PLN Pledges to End Rolling Indonesian Power Cuts

Jakarta. Less than a week after the president called Indonesia’s electricity problems a “crisis,” the head of state utility PT PLN said the country now had a sufficient power supply and promised an end to scheduled blackouts.

“There will be no more scheduled blackouts,” Dahlan Iskan told the Jakarta Globe on Sunday. “We have made numerous improvements in the last six months, especially in regions that used to suffer blackouts due to a shortage of power such as Aceh, Belawan in North Sumatra and Manado in North Sulawesi.

“We have made many improvements across the country,” he said, adding that there were now enough energy reserves to avoid scheduled blackouts.

“Our energy reserve in Java and the island of Bali is 19 percent, while in other regions it is 10 percent,” he said.

Dahlan acknowledged that some regions outside Java and Bali, such as South Kalimantan and North Maluku, continued to experience power shortages, but said PLN was able to channel electricity from surrounding regions to prevent blackouts.

He said he had reorganized the government’s 10,000-megawatt “fast-track” electricity-generating program, appointing heads for every project that was part of the program.

“I saw that these projects were behind schedule due to a lack of control,” he said, adding that the new project heads would help speed up the work.

Dahlan also said that PLN was now better positioned to fix failing transformers quickly, which would help ease blackouts.

“You can see with the Muara Karang incident, it was fixed in less than 30 hours,” he said, referring to a problematic transformer that caused electricity cuts in parts of the capital last week.

“We did not need two months to do it. I am going to report all the improvements we have achieved in the last six months to the president when he attends an event on Tuesday in Mataram, Lombok.”

Dahlan said he would also brief President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono on problems that PLN had yet to resolve.

Fabby Tumiwa, executive director of the Institute for Essential Services Reform, however, told the Globe that Dahlan would likely regret making such promises.

“He should not be making promises about the capacity of PLN as it is unlikely the company can fulfill them due to the complexity of the problems,” Fabby said. “Electricity is not a simple matter and when he says that there will be no more blackouts, he should realize that this involves many technical issues.”

He said PLN still had a lot of work to do. “It doesn’t have the necessary infrastructure and it should realize it can’t handle all these power issues alone, that it has limitations,” Fabby said.

He suggested Indonesia rent diesel-fueled power generators to add capacity to meet the target of having a secure power reserve of at least 30 percent. “Based on my calculations, they need more than 1,000 megawatts to be generated by the generators at a cost of Rp 5 trillion [$555 million],” he said.

“The no-blackout pledge may last only three to six months.”

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