Jakarta, CNN Indonesia – The Indonesian government will not accept new proposal on coal-fired electrical steam power plant project.
The Director General of Electricity at the Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources, Rida Mulyana, said that this was taken in line with the direction of the national energy policy in the future which would rely more on new, renewable energy and a green economy.
“We no longer accept the proposal for a new coal-fired power plant. So, the (project) currently in the RUPTL is all on-going project,” she said as quoted by Antara, Thursday (21/10).
In the 2021-2030 Electric Power Supply Business Plan (RUPTL) owned by PT PLN (Persero), the currently underway PLTU construction is a project whose contract has previously been signed in the 35-megawatt program.
The project is said to have entered the construction stage. For information, in the roadmap document that was just passed on September 28, the government projected that the addition of fossil energy generating power plant capacity in the next 10 years will only be 19.6 gigawatts or 48.4 percent.
This is smaller than the planned additional plan on new renewable energy generating power plant capacity which reaches 20.9 gigawatts or around 51.6 percent.
For this reason, in order to accelerate the addition of 40.6-gigawatt power plants over the next decade, the government will open up the role of private power companies or Independent Power Producers (IPP) for the development of new renewable energy-based plants.
Rida said that the government was preparing an early retirement plan from the coal-fired power plant currently in Indonesia.
In addition to closing the proposed new PLTU construction project, the government also requires the existing PLTU to use biomass as a fuel mixture until the early retirement program for fossil coal plants. “After 2030 there will be no more fossil-based power plants, but all of them are based on new and renewable energy,” said Rida.