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Cross-border electricity trade continues to play only a marginal role in Southeast Asia's energy mix, supplying around three percent of the region's electricity despite long-standing ambitions to develop an integrated ASEAN Power Grid.
Speaking at Singapore International Energy Week on Wednesday, United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP)’s Deputy Executive Secretary for Programme, Lin Yang, said regional energy connectivity must move beyond infrastructure development towards stronger governance and regulatory cooperation.
"The binding constraint is not engineering, it's governance," she said.
Yang said that the ASEAN Power Grid has made progress in recent years, citing the Laos-Thailand-Malaysia-Singapore Power Integration Project (LTMS-PIP), which has expanded from 100 megawatts to 200MW and is intended to serve as a model for wider regional electricity trading.
However, she said cross-border electricity exchanges remain limited, accounting for only about three percent of the region's total electricity supply.
"The next step must be more ambitious," she said. "The ASEAN Power Grid must not become an island of integration. It must become a node in an Asia-Pacific network."
According to ESCAP, future growth in regional power connectivity will depend less on technological capability and more on harmonising market rules and institutional frameworks between countries.
Among the key challenges are establishing common standards for third-party access, transit charges, transmission tariffs, coordinated dispatch systems, settlement mechanisms and carbon certification frameworks.
ESCAP member states. Source: Wikipedia