Geothermal as the Solution for Indonesia’s Electricity Shortage: How Does Indonesia’s Political Condition and Policies Affecting It?

Geothermal as the Solution for Indonesia’s Electricity Shortage: How does Indonesia’s Political Condition and Policies affecting it?

Introduction

The current condition arises within Indonesia is the electricity shortage. This can be seen as numbers of black outs happens in every part of Indonesia’s region of which conducted due to save the electricity reserves. Such problems happen because as an abundance country in which very rich with natural resources, including the source of potential energies that can be generated as electricity, Indonesia’s electricity production concentrates more on the conventional thermal sources—oil, natural gas and coal. By looking at the world reserves of these conventional thermal sources, Indonesia’s oil reserve is only 0.6 percents from total world reserve, Indonesia’s gas reserve is only 1.4 percents and coal reserve is only around 3.1 percents from the total world reserve. Thus, we cannot say that Indonesia is poor in fossil fuel energy, indeed. However, we are very far than rich of it. But then, the cliché condition is that we put fossil fuel as a primary resource to produce electricity (look at Table 1 and Table 2). Malla (1993) stated that the fossil fuels provide at least 59% of total energy consumption in 1974 to 63% in 1992 (excluding Vietnam). This dependence on fossil fuels is greatest in relatively more developed economies (based on country’s per capita GDP) in South East Asia (SEA) such as Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand, where over 80% of all energy needs for power generation in 1992 are provided by fossil fuels, compared with about 45% in less developed economies (for e.g., Myanmar, Philippines, and Vietnam). And that is what has leaded us to electricity shortage today[1]. Moreover he also stressed out that among the type of fossil-fuel intensities; Indonesia has the highest average oil intensity during the period of 1983-92. Though later Indonesia then makes a

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