When Singaporeans flick on a light switch or charge their phones, few pause to consider the vast, intricate infrastructure humming quietly in the background. This invisibility is precisely what the Energy Market Authority’s groundbreaking photo exhibition seeks to illuminate. Opening at Bugis Junction on January 19, “Invisible Power. Visible Impact.” represents more than just a collection of striking images—it’s a deliberate effort to bridge the gap between energy consumption and the extraordinary human and technological systems that make modern life possible.

The “Invisible Power. Visible Impact.” exhibition at Bugis Junction showcases the often-unseen work behind Singapore’s energy supply.

Key highlights from the exhibition:

Three photographers, three perspectives:

• Amrita Chandradas captured the Sembcorp Tengeh Floating Solar Farm at Tengeh Reservoir, featuring over 122,000 floating solar panels across 45 hectares that generate enough electricity for 16,000 four-room flats annually.
• Lee Aik Soon documented the Singapore Liquefied Natural Gas Terminal on Jurong Island, showing how LNG arrives by vessel, gets stored, converted back to gas, and piped to power plants. This is particularly significant since about 95% of Singapore’s electricity comes from imported natural gas.
• Lee Yik Keat focused on SP Group’s power grid infrastructure, including transformers, generators, and even a robotic dog used for tunnel inspections—a fascinating modern touch to maintaining the grid that serves 1.7 million homes and businesses.

Each photographer also included personal lifestyle images exploring what energy means to them, adding an artistic dimension to the technical documentation.

The exhibition runs until January 25 (so just a few more days!) at Bugis Junction, 10am-10pm daily, with free admission. It’s commissioned by the Energy Market Authority as their first-ever photo exhibition, aiming to help the public understand Singapore’s transition to clean, reliable, and affordable energy.

If you’re interested in infrastructure, photography, or Singapore’s sustainability journey, it’s worth checking out before it closes!

The Power of Visual Storytelling in Energy Awareness

Photography has long served as a bridge between the abstract and the tangible, transforming complex systems into accessible narratives. In commissioning three local photographers—Amrita Chandradas, Lee Aik Soon, and Lee Yik Keat—to document Singapore’s energy infrastructure, EMA has chosen a medium uniquely suited to cutting through the technical complexity that often obscures public understanding of energy systems.

The exhibition’s timing is particularly significant. As Singapore navigates an ambitious transition toward cleaner energy sources while maintaining grid reliability, public engagement becomes not merely desirable but essential. EMA Chief Executive Puah Kok Keong frames this explicitly, describing the nation’s energy story as one of resilience and transformation built on the dedication of countless individuals working behind the scenes. The exhibition, he notes, highlights the invisible work powering daily life while navigating the journey toward a clean and secure energy future.

Floating Solar: Reimagining Space in a Land-Scarce Nation

Amrita Chandradas’s series “Currents of Light” captures what may be one of Singapore’s most ingenious responses to the dual challenges of limited land and growing energy demands. The Sembcorp Tengeh Floating Solar Farm sprawls across 45 hectares of Tengeh Reservoir’s water surface, its 122,000 floating solar panels generating enough clean electricity to power 16,000 four-room flats annually.

The choice to photograph this installation reveals several layers of impact. On the most immediate level, floating solar addresses Singapore’s fundamental geographic constraint. Unlike many nations with vast deserts or rural expanses suitable for ground-mounted solar farms, Singapore must innovate within extreme spatial limitations. By utilizing reservoir surfaces, the city-state transforms otherwise passive water bodies into productive energy assets without sacrificing precious land that might otherwise support housing, industry, or green spaces.

But the impact extends beyond mere space efficiency. Floating solar panels benefit from the cooling effect of water beneath them, which can increase their efficiency compared to ground-mounted alternatives. The reservoir surface also reduces water evaporation, creating a symbiotic relationship between energy generation and water conservation—two critical concerns for Singapore’s resource security.

Chandradas’s observation that photographing the solar farm felt like witnessing the beginning of a day “not just for us, but also for the energy that sustains us” captures something profound about renewable energy’s relationship to natural cycles. Unlike fossil fuel generation, which operates independently of daily and seasonal rhythms, solar energy reconnects the power grid to the fundamental patterns of sunlight and shadow, day and night.

