Experts believe that the Indonesian president's ambitious goal of abandoning coal-fired power plants within 15 years and achieving zero emissions by 2050 requires immediate action.

At the recent G20 summit in Rio last month, President Prabowo Subianto, who took office in October, made an unexpected proposal: to close hundreds of coal and fossil fuel power plants by 2040, a bold commitment from the leader of a country classified as one of the world's largest producers and consumers of coal.

And this goal "will be difficult to achieve. To reach it, we need a complete change" in policy, according to Fahmi Razi, an energy economics expert at Gadjah Mada University in Yogyakarta.

According to France Press Agency, Indonesia currently operates 253 coal-fired power plants, according to the Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources. The archipelago also has the largest coal-fired power plant in Southeast Asia, located in the Suralaya complex, 100 kilometers from the capital, Jakarta.

Numerous other stations, known as captive coal plants, are currently under construction, providing energy for industry without connecting to the public grid.

Researchers say that Bravo's goal of achieving net-zero emissions a decade earlier than originally expected could cost tens of billions of dollars.

Despite signing a $20 billion partnership to initiate the energy transition, Indonesia has not yet implemented much.

The initial goal for Jakarta, before Prabowo's announcement, was to close 13 coal-fired power plants by 2030.

But so far, the government has provided only a few details on how it plans to achieve its new goals.

The first elements of the response to these questions lie in the fact that Prabowo's brother, Hashim Djojohadikusumo, a businessman active in the fields of mining and renewable energies and the "Special Envoy for Energy and Environment" at the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP29), recently announced that Jakarta wants to build two nuclear power plants.

However, it appears that they are still a long way off from construction, and they have not yet announced their locations. Fahmy points out that "the commitment is there, but I don't see any implementation or achievement at the moment."

Low cost

Indonesia's reliance on readily extracted and inexpensive coal has proven to be difficult to overcome.

Joko Widodo, Prabowo's predecessor, announced in 2022 a voluntary halt to the construction of new coal-fired power plants.

However, the International Energy Agency (IEA) reports that coal still produces two-thirds of the nation's electricity due to projects completed before the ban.

Moreover, most coal plants in Indonesia are relatively new, making their early closure extremely costly.

According to the Indonesian research center IESR, the country will need $27 billion by 2040 to close coal-fired power plants that generate a total capacity of 45 gigawatts.

For its part, the state electricity company PLN confirms that shutting down a power plant could cost nearly $2 billion, warning that it cannot bear this cost.

Adila Esfandiari, a climate and energy activist at Greenpeace in Indonesia, says that "many political programs do not aim for a real transformation in the energy sector," calling for a speeding up of the steps taken in this process.

She adds, "Our investment climate is not very good; (investors) still do not consider renewable energies a profitable project for them, especially since coal is still very cheap."

A feasible mission

But experts say that if the government takes this matter seriously, there is a way to get rid of coal.

The energy research center "Ember" predicts that over the next fifteen years, we must phase out 3 gigawatts of coal power annually while accelerating the development of renewable energy.

Indonesia opened the largest floating solar power plant in the region last year with a capacity of 192 megawatts. Additionally, the archipelago has many volcanoes with untapped geothermal energy potential and biomass capacity.

According to Fabby Tumiwa, the executive director of the IESR Institute, integrating the bold Prabowo initiative into an equally ambitious roadmap is a challenging and costly task.

Among the measures that must be taken, the government should ensure that no new coal-fired power plants are built after next year and refuse to expand the ones that need to be shut down

Tumiwa also sees the need to simplify regulatory rules and provide incentives for renewable energy.

He concludes by saying, "At the moment, it might be closer to a mission to Mars, but if we take a proactive approach, it will be possible."