Hundreds of thousands of new residences in the country are left without electricity as the state power firm, PT Perusahaan Listrik Negara (PLN), defaulted on its commitment to meet the demand.

State and private housing developers pleaded for support from legislators on Monday, citing potential government losses should they fail to deliver residences to their rightful owners.

"Today, at least 100,000 government-subsidized houses are without electricity supply," said Tito Nurbianto, deputy to the state minister for housing, at a hearing with legislators at the House of Representatives.

Citing a ministry report, Tito said PLN had failed to meet the demand for more than 36 megawatts of electricity to supply all new residences built under government commission.

The residences, he said, included houses, low-cost apartments - also known as Rusunami - and the so-called Simple Healthy Houses.

Also present at the hearing, Indonesian Real Estate Association (REI) chairman Teguh Satria said the association first filed its complaint about the electricity supply problem in 2003.

REI members, Teguh said, were responsible for constructing 48,000 government-subsidized houses that were currently without electricity.

"Obviously we cannot hand over these houses to their rightful owners," he said.

Most of the residences, he said, were located in Nunukan and Tarakan in East Kalimantan, Entikong in West Kalimantan and Sukoharjo in Central Java.

Another key factor behind the supply constraint, Teguh said, was the conflicting central and regional government regulations, which translated into fluctuating electricity rates.

Representatives from the Indonesian Association of Low-Cost Housing Builders (Apersi) reported at the hearing that 20,000 houses constructed by its members were currently without electricity.

State housing developer PT Perusahaan Perumahan Nasional (Perumnas) said it was still waiting for electricity supply for approximately 22,000 houses that had been built.

Enggartiasto Lukito, a legislator who is also an expert in the housing sector, strongly supported the claim that the state power company had caused serious losses to the state.

He said the construction of 74,000 subsidized houses that began in 2003 had cost the government some Rp 3.5 trillion (US$346 million). The failure to supply electricity could turn the massive investment to waste, he said.

To answer the complaints, PLN president director Fahmi Mochtar said all the problems above stemmed from electricity rates not being determined by market price, but fixed by law and government regulation.

"The current electricity rates are no longer up-to-date with the current market situation," Fahmi said, while pleading for a revision to existing law and regulations.

To cope with the growing demand, PLN on June 8 had to inctroduce an immediate increase in electricity installation fees of up to 300 percent for new customers in Greater Jakarta.

At present, he said, the company had only allocated Rp 1 trillion to meet the demand for new electricity installations for 1.3 million subscribers. The figure, he said, should ideally be Rp 3.2 trillion.

Fahmi noted that only 65 percent of Indonesians had access to electricity. Reaching the remaining 35 percent, he said, was getting more and more costly as many of them were located in remote areas.

The state company is currently struggling to finance the so-called 10,000 megawatts program that was launched in 2006 to meet the increasing electricity demand across the nation, especially in Java and Bali, where demand has been increasing at an average rate of nearly 7 percent a year. (naf)

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