The LNG Lifeline: Singapore’s Bridge Fuel

Lee Aik Soon’s focus on the Singapore Liquefied Natural Gas Terminal on Jurong Island documents what might be called Singapore’s energy paradox. The terminal represents both the nation’s current dependence and its transitional strategy. With approximately 95 percent of Singapore’s electricity generated using imported natural gas, this infrastructure stands as critical as any hospital or water treatment facility.

The photographs reveal the remarkable journey of liquefied natural gas: arriving aboard massive vessels from distant suppliers, stored in specialized tanks at minus 162 degrees Celsius, then regasified and piped to power plants where it generates the electricity flowing through every home and business. This process, largely invisible to most Singaporeans, represents an extraordinary feat of engineering, logistics, and international coordination.

The terminal’s significance becomes even clearer when considered against Singapore’s energy security context. Unlike nations with domestic fossil fuel reserves, Singapore imports virtually all its energy sources. The LNG terminal, therefore, functions not just as infrastructure but as a lifeline, requiring diversified supplier relationships, strategic reserves, and redundant systems to ensure continuity even during global market disruptions.

Yet natural gas also represents Singapore’s bridge strategy. While not renewable, it burns significantly cleaner than coal or oil, producing roughly half the carbon dioxide per unit of energy. As Singapore works toward its 2050 net-zero target, natural gas serves as the stable baseload power source that enables the integration of variable renewable sources like solar. The tension between current necessity and future aspiration runs through every image in Lee’s series.

The Grid Behind the Walls

Lee Yik Keat’s documentation of SP Group’s power grid infrastructure brings the exhibition’s focus to perhaps the most taken-for-granted element of modern energy systems. Electrical transformers, generators, substations, and the thousands of kilometers of cable that thread through Singapore’s urban landscape rarely enter public consciousness unless they fail.

The inclusion of a robotic dog conducting tunnel inspections offers a glimpse into how grid maintenance is evolving. These robots can navigate the cramped, potentially hazardous environments of cable tunnels, identifying hotspots, moisture intrusion, or structural issues before they escalate into failures. For a grid serving 1.7 million customers across homes and businesses, prevention vastly outweighs cure. A single substation failure can cascade through neighborhoods; a cable fault can disrupt commerce and daily life for thousands.

The grid’s invisibility paradoxically measures its success. When Singaporeans experience electricity as instantaneous and reliable—available at the flip of a switch with voltage and frequency held within narrow tolerances—they’re experiencing the culmination of massive infrastructure investments, sophisticated monitoring systems, and round-the-clock human oversight. Lee’s photographs make visible what success has rendered invisible.

The Personal Energy Narrative

Perhaps the exhibition’s most innovative element is asking each photographer to present a series exploring what energy means to them personally. This moves beyond technical documentation into something more intimate and universal. By connecting industrial-scale infrastructure to individual creativity, routines, and daily energies, the exhibition acknowledges that energy isn’t just a commodity but something woven through every aspect of human experience.

This framing invites viewers to trace their own energy dependencies. The morning coffee maker, the air conditioning enabling comfortable sleep in tropical heat, the refrigeration preserving food, the internet connectivity powering remote work and education, the MRT trains shuttling millions daily—each represents energy transformed into human possibility. By making these connections explicit, the personal series grounds abstract megawatts and gigawatt-hours in lived experience.

The Broader Context: Singapore’s Energy Transition

The exhibition arrives at a pivotal moment in Singapore’s energy journey. The nation has committed to ambitious climate goals while confronting unique challenges. Its equatorial location limits wind energy potential. Its urban density constrains large-scale solar deployment. Its lack of geothermal, hydroelectric, or other renewable resources means Singapore must innovate rather than simply adopt proven international models.

Recent developments illustrate the scope of this challenge. Singapore’s greenhouse gas emissions dipped in 2023 but face upward pressure from economic growth and cooling demands in a warming climate. The government has outlined strategies including aggressive solar deployment (targeting at least 2 gigawatts by 2030), regional power imports from Southeast Asian renewable sources, hydrogen trials, and carbon capture technologies.

Each strategy carries profound infrastructure implications. Regional power imports require high-voltage undersea cables and new interconnection facilities. Hydrogen at scale demands production, storage, and distribution systems that don’t yet exist. Carbon capture requires pipelines, storage sites, and monitoring systems. The energy landscape these photographers have documented will transform dramatically in coming decades.

