Introduction

Indonesia, which is the largest archipelago country in the world, is located between
the Pacific and Indian Oceans. Indonesia has in total 17,508 islands and even such
huge land only takes account nearly 20% of Indonesia’s total area (Asian
Development Bank, 2016). In other words, about 80% of Indonesia’s area is sea.
Moreover, there are about 5,700 rivers spread within those islands (Asian
Development Bank, 2016). Gokhale, Date, Akbarzadeh, Bismantolo, Suryono,
Mainil, and Nuramal (2017) assert that Indonesia’s geographical location makes its
weather affected by rainfall. Thus, such rainfall can increase Indonesia’s river stream
flows. In other words, Indonesia has high potential in utilizing hydro energy as
renewable energy source. Moreover, some researchers emphasize that Indonesia is
actually able to utilize its hydro energy potential in total of about 70 GW (Budiman,
Das, Mohammad, Tan, and Tonby, 2014; Gohkale et al, 2017). In contrast, until 2015,
there is only in total of about 5 GW of national installed hydro power plant
(Directorate General of Electricity).
Indonesia is still working on the development of hydro energy. Slowly but
sure, Indonesia has enhanced in total of 1.2 GW since 2011 up to 2015 (Directorate
General of Electricity). However, hydro energy is not yet becoming the main focus of
Indonesia since it still plays a very minor role in total power plant development. For
instance, national installed steam power plant is over 27 GW in 2015. This power
plant type even has been increased in amount of about 11 GW since 2011. In terms of
its national capacity in 2015, steam power plant is the greatest contributor to national
power plant capacities, followed by combination of gas and steam power plant with
capacity of 10 GW, and then diesel power plant with capacity of 6 GW, following
behind is gas power plant with capacity of 4.3 GW, and then hydropower plant with
capacity of 5 GW. In other words, hydro energy is in the rank of number 5 in terms of
its national installed capacities.
With these elaborations, Indonesia has not yet been able to utilize its natural
resource to provide renewable energy and still highly rely on fossil-fuel energy.
However, keep utilizing fossil-fuel energy will ultimately bring adverse effect to
Indonesia since it has major contribution to carbon gas emission. Furthermore, even
though Indonesia is ranked in the top 20 of world’s oil production and ranked 10th in
terms of world gas production (PWC, 2016), such fossil fuel energy takes a very long
time to be renewed and, again, is highly dangerous for the environment. With this in
mind, it would be very useful for the author to study about the renewable energy
utilization in Indonesia, specifically hydropower. The objective of this paper is to find
out hydro energy potential in Indonesia. The author will start this study by presenting
the current status of national installed hydro power plant and discussing its current
development. Next, the author will discuss the classifications of hydro power plant
and hydro power plant’s challenges. Forth, the author will present the hydro energy
potential in Indonesia and the reason why we should chose to utilize that potential
with hydro energy. Finally, the author will end with conclusion.

Current Situation of Installed Hydro Power Plant in Indonesia

The national installed capacities by all types of power plant –including hydro power
plant- that is presented here was retrieved from Directorate General of Electricity and
Indonesia’s government-own electricity company (PLN). They together formulate
The Book of Electricity Statistics annually. The purpose of publishing this book is to
provide information about electricity and energy, and related information in
Indonesia. In this paper, the author retrieved the data from The Book of Electricity
Statistics from 2012 to 2015. Directorate General of Electricity is established under
Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources. Furthermore, PLN is a government-
owned company that has monopoly on electricity distribution in Indonesia; in other
words, any power plant constructor company will sell its electricity supply to PLN.
Based on the data provided, Indonesia is currently utilizing 3 types of hydropower
which are classified as micro hydropower, mini hydropower, and hydropower. Such
classifications are differentiated based on their capacity, ranging from the small to the
large respectively. In order to avoid confusion, starting from this point, the author will
refer the term of hydro –or hydro energy- as hydro energy resource in general, and
hydropower as the third classification of hydro power plant installed in Indonesia. Up
to 2015, capacity hydro power plant installed has contributed to about 9% of total
capacities of all types of power plant installed. Moreover, as stated earlier, its
development has not been as fast as fossil-fuel energy power plant, such as steam or
gas power plant.
 From this table, there is evidence that Indonesia has been incrementally
enhancing the development of hydro energy. To be more specific, Indonesia has an
average annual growth rate of 6.5% from 2009 to 2015. Moreover, there was a
significant growth from 2012 to 2013 in which we can see a growth rate of almost
25%. This significant growth is majorly contributed by non-PLN owned installed
power plant, such as Independent Power Plant (IPP), Power Producer Utility (PPU),
and Izin Operasi non-BBM (Operating License for non-fossil-fuel energy). These
classifications are also categorized as private companies. However, we can also see a
very slow development from 2013 to 2014 and from 2014 and 2015 with growth rate
of 1.2% and 0.6% respectively. Within those years, there is a significant declining
growth of national installed power plant –by all types of power plant-, with annual
growth rate of 13%, 12%, 4.3%, and 4.6% from 2011 to 2015 respectively (see table 2
in appendix for more details). Specifically, the total increase in capacities by all types
of power plant owned by Indonesia is only around 2,000 MW per year from 2013 to
2015, in which 90% of each increase is contributed by fossil-fuel energy. This is
unfortunately evidence that currently Indonesia has still focused to electrify its
regions using fossil-fuel energy. Regardless of this evidence, both government and
private companies are still incrementally enhancing the development of hydro energy
in Indonesia.

