Why our EV push does not equate to zero emission

 Malaysia is right to push electric vehicles, and right to subsidise them. But an electric car plugged into a grid that still burns imported coal is not a clean car. It is a coal car with extra steps.

Somewhere in Klang Valley tonight, a proud new electric vehicle (EV) owner will plug into the charger in their car porch, watch the light glow, and feel like they have done their bit for the planet. They have, mostly.

What they may not realise is that the electron in their battery was very likely born in a furnace, burning coal shipped in from Indonesia.

That is the uncomfortable truth beneath Malaysia’s EV boom. We have moved the exhaust pipe from the car to a power station a hundred kilometres away. The smoke is still there. We just cannot see it from the driver’s seat.

The direction, however, is correct. Malaysians registered 44,813 EVs in 2025, more than double the year before, and another 31,738 in the first half of 2026 alone, up 85%. Battery cars are now 7.8% of the market, and Proton’s home-grown e.MAS range has overtaken BYD as the country’s top-selling electric brand.

The incentives did their job. Locally assembled EVs stay exempt from import, excise and sales taxes until the end of 2027, and buyers can claim up to RM2,500 in tax relief for a home charger. Even after the road tax exemption ended this January, most EV owners still pay a fraction of what a petrol driver pays. Subsidising this shift was a step in the right direction, full stop.

An electric motor is also better engineering: more efficient than an internal combustion engine, cheaper to run, and cheaper to maintain. None of that is in dispute.

But where does the power come from?

Here is where the story falls apart. Fossil fuels still generate more than three-quarters of Malaysia’s electricity. Coal alone is the single largest source at around 45%, natural gas supplies about a third, and most of the rest comes from large hydroelectric dams. Solar, in a country bathed in equatorial sun, contributes under 2%.

And coal is the dirtiest of them all. It is the most carbon-heavy fuel we burn, and it loads the air with far more sulphur, fine particles and mercury than natural gas, the toxins that scar lungs and foul the air.

Almost none of that coal is ours. Malaysia mines less than four million tonnes a year but imported more than 36 million tonnes in 2025, about three quarters of it from Indonesia. So even our cleanest cars run, in part, on coal shipped in from abroad.

So an EV on today’s grid is not zero emission. It is lower emission, and that counts for something. But we are burning fossil fuels either way, we have just changed the location where it happens.

This is now a security question

For most of history this was an environmental problem. It is fast becoming a security one. When conflict flares in and around the Strait of Hormuz, global energy prices spike, and a country that imports much of its fuel has little shelter from the shock.

Deputy prime minister and energy transition minister Fadillah Yusof put it plainly this year, calling energy security “a strategic national priority, no longer optional” after disruptions at the Strait of Hormuz rattled global markets. He is right. A country that imports its fuel does not fully control its own lights.

Sunlight, by contrast, cannot be embargoed. It arrives by no tanker, is priced in no dollars, and answers to no foreign government. Every solar panel is a small act of independence.

Solar is the answer, and we know it

Among the renewables, the choice is not close. Hydropower already does most of the clean lifting, but Malaysia has few big rivers left to dam without drowning forests and displacing communities.

Solar is where the room to grow lies.

The Sustainable Energy Development Authority puts Malaysia’s solar potential at around 269 gigawatts. We have tapped less than 5% of it. Straddling the equator, we receive some of the most consistent sunlight in the region. In Peninsular Malaysia, the energy think tank Ember found that by 2023, solar generation was already about 53% cheaper than fossil power.

Here is the strangest part: Malaysia is one of the world’s biggest makers of solar panels, home to vast factories like First Solar in Kulim and Jinko Solar in Penang. We shipped out over RM40 billion in solar exports in 2022, more to America than anywhere else, and then kept burning coal at home.

The technology is proven. The climate is perfect. The economics have already won. So what is the hold up?

The missing piece is storage, and it is arriving

The honest answer is that the sun sets. Solar floods the grid at noon and vanishes by dinner, just as household demand peaks. Critics have long used this to wave solar away as unreliable.

That objection is now expiring.

Batteries have become cheap and grid-scale. Malaysia’s newest solar tenders, including the two-gigawatt round launched in 2026, now require battery storage built in, and the MyBeST programme is rolling out 1,600 megawatt hours of storage across the peninsula. As Ember notes, solar can carry the daytime peak while batteries and hydro cover the evening.

The pieces exist. What is missing is urgency.

Malaysia has pledged that renewables will make up 70% of its installed power capacity by 2050, under its National Energy Transition Roadmap. That is a fine, albeit distant destination. The sun is already up, the panels are already cheaper than the coal, but the coal ships keep coming.

We have taught Malaysians to drive on electricity. Now we have to stop making that electricity from someone else’s coal. Let’s point the panels at the sky. - FMT

The writer can be contacted at kathirgugan@protonmail.com.

The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of MMKtT.