Public Engagement as Infrastructure

What makes this exhibition significant extends beyond the images themselves. By bringing energy infrastructure into a public shopping mall rather than confining it to industry conferences or technical publications, EMA signals that energy transition isn’t solely a matter for engineers and policymakers. It’s a shared challenge requiring public understanding, support, and behavior change.

The free admission and accessible location at Bugis Junction democratize access to this information. Shoppers encountering the exhibition between retail errands might pause to consider questions they’ve never contemplated: Where does Singapore’s electricity actually come from? What infrastructure makes their lifestyle possible? What does energy transition mean in practice?

This kind of ambient public education—learning that happens through voluntary engagement rather than formal instruction—can shift baseline assumptions. When more Singaporeans understand that 95 percent of their electricity comes from imported natural gas, for instance, conversations about energy security and diversification gain different resonance. When they see the scale of the floating solar installation, the possibilities and limitations of renewable energy become more tangible.

The Workforce Behind the Watts

EMA’s framing of the exhibition emphasizes not just infrastructure but the people working behind the scenes. This human dimension matters tremendously for workforce development and industry perception. Energy sector jobs—from engineers and technicians to planners and grid operators—often lack the visibility of more consumer-facing industries.

Yet as Singapore pursues its energy transition, workforce needs will intensify. Installing and maintaining solar farms, operating LNG terminals, managing increasingly complex grids integrating variable renewable sources, developing hydrogen systems—all require skilled professionals. Making this work visible through photography can help attract talent to an industry that will be central to Singapore’s future.

The robotic dog conducting tunnel inspections, for instance, hints at how energy sector jobs are evolving. Tomorrow’s grid technicians will need different skills than yesterday’s—more data analytics, more automation management, more systems thinking. The exhibition subtly communicates that energy isn’t a static, sunset industry but one undergoing profound transformation.

Limitations and Opportunities

The exhibition’s week-long run and single location, while significant for a first effort, inevitably limit reach. The broader question is whether this represents a one-time initiative or the beginning of sustained public engagement. Will these images circulate beyond Bugis Junction? Might they appear in schools, community centers, or online platforms where they can continue sparking conversation?

There’s also the question of narrative completeness. The exhibition focuses on generation and distribution infrastructure—solar farms, LNG terminals, grid equipment—but energy systems extend further. What about energy consumption patterns? Building efficiency? Transportation electrification? Industrial processes? A fuller picture of Singapore’s energy landscape might include these elements alongside generation.

The personal energy series begins to address this, but future exhibitions might more explicitly connect individual consumption to infrastructure demands, helping people understand how their choices ripple through the system. Smart meter data, for instance, could visualize neighborhood demand patterns, making energy use less abstract.

The Road Ahead

As the exhibition closes on January 25, its impact will depend partly on what follows. Does it spark ongoing conversation? Does it influence how Singaporeans think about energy and infrastructure? Does it create appetite for deeper engagement with these critical systems?

The photographs themselves endure beyond the exhibition’s run. In an era of climate urgency, they serve as documentation of a specific moment in Singapore’s energy transition—capturing infrastructure that may look very different in 10 or 20 years as the nation builds toward its clean energy future.

More fundamentally, the exhibition models a approach to public engagement that other sectors might emulate. Singapore’s infrastructure—from water reclamation to port operations to underground utility networks—operates largely out of sight. Making the invisible visible, celebrating the expertise and dedication required to maintain modern urban systems, and helping citizens understand what sustains their daily lives: these represent valuable goals beyond energy alone.

“Invisible Power. Visible Impact.” ultimately asks viewers to reconsider what they take for granted. The lights that illuminate homes, the air conditioning that makes tropical life comfortable, the devices that connect Singapore to the world—none of this simply happens. Behind every switch, every outlet, every charging port lies extraordinary infrastructure and human ingenuity.

By making that infrastructure momentarily visible, the exhibition invites reflection on energy’s centrality to modern life, the challenges of transitioning to cleaner sources while maintaining reliability, and the collective effort required to power an entire nation. In the end, perhaps the exhibition’s greatest impact is simply this: helping Singaporeans see—and appreciate—what has always been there, working quietly in the background, keeping the lights on.