The ASEAN Power Grid: Why every year of delay matters

Read the full piece from Ember with link to PDF here.

The ASEAN Power Grid (APG) has been discussed for decades yet built only in fragments. Ember’s modelling shows that one year of slippage beyond the commercial operation date of 2035 will add $2.6 billion in economic losses, accumulating to over $14 billion in five years. Delays will also fundamentally alter the region’s energy transition path as countries get locked in imported fossil fuels for capacity that will still be running in the 2050s. Execution, rather than agreement or capital, is now the constraint for the APG.

The APG offers a solution by linking national power systems. It harnesses the pooling effect of geographic diversity, balancing the variability of solar and wind generation, enabling the sharing of reserve capacity, optimising renewable resources across the region and enhancing system security, reliability and market efficiency. The Lao PDR–Thailand–Malaysia–Singapore Power Integration Project (LTMS-PIP) already shows that cross-border interconnections work even across very different market designs, connecting a liberalised market to state-owned utilities through sustained coordination rather than structural harmonisation.

Despite decades since the ASEAN Power Grid (APG) was first conceived as an idea, grid-to-grid cross-border interconnection represents only about 0.5% of the regional demand, and the APG mostly operates as isolated generation-to-grid projects. As reliance on imported fossil fuels leaves the region increasingly exposed to geopolitical shocks, the case for the APG to boost resilience through renewable integration has strengthened recently.

Source: Wikipedia