After spending over two years advising on Indonesia’s flagship deal to prematurely phase out the first coal plant under its Just Energy Transition Partnership (JETP), Singapore lender DBS is now less hopeful about the prospects of scaling the model nationwide.
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“When I undertook this mandate more than two and a half years ago, I indeed hoped that it would be catalytic and there would be a ready pipeline of projects, either in Indonesia or Southeast Asia,” said Kelvin Wong, global head of energy, renewables and infrastructure, Institutional Banking Group at DBS.
“Truth be told, with the difficulties we have gone through in the last 30 months, I’m more circumspect about the viability of the project.”
Wong shared his assessment of the project’s prospects at the ASIFMA Sustainable Finance Conference in Hong Kong last month on a panel. He said that overseas experts estimating the cost of the country’s transition away from the pollutive energy source did not factor in its impact on Indonesia’s grid stability and the costs of grid expansion to integrate renewables, which are variable and intermittent, “until way later into the game”.
“Had we known the costs that we know now, it is debatable whether the Indonesian authorities would still have wanted to undertake this same exercise,” he said. While Wong did not specify how much higher the price tag is, the country’s finance ministry recently said that replacing the coal plant with renewable energy could reach US$1.3 billion – up from the US$300 million that the Asian Development Bank previously estimated.
As the sole financial advisor to Indonesia’s sovereign wealth fund on the early retirement of Cirebon 1, a relatively young 600-megawatt (MW) coal plant in West Java which started in 2012, DBS has been working with the Asian Development Bank to reach out to get institutional investors, sovereign wealth funds and impact investors to participate in the transaction.
The concessional capital from impact investors helped to crowd in commercial banks that would have otherwise avoided financing the project as it is “too new” and its scalability remains “a big unknown”, said Wong.
DBS – which became the first Southeast Asian bank to update its coal policy to allow for managed phase-out in March – is “likely to be part of” the transaction, Wong shared.
The transaction, however, “is still not closed by any stretch of imagination”, said Wong. “There is still a lot of discussions, particularly with the new administration coming in. But the groundwork is laid, and hopefully there will be some announcements at COP29.”
The deal, which aims to shut down the coal plant nearly seven years ahead of schedule, was meant to be finalised in the first half of 2024, according to an agreement signed at the COP28 climate summit last year.
“As it stands, it’s not a very attractive proposition to Indonesia and partly also because of JETP,” Wong told Eco-Business. “Basically not a dime has been used from JETP. If you trace back to COP27, a big part of it was meant for the Energy Transition Mechanism [the country’s blended finance platform to accelerate the switch from coal to clean energy].”
“The people picking up the bill are PLN [Indonesia’s national power utility] and Indonesian citizens. So I think that the cost needs to be fully pinned down. The incoming administration will need to decide if this is the cost they want to bear beyond the first project.”
Indonesia’s Prabowo Subianto officially assumed office last month. To date, the archipelago has yet to receive the promised US$21.6 billion in JETP funding pledged by rich nations, led by the United States and Japan.The new administration has inherited a renewable energy bill to pass into law, but critics have found it weak and are sceptical of the leadership’s political will to address roadblocks hampering the energy transition.
Leonardo Martinez-Diaz, managing director for climate finance of the US Special Presidential Envoy for Climate, who spoke on another panel session, did not give any definitive updates of what JETP has achieved since it was announced in 2022.
Responding to an audience’s question, he said: “Through the efforts of governments and different parties, including the private sector, we have been able to achieve a very clear understanding of what needs to be done… We are happy that it is beginning to bear fruit.”
On the back of the US elections last week, there remains no official confirmation on whether Prabowo will meet with president-elect Donald Trump, which puts the prior US administration’s initiatives on climate-related issues, including JETP, in a limbo.
Better prospects in the Philippines
While the financing structure for the early retirement of Cirebon 1 “may not be replicable”, Wong believes scalability can be achieved in the Philippines, where a novel class of carbon credits known as “transition credits” are being piloted.
Transition credits, which were first mooted by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) in a working paper last year, present an additional revenue stream. But Cirebon 1 was “too early for it” and current methodologies may not enable transition credits to be generated under Indonesia’s regulatory context, he said.
Indonesia currently requires any new clean energy project to go through a competitive tender, meaning that the shareholders of the coal asset being shuttered could differ and have no contractual link to that of its replacement renewable energy plant.
According to an interim report launched at the COP29 summit in Baku on Thursday by the MAS-led Transition Credits Coalition, such a structure “will likely pose more complex challenges in terms of bankability, risk-sharing mechanism and alignment of interests.”
The report recommended establishing “robust financial and risk management strategies”, which can come in the form of a joint venture agreement, in such a scenario. The agreement would outline the rights and responsibilities between the owners of the coal plant and the renewable energy facility as well as how the transition credits risks and proceeds will be shared.
On Tuesday, the Coal Transition Commission (CTC), which was formed at COP28 last year and co-chaired by the governments of France and Indonesia, also published its recommendations endorsing the use of “high integrity coal-to-clean carbon credits” for financing early coal plant closures.
However, the Paris-headquartered non-governmental research and campaign organisation Reclaim Finance commented that while it welcomed CTC’s calls for more public financing of the removal of coal subsidies, “its repeated promotion of carbon offsetting as a way to bring more finance into coal phase-outs is deeply concerning”.
The group also urged the French government to increase its financing of coal phase-outs and clean energy overseas and in Indonesia to step up its efforts to transition away from coal.
Apart from expanding the supply of clean energy, the CTC’s report stated that emissions can also be reduced from existing coal fleets – especially young and large plants – through retrofitting them with carbon capture, utilisation and storage (CCUS) technology or to co-fire the facilities with biomass and ammonia.
The CTC acknowledged that CCUS has made “limited progress to date”, but if the some 80 new projects to be completed by 2030 materialise, they could capture close to 90 million tonnes of carbon dioxide, or half the level needed in the International Energy Authority (IEA)’s net zero by 2050 scenario.
It also flagged the high costs of biomass and ammonia fuels and that co-firing these fuels with coal produces nitrogen oxide emissions – which are approximately 270 times more potent than carbon dioxide in warming the planet.
