Abstract

With a current projected nameplate capacity of 900 MW and a peak demand of about 700 MW, Sabah has a 28% reserve margin, Sabah’s capacity is largely made up of outdated, pricey, and more unreliable diesel plants, and the demand for energy is expanding at a rate of over 7% annually. Driven by the expansion of both the commercial and household sectors, unexpected breakdowns in Sabah result in costly service interruptions, especially on the east coast, which is almost totally dependent on diesel plants.

In addition, Sabah and Sarawak, two states in East Malaysia (also known as Malaysian Borneo), only have rates of 77.00% and 67.00%, respectively, while Peninsular Malaysia has a high electrical access rate of 99.72%. Nearly 0.8 million Malaysians, the majority of whom live in East Malaysia’s rural areas, lack access to electricity. Sabah even had the highest average monthly number of electric outages among all the states in Malaysia in 2009, with 1,759 disruptions.

This research adopts quantitative research in which a public survey was performed in between 28 April 2023 to 10 May 2023 emphasizing on the Sabah public sentiment on perception, awareness, knowledge, acceptance and attitudes on how Sabah’s energy resources, including nuclear, fossil, and renewable fuels, relate to Sabah’s costeffective sustainability and energy security.

A total 100 questionnaires have been distributed to various geographic or regional regions, who are likely to differ due to their beliefs or perceptions, educational backgrounds, income levels, and occupations participated in this survey but only 80 usable questionnaires are taken as sample size as required in this paper. The response rate was 86.96%. A smaller sample was chosen in the study rather than a more thorough census due to the magnitude of the population.

The sample strategy used in the present research was nonprobability sampling. The hypothesis results indicated that most Sabah’s people had a poor understanding of, and lack of acceptance of, the need for energy. This study found that the Protection Motivation, Theory Consistency Theory and Behavioral Reasoning Theory (BRT), play
an important theory of planned behavior in looking at practical, long-term solutions to the problems of cost-effective sustainability, energy security, and climate change as a mediating factor.

The study suggests that policy on conceptual framework on environmental literacy and proenvironmental be adopted and review the country existing energy policy especially renewable energy (RE) policy (RE Act 2011) and legal framework

Please request the Thesis from us via the button below.