The first room of the International Energy Conference (IEC) parallel session consisted of four paper presenters who discussed the energy poverty problem in Indonesia. They were reviewed by Dr. Matthew Dornan from Australian National University (ANU).
The first presenter, Ms. Ami Raisya Syanalia addressed her research paper of “Decarbonizing Energy in Bali with Solar Photovoltaic: GIS-Based Evaluation on Grid Connected System.” Efforts to use Solar Photovoltaic (PV) in Bali to produce electricity has been conducted in her research. Bali has a high demand for electricity up to 10 TWh energy by 2024 and still relies on its supply from Java Island. She mentioned that Bali has opportunities in Solar with a stable longer sunny day and has theoretical potential solar PV in Java-Bali system up to 38.7 GW. To conduct this research, facial modeling from GIS (Geographical Information System) software were used to find the suitable area for constructions of solar PV. After proper area identification, four different scenarios were developed: (1) BAU (Business As Usual) scenario, (2) moderate solar penetration, high solar penetration, and rooftop solar. From these scenarios, the total electricity generation, capacity, and emission were found as a result. From the result, she stated that for four different scenarios, the maximum scenario generates higher electricity capacity than the other three scenarios, which has a total geographical potential 2435.7 GWh on 453 km2 of the suitable area and 53-113 TWh electricity production so that Bali can generate a higher potential electricity for both Bali area and can export electricity to another island surrounding Bali. She also mentioned some reasons to implement solar PV in Bali are high urbanization, high space availability with buildings of similar height, and has stability in the electricity network. She concluded that solar PV shows very promising potential to decarbonize energy in Bali because of the huge potential of grid-connected solar PV in Bali and installed capacity in this model varies between 22-80 GW which represents higher estimates than those made by International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) of 38.7 GW. Emission savings that could be generated amounts to 2.5-6.8 million tCO2e or at least 2.1% of national emission reduction target by 2030. Lastly, this research requires policy support to promote renewable energy such as Solar PV in Bali so that Bali can use its energy independently without relying on supply from Java Island.
The second presenter, Mr. Jannata Giwangkara presented his research of “Planning the Electrification of Rural Villages in East Nusa Tenggara Using Renewable Energy Generation.” He stated that electricity is one of the main components of the economic and social development and half of Indonesian is living in small rural areas, but access to electricity is still limited. He also mentioned that the latest information from Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources is an increasing electricity supply of 33% from 2015, but electricity is dominating in residential areas about 92.7% and East Nusa Tenggara still has the lowest electrification ratio, which is below 60%. Thus, his research focuses on the development of renewable energy electrification in an Indonesian rural village. The objective of his research is to find proper system configurations and make a comparison of the proposed scenarios’ of Levelized Cost of Energy (LCOE). He divided his research methodology into two: demand-side model and supply-side model. The first model has three scenarios of electrification which is basic, moderate, and advanced. He also divided end-user consumers’ sectors into three: household, productive used, and social infrastructure. The second model has power generation system dimensioning, HOMER (Hybrid Optimization of Multiple Energy Resources) were used, to optimize micro power grid system and some inputs such as load profiles & scenarios, technical parameters, and economic parameters. Then he used three systems: conventional (diesel), renewables (solar PV and wind), and hybrid (diesel, solar PV, and wind) and try to figure out the best possible power system configurations. Regarding electricity dimensioning, load profiles and system dimensioning shows that the result for the fundamental electrifications demand is 54.933 and double to 131.364 for moderate electrifications demand, and the highest is for the advance electrifications. The results for electrification scenarios shows that for the essential electrification, renewable energy system has the cheapest with the configurations of 50 kW and solar PV generate with 100% and also for the moderate electrification are from the renewable system same as the advanced electrification. The basic electrification scenarios only cost around 0.66$/kWh. For the emission, it is obvious that the conventional system produced more emission than the renewable or hybrid system in all three electrifications scenarios. For the advanced, the emission from conventional reaches the highest amount. He concluded that the rural electrification with renewable energy generation had been shown to be a feasible option. Solar energy is dominating wind energy as the preferred energy technology for both renewable and hybrid configurations. The renewable energy system still considered as the preferred choice with respect to changes in economic and environmental inputs, and the LCOE of renewable energy system dominates all scenarios with 0.66 USD/kWh (basic), 0.74 USD/kWh (moderate), and 0.55 USD/kWh (advanced).
Ms. Novriany Amaliyah presented her research of “Preliminary Study of Hydrogen Production from Banana Waste Using In-Liquid Plasma Method.” As a background for her research, data from the Asian Development Bank 2016 shows that there is an increase in CO2 of almost 5% per year and there are five countries that are responsible in contributing the greenhouse emission and Indonesia is one of them. Energy consumption in Indonesia still uses from energy resources that are unable to renew. Burning coal could produce acid rain and greenhouse emission. Therefore, clean energy is needed as an alternative to the fossil fuel.
