce. Almost all of it goes unused.
Bring the date forward to 2035 and it looks worse. Renewables reach 29% of the electricity in 2035 on Ember’s arithmetic, leaving fossil fuels 71%. Solar is meant to be the largest single part of all the new equipment, and even then, it would produce about a tenth of the electricity that year.
Gas covers the hours the sun does not, and the plan still has it doing that job in 2050.
The case the other way
Nothing makes electricity until it is built, and Malaysia’s biggest solar farms are still under construction. A project approved today appears in the equipment figure years before it appears in the electricity figure. Storage is the other half. Solar only helps at dinner time if the afternoon’s power can be saved for it, just like keeping half the day’s cooking for supper. Peninsular Malaysia’s first big batteries have not arrived yet. The Energy Commission does publish generation figures too, in a yearly handbook that arrives long after the year it covers.
Fadillah has made the same point himself. Solar is intermittent and unpredictable, he said in April. It stops at sunset and thins out under clouds. The supply that has to be there around the clock is gas, much of it imported at prices the country does not control. Coal, he added, is to be shut down by 2044.
All that is a good reason to build fast and to count what you build. It is not a reason to announce one number and hide the other.
The panel in Kajang will still be there at midnight, counted and idle, and there will be many more beside it. That is real progress, and the figure that measures it will keep climbing. It will never say what came out of the socket. Nobody announces that figure.
