Perspectives for The Clean Energy Transition

A transition to clean energy is about making an investment for our future generation

Hi again everyone! I am Indri from THINK-Research Team.

If you visit our website and go to Think page, you will know that su-re.co is working on some projects, such as LANDMARC, TIPPING+, Switch Africa Green, and Bioeconomy Initiative. Actually, I am working on LANDMARC (a 4-year European Commission project), but I'm also supporting and joining TIPPING+ project. You may find other posts about this project from my colleague in the future. Now, I will share one of TIPPING+ activities that we've done this week. We contribute to workshop preparation and attend the Internal Workshop.

Picture 1: The participants of the workshop

I'm helping Cynthia (one of THINK-Research team) since August this year, and I learn many things from this project. First thing, I'll tell my background briefly. I'm an Engineer. I got a Bachelor Degree in Physics Engineering and continued Master Degree in Sustainable Energy (Master of Engineering). I learned thermodynamics, fluid dynamic, heat transfer, engineering mathematics, and all renewable energy technologies (PV, wind, hydro, biogas, biomass, hydrogen, and others). I finished my thesis in bachelor and master degree by doing micro-hydro modelling using LEAP, WEAP, HOMER, and RETScreen software. So, it's interesting to learn something outside the engineering field, like social-ecological perspectives from TIPPING+ project.

There are four perspectives in this project, i.e. human geography, social-psychology and anthropology, policy, and economical. So we'll assess the case studies based on the perspective frameworks. I learn new things about human geography, social psychology, and anthropology perspectives. I remember a book which I read a few years ago: The Clash of Civilizations by Samuel Huntington. I read this book when I was in the second year of my Bachelor degree. I was interested in social discussion and philosophy course, so I bought this book. I spent a few months to finish a half part of this book. I learned that humans have so many perspectives, and the perspectives could drive social and political changes.

Picture 2: The Clash of Civilisations by Samuel Huntington

The topic of TIPPING+ project is Enabling Positive Tipping Points towards clean-energy transitions in Coal and Carbon Intensive Regions. So, in this workshop, we want to do matchmaking between the case studies and the perspectives. We played role-playing in this workshop. We used Zoom platform and divided the participants into four breakout rooms. For example, I joined the Canada case study, and I became the Federal Government and some other participants became other stakeholders roles, such as Provincial Government, Oil and Gas worker, Indigenous communities, and others. The Canada case study is the transitions of the oil sand to save the industry through energy efficiency technologies and carbon capture and storage as well as the rise of new potential technologies. We discussed the stakeholders' perspectives, either they support or not support the clean energy transition. For example, oil and gas worker didn't support this transition, but the indigenous community supported this transition. We discussed the impacts and perspectives of the transition. In the policy perspectives, there's a goal for zero carbon in 2050, but the governments get big royalty from the oil and gas company. On the other hand, in the social-ecological perspective, the indigenous people get bad impacts as they lost their land. I knew one thing from discussions: how to define the most ethical company. They said that this oil and gas company is one of the most ethical oil and gas company in the world. We need to know the corruption index to define it.

After the workshop, I did a reflection and thought about clean energy transition in Indonesia. Indonesia has a national energy target in 2025 and emission reduction target in 2030. We'll say goodbye to 2020 and welcome 2021, but it's a long way to achieve those targets. From TIPPING+ project, we met some stakeholders and collected narrative of this topic. You can read this, one of our blog posts to know the data of coal share in electricity generation. Based on the data, Indonesia is the only country who has a going-up trend for coal use in the power generation. Is Indonesia able to do energy transition and achieve those targets?

See you next post!