Southeast Asia wants to trade power by sea. Three firms make the cable.

Indonesia's state investment fund Danantara has signed study deals with Singapore buyers on selling low-carbon electricity north, and Singapore says it wants to import 6 gigawatts of it by 2035, where one gigawatt is roughly one large power station. Elbinsar Purba of the ISEAS institute in Singapore has written a short piece in Fulcrum about the part the press releases skip: the cable itself. No factory in Southeast Asia can make the long-distance undersea power cable these projects need. The type required is HVDC, high-voltage direct current, which carries electricity over long distances while losing less of it than ordinary lines. Three European makers, NKT, Prysmian and Nexans, hold about 60 per cent of world capacity between them, and their production slots are full until 2030.

A study by USAID and the ASEAN Centre for Energy, published in January 2025, found it could take 10 to 12 years just to get hold of cable if nobody builds new plants. Ships are scarce too: only a few vessels anywhere can lay and repair heavy HVDC systems over long distances, and the seabed here is awkward work, with deep water, steep slopes and earthquakes. The only working cross-border undersea power cable in Southeast Asia today is 4 km long, between Plentong in Malaysia and Woodlands in Singapore. The ASEAN Power Grid, the long-discussed plan to wire the region's electricity systems together, has 18 priority links. Seven of them run under the sea, eight if you count Indonesia's own island connections.

Purba does not argue for postponing any of it. He wants the first projects used to build the missing industry at home: incentives for foreign developers that bring local firms into design and maintenance, predictable permits, scholarships in undersea power systems, and long placements for engineers with grid operators abroad. The money is coming either way. One estimate he cites puts the global market for undersea power cable at 17.8 billion dollars in 2025, rising to 35.9 billion by 2033. If foreign firms build everything, Indonesia provides the sun, the land and the seabed, and the skilled work stays somewhere else.

Why it matters

Anyone hoping clean-power exports become the next big earner after coal and nickel should read the timeline honestly, because the cable alone can take a decade to get. That makes the export story a 2030s one, not a 2020s one. Watch whether Indonesian firms turn up in the first contracts as partners rather than landlords, since that is where the lasting jobs would sit.