Indonesia leads the world with 150 volcanoes. Indonesia is also the most seismically active country is the world and it seems that hardly a quarter goes by when a new earthquake or volcanic eruption is not reported someplace in Indonesia.
The good side to having a prominent location on the so-called ring of fire is that Indonesia has incredible non-emitting geothermal power generation capacity. In January 2009, Indonesia’s total installed geothermal capacity was only 1.2 GW, primarily on the island of Java. But Indonesia has identified 256 potential volcanic projects with a total of 27 GW of power generation potential and 53 non-volcanic projects with an estimated 1.1 GW of capacity, distributed over Indonesia’s many islands (of which also incredibly there are about 18 000).
According to Indonesia’s Power Development Plan 2008-2018, electricity demand is expected to grow by 9.7% per annum through 2018. This will require 57 GW of new capacity, to be built by PLN and independent power producers ( IPP). The total investment is estimated to be be US$ 56 billion, broken down as
- Generation US$38 billion
- Transmission US$9.5 billion
- Distribution US$8.5 billion
Phase 2 of the plan targets 10 GW of new capacity at a cost of about US$15.8 billion. About half or 5 GW of this is planned to be geothermal and12% hydro.
Currently the US leads the world in geothermal power capacity. I blogged previously about geothermal power generation in Nevada, which on a per capita basis is the leading state in geothermal power capacity in the US.
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