Indonesia, which depends heavily on coal for its electricity generation, plans to tender opportunities for as much as 75 gigawatts (GW) of renewable energy capacity installations over the next 15 years, the Southeast Asian country’s climate envoy to the COP29 summit has said.
“There will be 100 GW of new energy that will be implemented in the new administration in the next 15 years, of which 75%, or 75 GW will be renewable energy,” Hashim Djojohadikusumo, Indonesia’s envoy to the COP29 climate summit in Azerbaijan’s capital city Baku, said, as carried by Reuters.
Currently, Indonesia’s installed power capacity exceeds 90 GW, of which coal accounts for a large part, while renewables represent less than 15%.
At the end of 2022, Indonesia, the world’s top coal exporter and heavily reliant on coal for power generation, signed an agreement to launch a Just Energy Transition Partnership (JETP) co-led by the U.S. and Japan and including Canada, Denmark, the European Union, France, Germany, Italy, Norway, and the United Kingdom.
To achieve total power sector emissions peaking by 2030, the long-term partnership said in 2022 that it intends to mobilize an initial $20 billion in public and private financing over a three-to-five-year period, using a mix of grants, concessional loans, market-rate loans, guarantees, and private investments.
Under the partnership, Indonesia will target to have renewable energy generation accounting for at least 34% of all power generation by 2030, which would roughly double the total renewables deployment over the course of this decade compared to current plans.
But the largest economy in Southeast Asia is still awaiting a large part of the $20 billion funding it was promised by the richest nations to facilitate its move away from coal, a government official said in September.
Meanwhile, dependency on coal in Indonesia has grown in recent years, reaching a record-high 61.8% of power generation in 2023, according to data from clean energy think tank Ember. Indonesia and the Philippines have already outranked Poland and China in terms of coal dependency.
By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com