Southeast Asia is one of the most vulnerable regions in the world to global climate change.
As the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) found in its latest report, Southeast Asia faces rising sea levels, heat waves, violent storms and reduced river flows due to reservoir construction and water extraction.
Yet, the urgency displayed by national governments, both individually and collectively through the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), lies in stark contrast to this emerging threat.
National plans to constrain the rise of carbon emissions from energy use lack ambition, and in some cases are not even treated as self-binding.
The latest ASEAN Energy Outlook, produced by the ASEAN Centre for Energy in November 2020, projects that energy consumption in the region may double between now and 2040. This could involve a doubling of fossil fuel use unless radical action is taken.
Just this week however, Malaysia’s prime minister Ismail Sabri Yaakob announced plans for the country to “become a carbon neutral country by 2050 at the earliest.”
Whilst the path to energy decarbonisation involves many different technologies, renewable energy has become one of the most important in recent years as costs have declined over the last decade – by 80 per cent for large-scale solar photovoltaic installations and 40 per cent for onshore wind farms.
However, many Southeast Asian countries have been slow to install new renewable energy capacity and are heavily reliant on fossil fuels.
Coal and natural gas supply almost 75 percent of the region’s electricity. Hydroelectricity accounts for another 20 per cent and other forms of renewable energy provide just 5 per cent.
Since 2011, the installed capacity of hydroelectricity has risen by 70 per cent, mainly in the Mekong River Basin. However, future growth may be limited by factors such as the need to displace communities, the destruction of fisheries in the Mekong Delta and changing weather patterns.
In contrast, other forms of renewable energy have great potential. Solar and wind energy are the most mature of these technologies. However, despite their sharp decline, costs remain higher in Southeast Asia than in many other regions due to constraints on project development, weak supply chains and project risks.
GEOTHERMAL ENERGY TECHNOLOGIES
Geothermal energy technologies are mature, but costs vary greatly with location, even in areas of high potential such as Indonesia and the Philippines.
Bioenergy is another promising technology, given the ample supply of sustainable biomass such as crop residues in Southeast Asia. Thailand is the regional leader in biomass for electricity generation, whilst Indonesia leads the production of liquid biofuels.
All these forms of energy can provide off-grid solutions to islands and other remote communities.
Given the availability of these renewable energy resources across Southeast Asia, the installed capacity of non-hydro renewable electricity generation in the region has risen nearly five-fold since 2011.
Yet, more than 50 per cent of this growth has been in Vietnam, mainly in solar, and another 25 per cent in Thailand, in solar and bioenergy, due to their respective governments’ concerted efforts at developing renewable energy. The other eight Member States have done relatively little.
VARIABILITY OF RESOURCES
To understand why, we need to look first at the variation of availability of renewable energy resources across the region.
Whilst Southeast Asia has a relatively hot climate for much or all of the year, the intensity of solar radiation does not match that of the deserts of the Middle East, North Africa or western China.
In general, the solar energy potential of the region is similar to parts of southern Europe, such as Italy and southern France, but much better than in Germany, a country with a lot of installed solar power.
Solar accounts for about 60 per cent of Southeast Asia’s installed capacity of non-hydro renewable electricity, but the areas that receive the strongest solar intensity are concentrated in the Mekong region: Thailand, Myanmar, Cambodia, and southern Vietnam.
Until it was recently overtaken by Vietnam, Thailand hosted the largest installed capacity of solar power in the region.
By the end of 2020, Vietnam had 16,000 MW of installed solar capacity, dwarfing that of Thailand at 3,000 MW. But solar energy only makes up a fraction of these countries’ energy mix: Solar photovoltaics contributed only 4 percent of electricity generation in Vietnam and 2.6 per cent in Thailand.
Tropical and equatorial regions across the world tend to have relatively low potential for wind energy on land.
As a result, wind energy provides relatively little electricity in Southeast Asia. Most of this is in Thailand and, to a lesser extent, in Vietnam and the Philippines. (www.channelnewsasia.com)
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