High-rise buildings keep on popping up across Jakarta, draining already scarce and expensive clean water and electricity.

Growing vertically is inevitable for Jakarta, which has been struggling to deal with land scarcity for decades and has constantly been attracting newcomers from all across the archipelago.

Last year, the Jakarta Building Supervision and Regulation Agency recorded about 800 buildings that were taller than nine stories.

Agency head I Putu Ngurah Indiana said that the greatest increase in high-rise buildings in Jakarta took place in 2013. In 2014, there was also growth but it was not as fast as in 2013.

'€œBuilding growth in 2015 is not expected to be as rapid, but more buildings will keep coming nevertheless,'€ Putu said.

Currently, 133 new high-rise buildings are under construction; 43 of them are office towers and the rest are residential apartment towers.

Putu said one of the main problems posed by the rapid increase of high-rise buildings was the amount of energy needed to power them all.

'€œWe are quite wasteful in terms of energy usage. We are not using electricity efficiently. Jakarta'€™s buildings are running on hundreds of kilowatt-hours [kWh] per square meter, very inefficient if we compare with, for example, cities in Japan, which use only around 175 kWh per square meter,'€ the official said.

Inefficient energy use results in higher carbon dioxide emissions, which are responsible for worsening climate change.

'€œWith the current rate of carbon dioxide emissions per kWh, we are putting out thousands of tons of CO2 per hour of electricity use,'€ Putu said.

'€œWe contaminate so much, but we do not think twice about it, telling ourselves as long as we pay the bill it is alright.'€

On the other hand, energy inefficiency also created a gap between Jakarta and other regions in Indonesia.

'€œWe are wasting electricity to no end, but there are our brothers and sisters in other regions who suffer from rotating blackouts,'€ Putu said.

With around a third of Indonesians still without access to electricity, the situation could go from bad to worse in the future as Indonesia'€™s demand for energy increases in line with its population and economic growth.

According to a report by the Agency for the Assessment and Application of Technology (BPPT), in line with Indonesia'€™s economic growth, electricity consumption in Indonesia is estimated to grow at an average of 8.4 percent per year to a total of 386.6 terawatt-hours by 2022.

In 2012, the Jakarta administration issued gubernatorial regulation No. 38/2012, which focuses on creating greater efficiency in electricity use, water use and waste treatment.

Since last year, an environmentally friendly building code has been incorporated in the building permit application process and will be mandatory for office buildings, shopping malls and apartments of more than 50,000 square meters in total area; hotels and health facilities that are bigger than 20,000 square meters; and educational
facilities that are bigger than 10,000 square meters.

The Jakarta administration'€™s green building checklist includes mechanical and electrical equipment plans, overall distribution of temperature, outdoor landscape plans, indoor landscape plans, rainwater retention schemes, green construction activities, building maintenance, operational activities, electricity usage, water consumption and indoor air quality.

With almost 40 percent of carbon emissions coming from buildings, uncontrolled urban developments that produce carbon emissions could lead to severe environmental degradation.

Rana Yusuf Nasir, director for training and education at the Green Building Council Indonesia (GBCI), said that setting up regulations was one thing, but implementing then was another. The council is an independent organization providing a green building rating tool that evaluates environmental and sustainability designs and the construction of buildings.

'€œWe love making regulations, but we don'€™t put much effort into implementing and supervising the regulations,'€ Rana said. '€œJakarta is commendable for its effort, but we still need more building inspectors.'€

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