Achieving renewable energies utilization target in South-East Asia: Progress, challenges, and recommendations

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Abstract

The South-East Asian countries together have a target to increase the component of renewable energy in their primary energy supply to 23 % by 2025. However, there is a different starting point for the individual country members based on their natural conditions and specific political and regulatory frameworks. The Association of South-East Asia Nations (ASEAN), as the regional-cooperation organization, does not have the authority to intervene in the countries’ national policy for renewable energy. It can only provide inputs to develop renewable energy. However, that can also be challenging because it does not have a portal to access each member’s development of renewable energy utilization. This study aims to observe each ASEAN member’s progress by analyzing historical data. This study also reviews some academic papers to summarize the challenges and obstacles faced by each country. The result suggests that regionally, ASEAN members still rely highly on fossil fuels, especially the total primary supply. Moreover, the share of traditional biomass is also very high. Although, data shows that its use has started to reduce as countries gradually shift to other energy options, unfortunately, mostly to fossil fuel. However, power generation has developed in a positive direction. Historical data shows an increase in renewable energy use for power generation, mainly due to the higher utilization of hydropower. Furthermore, it is strongly recommended for ASEAN to build a monitoring portal of renewable energy to track the progress, so it can provide more precise policy recommendations to its members and establish better energy cooperation between each member in the future.

Introduction

Ten ASEAN (Association of South-East Asian Nations) Member States (AMS) are projected to be a hub of the global renewable energy (RE) market in the future (Hayes and Parker, 2018) due to the abundant natural resources of each country in the region (Frost and Sullivan, 2019). For example, Indonesia and Philippines are among the world’s largest holders of geothermal reserves. Lao PDR, Cambodia, and Myanmar are blessed by abundant river resources that can be utilized as RE sources to fuel the country. However, there is an impression that the AMS neglect their RE resources. Meanwhile, other countries such as China and India are outstripping the AMS on renewables (Maslog, 2018).

Realizing the trend, the AMS has then set several important agendas stated on the ASEAN Plan of Action for Energy Cooperation (APAEC). One highlighted point on the APAEC is to achieve 23 % of RE shares in the primary energy mix by 2025 along with the target of realization of ASEAN power grid and reduction in the energy intensity by 20 % in 2020 compared to the 2005 level (ASEAN Centre for Energy, 2015). This cooperation was initially meant to lower capital expenditure, especially electricity prices, and enhance energy security in Southeast Asia. Furthermore, this is also to promote the competitiveness of the region in the RE business constellation.

However, the commitment itself is not binding and made by consensus. It becomes each AMS’s national responsibility to adjust their national energy mixes. As the regional organization, ASEAN cannot interfere with any political, legal, or institutional force in the affairs of the AMS. In this manner, each AMS has the flexibility to design their energy policy and choose the level of cooperation regarding the energy with other ASEAN countries (ASEAN Centre for Energy, 2018). However, this method has several flaws including a lack of monitoring and evaluation mechanisms to check whether the target is already on the track or not.

This study aims to track the progress of RE utilization in Southeast Asia by analyzing the historical data of RE both in the Total Primary Energy Supply (TPES) and power generation. The progress of the region is also tracked by utilizing a further literature review. Ultimately, the study attempted to find out the main challenges faced by each AMS and propose several policy recommendations that might be useful to utilize.

Section snippets

Data and method

In general, the data is gathered from several credible sources from 1980 to 2015 for the TPES and 1990–2015 for power generation. However, there is some data limitation, as in some countries, time-series data were not entirely covered at that time period. The details of the source and year used in this study are mentioned in Table A.1. In addition, it is also noteworthy that some data are not gained from national statistics. Thus, there might be some discrepancy between the actual national

Total Primary Energy Supply (TPES)

In general, the share of renewable energies in the TPES in the AMS tends to be low, which implies that the AMS tend to use more fossil fuel rather than RE in their energy mix. Furthermore, if we compare the trend between TPES with and without traditional biomass, we see that the decline rate when excluding the biomass is lower (−0.01 %) than when including it (−0.17 %). This is because the countries have attempted to reduce the share of traditional biomass in their energy mix and replace it

Discussion

The ASEAN target to achieve 23 % of RE mix seems very challenging as the historical data shows that progress in this aspect has been relatively stagnant. Moreover, there is a tendency of RE share reduction in TPES. This result is understandable because ASEAN itself did not set the target to be more specific and have each member state the freedom to define the target and set their national energy policies. Moreover, the progress and the target vary across countries (Table A.4). Only Indonesia is

Conclusion

The main question of this study is to determine whether the AMS is already on track to achieve the ASEAN regional RE target by examining the historical trend of statistical data from each AMS. The result shows that it is very challenging for ASEAN to achieve the RE target in TPES by 2025 as the trend shows that regionally, the use of fossil fuel keeps increasing year by year. However, if the AMS can utilize biomass as modern biomass, the target will be easier to achieve as biomass share is

Acknowledgement

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Marissa Malahayati is a research associate in National Institute for Environmental Studies (NIES), Japan. She got undergraduate degree from IPB University, Indonesia, and finish her master's and pH.D. from Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan. Her research interest includes emission mitigation policies, agricultural and forestry economics, and environmental economics. Before her postgraduate study, she also got some working experience in Coordinating Ministry of Economics of Indonesia and

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    Marissa Malahayati is a research associate in National Institute for Environmental Studies (NIES), Japan. She got undergraduate degree from IPB University, Indonesia, and finish her master's and pH.D. from Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan. Her research interest includes emission mitigation policies, agricultural and forestry economics, and environmental economics. Before her postgraduate study, she also got some working experience in Coordinating Ministry of Economics of Indonesia and Centre for Climate Risk and Opportunity Management in Southeast Asia Pacific (CCROM - SEAP), IPB University.

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