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Electrification hits rocky roads
Oh happy day: Children play around an electric grid after school in Kwangko village, Dompu regency, West Nusa Tenggara (NTB), on Monday
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h happy day: Children play around an electric grid after school in Kwangko village, Dompu regency, West Nusa Tenggara (NTB), on Monday. Kwangko is among thousands of villages in NTB that now have access to electricity as part of extensive electrification expansion efforts in the region.(JP/Made Anthony Iswara)
In the corner of a house of West Nusa Tenggara’s (NTB) Kwangko village in Dompu regency, 35-year-old Anti kneels down to place a dozen water-filled plastic bottles in her refrigerator, soon to be frozen and sold to passing fishermen.
For her and 103 families in the village, the fridge embodies running electricity that came to the village 18 months ago, helping fishermen conserve their fish better as their wives earn an income by selling ice.
The former village head, Syaiful Baharudin, said limited road access to the area had forced residents to carry electric poles and cables with their fishing boats, all in the hope of replacing their worn-out, diesel-run generators that had only covered parts of the residents’ daily needs.
“It took us five years to get good electricity,” Syaiful said. “Alhamdulillah [thank God], it’s all worth it.”
Kwangko village and over 1,000 villages in NTB have enjoyed the fruits of extensive electrification in recent years. According to Energy and Mineral Resources Ministry data, the province now has an electrification ratio of about 95 percent as of this year’s first quarter, higher than the 93 percent in 2018 and 85 percent in 2017.
Nationally, President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo has boasted that the country has achieved 98.05 percent electrification, higher than 67.2 percent it recorded in 2010. The government had aimed to electrify 99.9 percent of Indonesia by the end of 2019.
Despite closing in on the finish line, the last few kilometers to achieving electricity provision in rural areas have been tough, regional state electricity firm PLN officials said.
PLN planning manager for Sumbawa, Firman Sulistyawan, said high production costs had bogged down electricity supply expansion in Sumbawa’s rural areas.
On average, every customer in Sumbawa spends Rp 1,000 (7 US cents) per kilowatt-hour (kWh), he explained, whereas PLN has to spend Rp 2,700 kWh to supply electricity, resulting in the region’s lower cost-efficiency figure compared to the national average.
Energy and Mineral Resources Minister Ignasius Jonan inaugurated the operation of the 50-megawatt (MW) feed gas-fired power plant in the region recently, potentially pushing down unsubsidized consumer prices through lower production costs.
Firman’s team is also planning to produce biomass energy to replace pricy gasoline, as he aims to implement the plan by 2023. The target follows the government’s ambition to raise the share of renewable energy in the national energy mix from 13 percent in 2016 to 23 percent in 2025.
But with a population scattered around the island packed with mountaintops and nonasphalted roads, PLN regional manager Hamzah said the firm had a tough time installing the necessary infrastructure.
“We would like the government to team up with us to build public facilities [in isolated areas] to ease our electrification expansion and meet the deadline,” said Hamzah.
Asian Development Bank (ADB) energy specialist Florian Kitt saw a similar struggle in electrifying the country’s rural areas of Papua and Sulawesi, adding that the initiative to replace fuels would cut down generation costs for on-grid generators and emit cleaner emissions.
But he argued that the energy shift had little to do with easing rural electrification as high initial infrastructure investment to connect far-flung places was a hurdle in enlarging electricity access. Instead, he recommended that the government partner with the private sector in adopting cheaper and smaller isolated electrical grids that could be connected between villages.
Then, policymakers must clearly divide the budget between electricity connection subsidies and electrification expansion in its next National Medium-Term Development Plan, helping the PLN devise its expansion capacity with the calculated funds within the next five years. The draft should also explicitly patch out the pipeline for private sector involvement, he continued.
In the meantime, Kwangko village head Wahidin is eyeing bigger dreams to further develop facilities at his village after the former village chief had attained electricity access.
“All that’s left now is to asphalt the road and maybe [install] street lights. There’ll be improvements by next year,” Wahidin said with a voice thick of conviction.