Hydro Power Plant Classifications based on Its Scheme

In order to deeply understand hydro power plant, it will be very useful to comprehend
the classifications of hydro power plant. Based on its scheme, there are three
conventional classifications; which consisting of run-of-river hydro power, hydro
power with reservoirs for storage, and pumped storage hydro power (IRENA, 2012).
The first scheme is less expensive than the later two schemes, but it has major
drawback of highly depending on the river’s flow and potentially cannot meet the
demand while the stream flow is not enough. Moreover, when the flow is more than
sufficient, there will be a “lost opportunity” in which the excess energy retrieved from
the turbine is not stored. On the other hand, the later two schemes offer the solution to
that problem in which such schemes can store the energy and use it once it is needed.
Moreover, the pumped storage hydropower scheme has an even technological
advance in its storage system; the water from a lower reservoir or river can be
pumped up to a higher position in order to retrieve a great river’s flow. The pumping
process ultimately requires energy, but there will be even higher energy provided after
the pumping process.

Challenges of Hydro Energy (Dam)

Those three schemes mostly involve a dam and; however, dam has produced
renewable energy with several environmental expenses. International Rivers posited
that large dam brings some environmental consequences. For example, it leads to
changes in temperature, chemical composition, dissolved oxygen levels, and the
physical properties of the reservoir. Those changes are not suitable to the aquatic
plants and animals that evolved with a given river system. Next, the dam alters river’s
flow and sediment transport downstream, and it makes life in and around the river
evolve and highly affected by the timing and quantities of the river’s flow. These
effects lead to the extinction of aquatic species; especially fishes. Moreover, the river
that actually contains sediments –such as gravel, sand, and silt- is held still within a
reservoir. As time goes by, the sediments will sink to the bottom of reservoir and will
be accumulated. This will worsen the capacity and efficiency that a dam has to
produce electricity. An effort is needed to clean the reservoir by dredging the
sediments out.
Since the existence of dam actually gives adverse effect to environment,
Indonesia should advance its hydro energy technology; thus, it can supply a green
energy. It is not impossible at all. There is a German–based company (called Smart
Hydro Power) that invented a smart floating turbine which can supply electricity from
kinetic energy of flowing waters. The usage of such smart turbine does not require
any dam. Even though it cannot produce great amount of electricity like dam, the
company is still developing its product to become more advanced and able to supply
greater electricity. Currently, this smart turbine has supplied energy to food
processing project in India and to telecom project in Indonesia. Moreover, it can even
electrify a remote area in Nigeria (which consisting of seven households). This
turbine first established and tested on 2010 in Germany. Thus, this is still a fresh
invention and the author believes that such smart floating turbine can be more
advanced and produce greater electricity in the future.