One of the clean energy resources is hydrogen. The most important feature of hydrogen is safe and has been recommended as a resource for renewable energy because when it burned, hydrogen leaves no residue. There are many kinds of biomass such as agricultural waste which very abundant, cheap, and easy to convert to hydrogen. Agricultural waste can be converted to hydrogen especially from banana. In Indonesia, there’s a lot of banana. Previous research showed that 9.5 million tons of banana were produced in Indonesia. Most of the banana stem and peel was the waste from harvesting. That makes for every production of banana, 100 kg of fruit is eliminated, and about 4 tons of wastes are produced. Hydrogen can be obtained using in liquid plasma method; plasma has active chemical species to possibly break the lignocellulosic bond to produce the hydrogen. The advantage of plasma is that it can enhance the chemical reaction rate, and therefore reduce the production cost. Ms. Amaliyah used three kinds of the banana stem to decompose hydrogen. She stated that this research had produced many kinds of gas such as hydrogen, oxygen, carbon monoxide, methane, etc. Every part of the banana stem has different contain lignocellulosic such as lignin in peel banana is higher than the other part so that the result shows less hydrogen. However, she also mentioned that for the true stem assume that each layer has different compositions. She stated that this method is very simple because this research is not using any catalyst just pure water. She also shows the result of the production rate and gas percentage of hydrogen gas. The result shows that hydrogen gas obtained higher when applying plasma in the true banana stem.
The final presenter is Mr. James Guild. He discussed on “Turning a Liability into an Asset: How the Challenge of Powering Indonesia’s Remote Grids is an Opportunity to Shape Cutting-Edge Energy Policy.” He mentioned that Indonesia has ambitious energy goals; Jokowi has 5 Year Power Plan – Add 35 GW of installed capacity by 2019, PLN wants a 100% electrification ratio by 2024, and Ministry of Energy wants to increase renewables as the percentage of the energy mix to 23% by 2025. This is very ambitious goals and has a lot of challenges to achieving and implementing them. Electrification ratio, particularly in Eastern Indonesia, is still low, especially in Papua still around 50%, Maluku around 80%, and Nusa Tenggara around 60%. That makes a long way to go to achieve 100% electrification ratio. He also mentioned that renewable energy itself could not generate enough energy just for Java and Sumatra. Therefore, this presentation seeks to broadly identify opportunities where PLN and energy policy can use renewable technologies to power remote grids and in the process, develop grid management technologies. In the hope that PLN to start developing smarter, more efficient, and new technologies. The challenges are like remote area, particularly in eastern Indonesia, are difficult to electrify and to access, lack of reliable infrastructure, and prohibitively high capital costs, not economically sustainable. This is an opportunity to push for developing a robust renewable sector, and to be on the cutting edge of energy policy and grid technology. Renewables cannot generate power on the scale of a coal-fired plant. But they don’t need to in remote grid because of the electricity demands in Nusa Tenggara (670 MW), Maluku (272 MW), and Papua (220 MW), they don’t need the big plant, they can use solar, wind, and biomass to produce renewable energy. A network of micro-grids that are intelligently and efficiently managed using better grid technology, I think that where the technology policy is going in the 21st century. He derived US model is focused on capital investment – expanding the grid, and building more plant, more generating capacity. This reflected the needs of 20th-century industrialization. Rapid urban expansion meant that power plants needed to generate vast amounts of electricity and send them over long distances to electrify growing cities and manufacturing centers and somewhat similar to Java and Sumatra right now. Energy utilities in the United States were allowed to maintain vertically integrated monopolies on power generation and distribution, but rates were carefully controlled on the investment base on how many more plant they build. This monopoly power is now being eroded by renewables, smarter grid technology, and better battery storage. In the 21st century, you will find that trend continue grids will increasingly need to be multi-directional, capable of receiving as well as delivering power to consumers and businesses and more efficiently managing the distribution of energy being produced. Instead of just a couple of big high capacity coal plant, lots of different power sources sometimes would be quite small. 21st-century grids serving dynamic markets will likely have some or all of the following attributes: They will be modular meaning they will be smaller and segmented of course, the smaller the grid, the less energy is required to power it, reducing capital costs and lowering barriers to entry. They will be smarter using sensors and software will allow for improved management of the grid so we can understand in real time how energy produced and distributed. They will be multidirectional, meaning consumer not only consume the energy but can produce energy and send it back to the grid. Far-sighted Indonesian energy policy should look to avoid getting locked into a similar high-carbon energy model with the same misaligned incentive structure. It can do so by aggressively embracing renewables to remote power grids, which are uniquely suited locations for the application of this technology. Solar, biomass gasification and wind power have much lower barriers to entry and can be deployed in areas where building expensive coal-fired plants are impossible. The technology is already proven, and costs are coming down. The big challenge going forward will be integrating a wide array of smaller power sources into an integrated grid and utilizing sensor technology and software to manage it efficiently in real-time. Doing so will give PLN critical experience in developing smarter grid management systems that link together a series of segmented micro-grids. And it will ensure that while the bulk of resources are going toward building big, expensive plants in Java and Sumatra, rural electrification of remote parts of eastern Indonesia will not be overlooked, and that Indonesian energy policy is anticipating future developments in the market.
