Indonesians want coal gone sooner than the government promised

A new write-up of the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute's regional survey puts a number on something Indonesian politicians rarely test: how many people actually want coal power to end. Choi Shing Kwok, an adviser at the institute's ASEAN Studies Centre in Singapore, reports on Fulcrum that 47.5 per cent of Indonesian respondents want existing coal plants closed or phased out quickly. Fewer than one in ten want new ones built, and the same pattern holds in the Philippines, Vietnam and Malaysia. That matters because coal supplies between 43 and 67 per cent of the electricity in those four countries. Asked about timing, 60.2 per cent of Indonesians said coal should be gone by 2030.

The harder question is who pays. Indonesia has promised to end coal power by 2040 and is trying to fund "early retirement", meaning plants shut before the end of their working life, which usually requires paying off the owner and the loans behind the plant. Part of that money was meant to come through the Just Energy Transition Partnership, a deal in which richer countries help cover the cost of the switch. The United States walked away from it, which weakened the arrangement. Germany and Japan have since stepped in to cover the gap the Americans left. Choi gives no amounts.

He is careful about what public opinion can deliver. Money and the slow business of building anything will hold back a phase-out whatever people say they want. On what should replace coal, solar came first in nine of the eleven ASEAN countries, and bioenergy, which means power made from crops, wood and farm waste, scored well in Indonesia. His reading is that the groundwork is now in place for the switch to move quickly.

Why it matters

If you pay a PLN bill, the detail to watch is whether the German and Japanese money goes into closing old plants or into building new clean ones, because that choice decides whether cleaner air or a higher tariff reaches you first. The 2040 pledge sits a decade later than what most people in this survey said they wanted, so expect that gap to drive the argument over who carries the cost. And for anyone working at a coal plant or in a mining town, early retirement is a question about a job, not only about emissions.