Jakarta – State Electricity Company (PLN) is still on track in completing 35,000 MegaWatt (MW) coal-powered plants nationally, before reaching the company’s target of new and renewable energy (NRE) mix of 29 percent by 2030, officials said Wednesday (6/4).
“Currently, PLN is still completing the 35,000 MW project of power plants built since 2015. In 2022, Java will have another 8,000 MW of power plants,” said PLN Executive Vice President of Electricity System Planning Edwin Nugraha in the IDE Katadata 2022 webinar, with the theme ‘Indonesia’s Readiness Towards Energy Transition’.
Katadata noted that the national renewable energy mix increased from 4.4% in 2015 to 11.5% in 2020. According to Nugraha, PLN is pursuing the target of 23% of the NRE mix by 2025 and 29% of the NRE mix by 2030. PLN projects that the addition of NRE, compensation costs, and electricity subsidies will increase by around 104 percent to an average of IDR 185.7 trillion per year between 2025 and 2030.
NRE development is not yet a priority
On the same occasion, Head of Katadata Insight Center, Adek Media Roza said that he conducted a non-probability sampling online survey between February 26 to March 6, 2022. The results found that 89.9% of Indonesian people are still very dependent on electricity, and that means electricity is the most widely used energy by Indonesian people.
“The survey results also show the public’s response to the government is considered less prioritizing the development of renewable energy,” he said.
Roza said, through this survey, the community hopes that the government is more committed and can take real action in terms of transitioning energy to renewable energy. In addition, the respondents also said that the main elements that must be met in renewable energy are environmentally friendly and safe for living things.
“This response shows that people have started to understand what renewable energy is and the importance of transitioning to renewable energy in Indonesia,” he said.
Among the efforts to achieve the target of the NRE mix, PLN is currently optimizing the use of biomass in coal-power plants. The company plans to replace 10 to 20 percent of coal with biomass Nugraha said that they “expect 3-6 percent of NRE to be obtained from the use of biomass. We really have difficulty introducing NRE in areas that are over-supplied from the coal-power plants.”
In remote areas that still use diesel generators, PLN will build solar-power plants combined with the use of batteries so that later it can save costs up to 25%. “We hope that in the future there will be technology that produces cheaper batteries into the PLN system,” he said. (Hartatik)
