Despite the alleged biodiversity crisis and licensing problems surrounding the power plant, President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo and the Bengkulu administration were scheduled to inaugurate the project on Wednesday. However, Jokowi cut short his visit to Bengkulu and canceled most of his plans there without immediate explanation, including the power plant inauguration.

Since its construction began in 2016, Baai residents and environment activists have protested against the PLTU, accusing it of destroying the environment, as well as recently causing the deaths of 28 turtles and damaging their properties.

The power plant, which began testing its systems on Sept. 19, 2019, is a part of Jokowi's 35,000-megawatt electricity program for increasing power plant capacity nationwide.

Ali Akbar, a member of an environmental advocacy group, Kanopi Hijau Indonesia, said nearby residents believed the power plant development had taken away their land, rice fields and mangrove forest, costing them their jobs and income.

Furthermore, Ali alleged there had been maladministration surrounding the power plant project, in which its management, according to Ali, had told the residents that they lacked several permissions necessary for the development, including a waste management permit.

A series of performance tests by the power plant had created air pollution and damaged the bay by causing foam and an abnormal color to appear in the water, according to residents.

Ali’s and the residents’ biggest concern came to the surface when they found turtles around the bay beginning to die. Since the power plant’s testing, they said at least 28 turtles died around it.

“We have filed lawsuits about the maladministration and the environmental damages the power plant has caused. We first sent letters to the government and the Bengkulu Ombudsman. We had also filed a petition with the [Bengkulu] State Administrative Court on July 19, 2019,” Ali told The Jakarta Post.

“But all of our efforts fell on deaf ears.”

Bengkulu authorities ruled out water pollution as the cause of the deaths of the 28 turtles after conducting necropsies on several of them on Jan. 31.

The Bengkulu Environmental and Forestry Agency, the Bengkulu Natural Resources Conservation Center and the provincial office of the Meteorology, Climatology and Geophysics Agency (BMKG) concluded that the cause of death was bacterial infection and not chemical substances.

According to them, salmonella and clostridium bacteria were consistently found in the turtles’ bodies. They also declared nets and common marine debris around the water as contributing factors to the turtles’ deaths.

BMKG Bengkulu station head Kukuh Ribudiyanto said the agency recorded an anomaly between September and early December in which sea surface temperatures in the western waters of Bengkulu had dropped significantly and only began to warm up again to between 27 and 31 degrees Celsius in mid-December. This caused an increase in plankton in waters off the coast of the city, which created the foam.

He insisted that the foam was not caused by chemical waste from the power plant and did not affect the turtles, contrary to what the residents believed.

Yuliswani, a provincial administration assistant, said that anyone unsatisfied by the government’s findings could challenge them scientifically, “but don’t make conclusions unsupported by science”.

However, another environment group, the Association of People's Emancipation and Ecological Action (AEER), said it suspected there was more to the turtles’ deaths than a mere bacterial infection given that the turtles died only around Baai Island and not in other waters.

In collaboration with the residents, the AEER and several other environmental NGOs studied the power plant’s legal status and concluded that it has had licensing problems from the start. During the first year of development, residents reported that the power plant management did not have a building license. More recently, they reported that it did not possess a waste management permit.

Residents also reported that the power plant’s environmental impact analysis document was far from successful in assessing the real-life impacts. The document did not specify that the power plant would affect the biodiversity around Baai Island.

The document, they said, also stated that the power plant would be built in Napal Putih, North Bengkulu regency instead of on Baai Island.

Pius had urged the local administration and Jokowi to halt the power plant’s inauguration, saying the environmental damage could potentially endanger the marine ecosystem of Bengkulu Beach — which is one of the Ecologically or Biologically Significant Marine Areas recognized under the international Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).

“If they insist on inaugurating [the power plant], we will send a letter to the CBD secretariat during this year’s event,” he continued, referring to the 2020 United Nations Biodiversity Conference, which is to be held in China from Oct. 15 to 28. (hpw)

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