INDONESIA: Shift to Electricity Means Shift to Coal, Critics Warn

JakartaPost-Sept 20

Critics have berated the government for promoting electric vehicles (EVs) and stoves but failing to ensure the power consumed comes from clean sources. The government is pushing consumers to rely more on electricity and less on oil or gas as part of the country’s energy transition, but environmentalists and a researcher have told The Jakarta Post the move, for now, means little more than shifting from one fossil fuel to another. Earlier this month, President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo signed a presidential instruction to replace hundreds of thousands of government service vehicles across the country with electric ones in a policy that took effect on Sept. 13. Several state-owned bus companies, meanwhile, have begun to or are about to operate electric buses. Also, earlier this month, State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs) Minister Erick Thohir said that, starting next year, the state would spend nearly Rp 5 trillion (US$334.7 million) annually to provide free electric stoves for millions of households currently using heavily subsidized liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) for cooking. Separately, state-owned electricity monopoly PLN initialized a program of its own this year to give away more than 300,000 electric stoves. “All of these efforts will help us reduce our oil and gas imports,” Djoko Siswanto, secretary general of the National Energy Board (DEN), told the Post on Friday, adding that the government considered electrification as a step bringing the country closer to clean energy. Komaidi Notonegoro, executive director at Jakarta-based research firm ReforMiner Institute, told the Post on Friday that the transition pursued by the government may only help solve cost issues but not environmental ones, or possibly neither. He explained that coal still accounted for more than half of Indonesia’s power generation of 76.3 gigawatts this year, followed by natural gas, according to Energy and Mineral Resources Ministry data. Read more at: https://www.thejakartapost.com/opinion/2022/07/04/energy-transition-or-energy-confusion.html.