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Energy is at the centre of our society. It effects our economy, our environment and our social situation. To understand more about Indonesia, it is important to get to know the energy issues that are currently happening in Indonesia.

 

Indonesia has a population of 245 million people, making it the fourth largest country in terms of population in the world, but our installed electric capacity is still far behind, which results in relatively low electrification ratio. Indonesia’s electrification ratio is only 88% in 2015, which falls behind other ASEAN countries like Singapore, Malaysia and Vietnam. Note here that the definition of electrification ratio is just the ratio between electrified houses and total number of houses, meaning that these statistic does not show the quality of the electricity. Even if a household has frequent electrical shutdown, it is still counted as electrified.

 

Indonesia, up to this moment is still considered by the World Bank as part of the Lower Middle Income Countries (whether or not this classification is valuable or not according to our opinion is beside the point. The point is that the classification is based on a certain standard that the World Bank has defined, making it quantifiable), one of the reason that Indonesia is still lacking behind is because of the the infrastructural gap, the infrastructure for energy being a major culprit. It is obvious then that to increase the economy, more investment needs to be done to close the infrastructural gap. A buzzing economy will need a steady supply of energy.

 

The distribution of energy in Indonesia is not even, most of the investment in the past decade was done in Java, which is clearly shown by regional data on the electrification ratio. Currently there is still one province, Papua, which still has an electrification ratio of less than 50%. While three other provinces, Sultra, NTT and Kalteng have an electrification ratio between 50-70%. Not to mention that around 90% of all electric generation is done in Java and Sumatera, while all other provinces generate small amount of electricity and are mainly connected to the national grid making each region very dependent.

 

Most of the energy consumption in Indonesia is used in cities, which uses 54% of all energy resources. 30% of all energy is also used mainly for the transportation sector. The vehicle growth in Indonesia is quite high, on average the vehicle growth is about 7%, while motorcycles in particular grow at a rate of 14% a year. The high number of privately owned vehicle are due to the lack of reliable public transport which has created an environment of everyone for themselves (resulting in horrible traffic jams especially in the capital of Jakarta). The transportation sector is just one out of the many sectors that can benefit by having better regulations/policies to increase energy efficiency.

 

Even with an electrification ratio of 88%, Indonesia is still heavily dependent on fossil fuels. 94% of Indonesia’s energy mix consists of coal, gas and oil. Only 6% of its energy comes from renewable sources. In the 2015 United Nations Conference for Climate Change in Paris, the Indonesian President Joko Widodo, has made a commitment to increase the share of renewable energy up to 23% in 2025, which sounds like an unambitious goal, but given the circumstances and the budget that the government has allocated for this purpose, in reality it still seems rather impossible.

 

The government has a plan to increase the electrification ratio up to 97% in 2019, which includes a program of increasing the electric capacity by 35,000 MW in the coming 4 years. The program will need a total investment of 72,942,000 USD, with which the government is planning on 291 electricity generators, 732 transmission segments, 75,000 tower sets and 1,375 substation units. The whole program is an ambitious one and the government realises that it needs to collaborate with both the private sectors and civil society organisations to achieve this.

 

So what does this mean to us humble citizens?

 

We who are lucky enough to live in cities are accustomed to think of energy to be our right, not realising that many still lack access to it (or must pay higher than us despite being economically less fortunate). Without the publics knowledge on these energy issues, the problems that some of these regions are facing can easily fall into the background. It is therefore important to keep ourselves informed of the facts so that we can ensure a more accountable distribution of wealth (in the form of energy). By cutting off our wasteful energy consumption, it can also help to ensure that there is more energy left for others. Continue to educate yourself on the issues and donate or volunteer to respective channels, to help accelerate the process. We can also help also to advocate on energy issues, because the future is after all in our hands.