Let PLN Rent Out the Grid It Already Owns
Let PLN Rent Out the Grid It Already Owns
In February 2026, Iran shut the Strait of Hormuz, and for a few tense weeks Indonesia’s energy dependence played out in real numbers. The Indonesian Crude Price (ICP) umped from US$102.26 to US$117.31 a barrel in a month, and every additional $1 above the state budget’s assumption added roughly Rp 10.3 trillion to state spending while raising only about Rp 3.5 trillion in extra revenue. By mid-June, Washington and Tehran had reached an agreement and the crisis faded from the headlines. But the vulnerability it exposed did not disappear with it. Indonesia still imports roughly a quarter of its crude from a region that can seize up overnight, and national fuel reserves last barely three to four weeks. The next shock, from that chokepoint or another one, is a matter of when.
The structural fix has been sitting above our own rooftops the whole time. Indonesia holds an estimated 207 gigawatts of technical solar potential, by far the largest slice of the country’s renewable endowment. Yet renewables made up only 15.75% of the national electricity mix at the end of 2025, and the government has already had to push its 23% target from 2025 out to 2030. The Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) puts the private investment Indonesia needs to hit its 2030 climate targets at around $146 billion, and has flagged PLN’s position as the sole mandatory offtake partner as one of the main reasons that investment has stalled. The constraint is structural: a single off-taker still decides whether almost every solar project lives or dies.
This debate usually collapses into an argument over a single imported phrase, “power wheeling,” and stays stuck there. But as of this month, it does not have to. At a hearing with the Indonesian Renewable Energy Society (METI) on Sept. 8, 2026, Commission XII chair Bambang Patijaya told legislators the unresolved piece of the energy transition is precisely this network-access question and that instead of an open-access obligation, it could be structured as a network lease, in which PLN is unambiguously the landlord. “If it’s a network lease, the position is clearer,” he said. “The owner of the asset is PLN.”
That is a more honest description of what is being proposed than the imported label ever was. A solar developer in East Java could lease PLN’s transmission capacity to supply a factory in Cikarang or a data center in Jakarta, paying PLN a regulated fee for wires it continues to own and operate. PLN does not lose its role as system operator or asset owner. It gains a contracted revenue stream from leasing capacity it already has, while accelerating the renewables build-out it is mandated to deliver under the 2025 to 2034 Electricity Supply Business Plan (RUPTL). IEEFA made the same case in a May 2026 briefing on restructuring PLN’s transmission business into a regulated subholding, arguing this would unlock cheaper financing “without changing state ownership.” Indonesia does not need to unbundle PLN to let it earn rent on its own network.
The investment case keeps getting harder to ignore. More than 120 RE100-committed companies operate in Indonesia, representing several terawatt-hours of annual demand, and have told the government directly that scarce rooftop-solar quotas and contested renewable energy certificates are not enough to meet their sourcing commitments here. Malaysia and Vietnam already let corporates buy green power directly across their national grids, and Thailand is piloting a comparable framework. At the same Sept. 8 hearing, Commission XII member Eddy Soeparno said that financiers under the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero have roughly $1.2 billion in solar projects ready to finance, including expansions at Jatigede, Jatiluhur, and Cirata. The constraint, he said, is no longer regulation or capital. It is a bankable offtake agreement. “If this doesn’t move,” he warned, “we’ll just take the commitment elsewhere, to Kenya, to New Zealand, wherever.”
PLN’s own workforce deserves a real answer, not dismissal. The labor union has warned that opening the network could erode captive demand, strain take-or-pay obligations on coal contracts, and creep toward a liberalization the constitution does not permit. These are legitimate risks, but they argue for careful design, not for abandoning the idea. Limit leasing to verified renewable generation, as the energy ministry has proposed, and the liberalization critique loses most of its force. Price the fee to fully cover grid costs and stranded-asset recovery, and PLN’s balance sheet is protected. Give an independent regulator authority over access, pricing, and disputes, and the scheme stops being a negotiation only the largest players can win.
The cost of waiting is concrete. Indonesia counted 4,778 public EV charging points as of December 2025, against a target of 192,251 by 2034. If those chargers keep drawing from a grid still dominated by coal and gas, the EV transition becomes a carbon shell game rather than a decarbonization strategy, and RE100 firms have another reason to route new capacity toward neighbors that can already deliver a verified renewable electron to the meter.
The Hormuz crisis has passed, for now. The next fiscal shock from an economy anchored to imported fossil fuels has not. What changed this month is not the underlying economics, which have been clear for years, but the vocabulary: Indonesia’s own legislators have offered a framing that lets PLN keep the grid, collect the rent, and still unlock the solar sitting on 207 gigawatts’ worth of rooftops and idle land. The sun does not care what the mechanism is called. The consumers who pay for every month of delay do.
Agus Hasan, Professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU)
The views expressed in this article are those of the author.
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