Bali's power sector is being turned toward solar. Work has begun in the island on a 300-megawatt plant with a gigawatt-hour storage battery, the aim being to move away from imported fuel: at present about 500 thousand kilolitres of it are burned every year. The plant is due to start operating in 2028.
Construction was launched on August 25, with the site set aside near the port of Gilimanuk. The panels will cover around 320 hectares, and a battery will go up alongside them: solar plants peak in output between ten in the morning and two in the afternoon, so storage is needed to supply electricity in the evening. Construction will cost 6.05 trillion rupiah, and the plant is expected to deliver about 470 gigawatt-hours a year.
The electricity will travel along a high-voltage line to the south of the island. This one plant will replace 151 thousand kilolitres of fuel a year out of the five hundred thousand used at present.
For several years now the governor of Bali has been insisting that only clean generation be built and that the island depend less on supplies from elsewhere. Under the plan, solar generation in Bali will be brought up to a gigawatt, and storage to 3.3 gigawatt-hours. At those capacities, oil products disappear from Bali's power sector altogether.
Local generation is being expanded through more than solar: in July work began on a waste-to-energy power plant, which is expected to come online at the end of 2027.
The plant is part of a national programme: over three years Indonesia intends to build 100 gigawatts of solar plants, and it has opened fourteen sites in one go.
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