This month, Indonesia's State Investment Agency announced it will spend $367 million on new geothermal projects in the near term. Last year, geothermal accounted for most of the billion dollars of investment in renewable energy sources in Indonesia, a 520 percent year-on-year increase, according to the Pew Charitable Trusts. The government is preparing to introduce feed-in tariffs that will make the price of geothermal more competitive with fossil fuels, and Pertamina plans to double or triple its geothermal capacity in the next five years. Riadhy says geothermal in Indonesia is now poised to take off. The price has to be high enough to help us recover that and give us a return on our investment of more than 10 percent."
"But it requires huge investments up front. "It takes very little money to operate a plant to produce geothermal power," he says. Slamet Riadhy, CEO of Pertamina Geothermal, says his company will only invest in building up capacity if the price is right. The field is located in a caldera, the crater of a volcano that has erupted and collapsed. Yosef Riadi for NPR Geysers puffing steam and bubbling, sulfurous hot springs are plentiful in the Kawah Kamojang geothermal field in West Java. Until 1996, Indonesia produced more oil than it could consume, so there was little incentive to invest in geothermal, and it is still cheaper to produce electricity by burning oil or coal. That potential is roughly equivalent to 12 billion barrels of oil. At present, Indonesia is only using about half a gigawatt of its estimated potential of 28 gigawatts of geothermal energy. Indonesia has around 130 active volcanoes, strung out through the archipelago. In many spots near the Kamojang plant, boiling hot water with the sulfurous smell of rotten eggs gushes from the ground. The heat is released through vents and hot springs around the crater." Heat comes up from faults inside the crater. "This area," explains plant manager Tavip Dwikorianto, "used to be a volcano that erupted and collapsed, forming a large crater. It's is run by the geothermal arm of the state-owned oil company Pertamina. Some of the steam is piped into a plant, where it turns turbines and generates electricity that is fed into the national power grid. Steam is visible from miles away as it billows into the sky over Kawah Kamojang, Indonesia's first geothermal field in West Java. And that issue is a political hot potato. But making geothermal energy economically feasible will require adjusting the country's heavily subsidized energy prices. The country is believed have 40 percent of the world's geothermal energy resources. Indonesia, the country with the world's largest number of active volcanoes, is betting that all the hot rocks will provide a clean and reliable energy source for the future.
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