Hydro Energy Potential in Indonesia

At the end of 2014, electrification ratio of Indonesia was up to 84% (Gokhale et al,
2017). Regardless this quite high percentage, there is still a high inequality of
electrification rate in Indonesia. For instance, 94% of urban area is electrified; on the
other hand, only 66% of rural area is already supplied by electricity (IEA, 2015). In
other words, 34% of rural area in Indonesia is still not yet electrified. Moreover, cited
from PWC (2016), Indonesia aims to electrify 99.7% of its region by 2025. With this
in mind, high effort is absolutely needed to achieve this target, and it can be done by
putting more attention to electrify the rural areas. Thus, private companies ultimately
can support government to achieve this target by electrifying such remote areas,
particularly by utilizing hydro energy.
Furthermore, in analyzing the data of current situation of hydro energy in
Indonesia, the author finds that there are three kinds of potential that particularly
private companies can utilize to build hydro power plant. First, private companies can
do so in regions in which PLN has built hydro power plant, but private companies
have not. In this case, the existence of PLN’s hydro power plant shows that hydro
energy is able to be utilized in that region and potentially to be enhanced further. For
example, the regions included in this case are Lampung, Jogjakarta, South Borneo,
Gorontalo, and Papua (see table 3 and table 4 in appendix for more details). Second,
private companies can further enhance hydro power plant in which regions PLN has
not built any such power plant. The regions included in this case are Bali and West
Sulawesi. In these regions, private companies are the ones who possess the hydro
power plant; meanwhile PLN focuses on fossil-fuel energy power plant in those
regions. Finally, there are still regions in which both PLN and private companies have
not yet constructed any hydro power plant until 2015. These regions are Riau Islands,
Jambi, Bangka Belitung, Banten, Central Borneo, and Eastern Borneo. In these
regions, further research is absolutely needed for the specific condition of the rivers
within those regions in order to find out whether hydropower energy can be utilized
or not.
Even though hydro energy is not yet developed in those regions, some
researchers of University of Indonesia posited that some of those regions actually
have potential in hydro energy (Purwanto, Nugroho, Dalimi, Soepardjo, Wahid,
Supramono, Adilina, 2006). First, there are two rivers in Jambi that can actually
produce around 1.3 MW from micro hydro energy. Second, about 2.8 MW of
electricity can also be produced by micro hydro energy from 6 rivers in Central
Kalimantan. Moreover, Eastern Borneo is potential to produce almost 1 MW of micro
hydro energy from its 4 rivers. Thus, reflecting the fact that hydro energy is not yet
developed in these three regions, private companies can consider to support these
regions’ electrification using hydro energy.

The Reasons of Choosing Hydro Energy

Regardless the adverse effect that large dam has on the environment, rivers in rural
area of Indonesia are actually potential with the development of micro or mini hydro.
In other words, the size of dam needed is absolutely not large; and the adverse effect
that it has is not that huge. The author believes that it is still better to use such small
hydro power plant compared to use fossil-fuel energy (such as diesel) to electrify rural
areas. By electrifying the rural area using diesel, there are some consequences that the
author highlighted from conserve-energy-future.com. First, besides it is non-
renewable, the people of the area need to constantly supply themselves with diesel to
fuel up the power plant and highly rely on the price fluctuations of the diesel (or any
other type of fossil-fuel energy). Moreover, the usage of diesel power plant will
highly contribute to carbon emission. Thus, it will highly deteriorate citizen’s health
and environmental condition.
In contrast, hydro energy offers a clean and renewable energy that does not
contribute to carbon emission. Moreover, by utilizing hydro energy in the rural areas,
it will educate the people of such areas about the importance of utilizing renewable
energy and avoiding using non-renewable energy. In the future, the author believes
that the development of smart hydro turbine will be more advanced and able to
produce greater electricity. Thus, this is also one opportunity that can be utilized to
develop hydro energy without dam.
Conclusion
Indonesia, which is the largest archipelago country in the world and possesses
about 5,700 rivers spread within those islands (Asian Development Bank, 2016),
actually has very large potential in hydro energy. To be more specific, some
researchers argued that Indonesia has potential capacity of over 70,000 MW in hydro
energy (Budiman et al, 2014; Gokhale et al, 2017). Moreover, the author also believes
that the best way to electrify the unelectrified areas in Indonesia is using renewable
energy, specifically hydro energy. For now, the author still believes that even though
building a dam can lead to adverse effect to the environment, the utilization of fossil-
fuel energy to electrify remote areas is still even worse idea. Moreover, the
application of mini or micro hydro only requires much smaller size of dam. Thus, the
adverse effect that it has ultimately not as huge as the large dam has. Forth, the author
suggests that private companies should reflect to Smart Hydro Power technology to
get the depiction and inspiration that it is not impossible to utilize hydro energy
without dam.
Reference:

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 Appendix:

Table 3. PLN’s installed capacity by type of power plant and by region 2015 (MW)

Source: Directorate General of Electricity and PLN

Table 4. Private companies’ installed capacity by type of power plant and by region
2015 (MW)

Source: Directorate General of Electricity and PLN

Hydro Energy Potential in Indonesia

Environmental Economics
Lecturer: Dr. Joeri Sol

Daniel Agung Pratama

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