Economist: Government Receivables Narrow PLN's Financial Room

The Executive Director of the Center of Reform on Economics (CORE) Indonesia, Mohammad Faisal, stated that unpaid government receivables are increasingly limiting the financial room of PLN. Faisal assessed that the large amount of receivables affects the company’s financial ability to maintain the reliability of the national electricity supply.

“If we link it to the current PLN power outage cases, this actually means that government receivables or government debts to PLN that are still largely unpaid are one of the factors making PLN’s financial room increasingly limited,” Faisal said when contacted in Jakarta on Monday (22/6/2026).

Faisal noted that this condition is indirectly related to PLN’s financial capacity to run its operations. One of the emerging problems is the limited supply of coal due to a fairly wide gap between the price paid by PLN and the coal price on the global market.

“The current power outage cases are actually indirectly related to PLN’s financial capacity as well. Because the main problem is the limited coal supply to PLN due to the wide spread between PLN’s purchase price and the global market price,” he said.

Faisal explained that PLN’s ability to purchase coal is highly dependent on the company’s financial condition. When financial capacity is limited, he said, the room to increase the purchase price of raw materials also becomes limited.

He assessed that if the coal purchase price needs to be raised to maintain supply, there must be a burden-sharing scheme between PLN and the government. However, such a scheme would be difficult to implement if the government itself still has unpaid obligations to PLN.