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The economic case for connecting South-east Asia’s power grids has been made, and made well.
Trillions of dollars in cumulative gross domestic product gains, millions of new jobs, renewables’ share climbing towards half the region’s power mix – these data now circulate freely in the region’s energy debate, cited in conference speeches and investment prospectuses alike.
Less discussed is what it would actually take to realise them. Asean is not short of ambition or capital.
The harder question underneath the headline figures is: How do more than a dozen sovereign grid operators actually agree to share power in real time, across borders, with most of them built for self-sufficiency rather than interdependence?
That is the less glamorous, more consequential story.
The IEA has been blunt that the obstacles are political and institutional far more than engineering problems. Building a transmission line is a construction project; building a grid that sovereign operators can jointly run is institution-building, on three fronts.
The first is technical standards. The second is data and operational coordination.
The third, and hardest, is institutional. Asean still lacks a bloc-wide framework for coordinating power-system operations, regulation and enforcement across borders. Much of the current architecture is built around bilateral and multilateral arrangements.
Source: Wikipedia