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JAKARTA – Vice Minister of EMR officially opened the event of geothermal focus group discussion. The speakers of the event “Finding Breakthrough of Indonesian Geothermal Investment” were the Head of Geological Agency, R. Sukyar, Director General of New, Renewable Energy and Energy Conservation, Kardaya Warnika, and also Experts Staff to Minister of Energy and Mineral Resources for Investment and Production, Sutijastoto.
“In managing national energy, we have some challenges to be solved together. The simplest challenge is that we like those expensive things, oil fuels (BBM) is the most expensive and we create energy by BBM; these paradigm are what we have to oppose. How could we produce energy without using BBM: French dare to utilize nuclear up to 70% and UK utilizes gas up to 60%. Let’s see other countries having a quite significant energy mix, while Indonesia utilizes 70% or 68% and 48% of it are oil utilization and it is quite burdening,” said the Vice Minister of EMR in his speech Monday (30/7/2012).
He added that the next challenge is the imparity between the needs and supply, in which the energy mix within the last ten years grow approximately 7% per year. It will continue in 7% even with saving movement because Indonesian GDP continuously increase and Indonesia population do too. So it is impossible if the needed energy decreases.
“Our energy supply capability is still limited; it will cause Indonesia as a net energy importer in the near future. We have to try as hard as possible to avoid the condition,” continued the Vice Minister.
The second challenge, based on national energy mix in 2010, the dependency towards fossil-based energy resources is still high; oil 47%, natural gas 21%, and coal 26%. So, Indonesian economy is still influenced by energy price fluctuating, especially unstable global oil.
The third challenge is alternative energy resource utilization especially renewable energy due to various obstacles from infrastructure and economical aspects. The last challenge is there are some regulation problem in developing energy business, such as policy and authority overlapping and also the implementation of fiscal policy.
The Vice Minister also affirmed that geothermal is one of the main renewable energy potency we have. We all know that Indonesia is a country having the biggest geothermal resereves in the world, approximattley 29.038 MW but only about 1.189 MW or 4, 1% of existing reserves is utilized for power plants. (AK)
