US, Japan-led climate pact set to offer Indonesia $15b

Bloomberg

The US, Japan and other countries will offer a climate finance deal worth as much as $20 billion to help Indonesia shift its coal-dominated power grid away from the polluting fossil fuel.
Details of an agreement will be announced during the Group of 20 meetings in Bali next week after talks between US President Joe Biden and Indonesian President Joko Widodo, Coordinating Maritime Affairs and Investment Minister Luhut Panjaitan said on Friday. He confirmed an earlier Bloomberg News report that the deal will be at least $15 billion.
The “just energy transition partnership,” or JETP, pact with Japan, the US and others follows roughly a year of negotiations and could be announced as soon as Tuesday.
The deal would enable Indonesia to accelerate efforts to shutter excess fossil fuel generation capacity, and to limit its pipeline of coal power projects, factors that are currently thwarting the development of renewable energy, the people said.
“I do hope the size is going to be big enough to create confidence in terms of delivering
the transition of energy,”
Indonesia’s Finance Minister Sri Mulyani Indrawati said at the Bloomberg CEO Forum in Bali.
Southeast Asia’s largest economy will need about $600 billion to phase out coal generation, add a similar amount of renewable capacity and make other changes like developing an electric vehicle sector over the next three decades, State-owned Enterprises Minister Erick Thohir said in a September interview.
Indonesia recently stepped up its emissions reduction targets with plans for more aggressive greenhouse gas cuts by 2030, and has set out a goal of reaching net-zero by 2060 by developing more solar, geothermal and nuclear power. Coal currently dominates the nation’s economy, accounting for more than half of the country’s electricity and is a key driver of growth — Indonesia is the world’s top exporter of thermal coal.
The agreement is modeled after a similar $8.5 billion climate finance deal for South Africa first outlined at last year’s UN climate summit, while talks are also under way on efforts to strike pacts for nations including Senegal and India. South Africa only this month published a detailed investment plan, showing how complex it can be to turn initial bare bones deals into fully
realised proposals.
However, unlike the South African deal, which was hastily advanced at last year’s climate summit, the Indonesian JETP is the product of a full year of negotiations and the initial framework is more detailed,
according to some of the people.
US officials have been working to steer some of the world’s most populous countries to cleaner forms of energy, including talks with Indonesia and Vietnam, US special presidential envoy for climate John Kerry said in an interview last month.
Indonesia’s abundance of thermal coal and large volume of potential power plant projects have long been cited as a barrier to the nation bringing on more capacity in renewables. State-run electricity utility Perusahaan Listrik Negara, or PLN, has a pipeline of about 13.7 gigawatts of new coal generating capacity under construction or development.
Under the JETP, some of those new coal plants would not be built and total new coal power capacity additions would shrink to about 10 gigawatts, some of the people said. PLN didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
It’s not immediately clear how many existing coal plants PLN would commit to closing early under the deal, though company executives previously have identified 6.7 gigawatts for potential early retirement.