Why Indonesia?
Indonesia is the world’s fourth most populous country with just over 240 million citizens. Though itself a vast archipelago, Indonesia’s population is unevenly distributed; roughly 60 percent inhabit 7 percent of the country’s total land area. As a result, Indonesia’s demand for electricity is disproportionately skewed towards high-population areas and approximately 80 percent of Indonesia’s electricity consumption occurs via the grid that services Java and the adjacent island of Bali. As such, Indonesia’s planners are deeply focused on increasing capacity in the country’s population heartland, mostly through large-scale coal- and gas-fired power plants.
According to the Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources, installed generation capacity reached 31,443 MW during 2010. However, electrification rates remain low, and only reached 67 percent during 2010, according to the Bureau of Statistics. Moreover, actual output from existing power plants is far below generating capacity due to the aging condition of many facilities. A small fraction of total installed capacity lies outside the Java/Bali grid, where electrification rates often lag far below the national average. In the Eastern Indonesia province of West Papua electrification rates have only reached a meager 40 percent.
Indonesia is the world’s fourth most populous country with just over 240 million citizens. Though itself a vast archipelago, Indonesia’s population is unevenly distributed; roughly 60 percent inhabit 7 percent of the country’s total land area. As a result, Indonesia’s demand for electricity is disproportionately skewed towards high-population areas and approximately 80 percent of Indonesia’s electricity consumption occurs via the grid that services Java and the adjacent island of Bali. As such, Indonesia’s planners are deeply focused on increasing capacity in the country’s population heartland, mostly through large-scale coal- and gas-fired power plants.
In terms of transmission, Indonesia’s rugged archipelago presents its own unique challenges for powering the country’s vast number of inhabited islands. As such, Indonesia currently operates twelve separate grids for the transmission of electricity. However, this challenging terrain also creates opportunities through a wealth of renewable energy resources, and a series of renewable energy projects connected to local power distribution grids becomes a simple solution to a very complex problem. As a result of this, the Government of Indonesia has put forward energy mix targets that call for 17 percent power generation from renewable resources by 2025, much of it in rural areas where building a large scale coal- or natural gas-fired power plant would be economically infeasible. Currently renewable energy makes up less than 5 percent of Indonesia’s power generation.