Blog by Debomita Dasgupta, Policy Researcher
The ASEAN Power Grid stands as a symbol of regional cooperation at a time of great uncertainty in energy markets. Even if interconnection proceeds flawlessly on time and within budget, the electricity surging through these cross-border lines might not deliver the sustainable, green future governments have promised.
The ASEAN Power Grid is transmission infrastructure. It moves electricity across borders; it doesn’t generate it. This distinction is important because the grid is being financed and praised as a climate project.
But building it and cleaning up the region’s power supply are two different achievements. A grid can be finished, funded and celebrated and still fail to deliver on sustainability, as the outcome depends on what the member states feed into it. In Indonesia and Vietnam, two of the grid’s most important participants, the answer is increasingly more coal than the climate story allows.
Indonesia is the clearest case. The state electricity utility Perusahaan Listrik Negara’s (PLN) latest plan, or RUPTL, sets an ambitious target of 42.6 GW of new renewable capacity, around 61 percent of everything being added. On paper, this mirrors the green transition promised by President Prabowo and ASEAN’s own energy ministers. But the same plan locks in 6.3 GW of new on-grid coal capacity. Additionally, there’s 8.6 GW of ‘captive’ coal, built by industrial operators to power their own nickel and mineral processing rather than to feed the public grid. That capacity sits outside the formal grid and largely outside public accounting.
So, while renewables are growing, coal isn’t shrinking. Both are expanding at once, because electricity demand is outpacing what renewables alone can deliver on the current timelines.
The imbalance is perfectly captured in a stalled coal retirement plan. Indonesia’s Just Energy Transition Partnership (JETP) was signed in 2022 with a pledge of $US 21.4 billion to accelerate coal retirement. Three years on, only 14.5 percent of that funding has been approved. The most recent JETP progress report projects fossil fuels will still supply 53 percent of installed capacity by 2030 with coal alone at 30 percent.
The scale of ambition has shrunk too. Only 1.6 GW of coal capacity is now being considered for early retirement, down from 5 GW. In December 2025, Indonesia’s chief economics minister, Airlangga Hartarto, confirmed the cancellation of plans to close the 660 MW Cirebon-1 plant by 2035, seven years ahead of its original schedule. This reverses an agreement with the Asian Development Bank under its Energy Transition Mechanism. The reversal surfaced in a trade-press confirmation, citing the plant’s remaining lifespan and supercritical technology, and drew no wider scrutiny.
Vietnam’s story runs on a parallel track, but with the same underlying mechanism. The Power Development Plan 8 cuts coal’s share of the generation mix to below 20 percent by 2030, down from roughly 31 percent in 2020. But total coal capacity is still projected to rise, from 21 GW in 2020 to around 30 GW by 2030. This is because the plan expects a rise in electricity demand from 335 billion kWh in 2025 to 505.2 billion kWh by 2030, roughly a 50 percent jump in five years.
Vietnam is also leaning harder on gas as a ‘transition fuel’. With domestic reserves depleting and the global LNG market getting more volatile, the increased reliance on imported gas is a new source of vulnerability. It undermines the energy security narrative anchoring the entire strategy.
The issue is not just a matter of demand. Indonesia caps the domestic coal price PLN pays at $US 70 a tonne, well below the international market rates. Its coal sector is dominated by a handful of politically connected family conglomerates whose influence has already reversed coal policies before. Vietnam’s version runs through state ownership instead. State owned enterprises like EVN, PetroVietnam and Vinacomin control most of the country’s coal capacity directly, with domestic prices held below market rates by the same institutions that build and run the plants.
While this does not imply a complete abandonment of climate commitments, it creates a quiet dilution of targets that is easy to disguise and hard to police. It is harder to monitor accountability in the absence of overt policy reversal. Coal retirement targets are downgraded in a technical annex. Outside observers rarely get a chance to contest these decisions, because they are made through channels most people never watch. Even as these commitments stay on the books, getting dutifully reinstated at each new pledge, their actual implementation drifts off into irrelevance.
This is the real test facing the ASEAN Power Grid. Even if interconnection proceeds flawlessly on schedule and within budget, the electricity surging through these cross-border lines risks carrying far more coal-fired power than the region has pledged. Ultimately, the network’s environmental credibility cannot be measured by physical infrastructure alone; it hinges heavily on sovereign generation policies being enacted in regional capitals like Jakarta and Hanoi, and those policies are currently pointing toward more coal, not less.
The Indonesian JETP numbers are a warning here too. If a flagship, multi-billion-dollar pledge to early retirement cannot be delivered, the region stands little chance of financing the massive generation task ahead. It is one thing to fund the wires connecting to a grid; it is another entirely to clean up the power supply feeding it within the timeline currently being promised.
Vietnam recorded the fastest emissions growth of any major economy over the past decade, up 106 percent between 2014 and 2024, with Indonesia close behind at 63.1 percent. Both countries will carry these numbers into COP31 in Antalya this November. Indonesia’s energy sector emissions aren’t projected to peak until 2035 . That leaves the country’s Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) to lean on land-sector offsets and a forestry net-sink target to make its overall numbers work. Vietnam’s net zero target still hasn’t cleared its own legislature, five years after it was first announced at COP26. Both countries have maintained that they remain committed to their climate targets. The question COP31 should be asking isn’t whether Jakarta and Hanoi still believe those numbers. It’s whether their actual power plans still back them up.
This article has been sourced from the official website of Asialink and can be accessed here. It has been slightly edited.