Japanese firms announced Wednesday they will meet Indonesia's electricity monopoly over a power crisis in the Southeast Asian nation they say has lost foreign investors millions of dollars. The Jakarta Japan Club will meet state electricity company PLN on Friday over chronic outages and a plan for two weeks of rolling blackouts in the capital Jakarta, JJC's secretary general Hiroyuki Amaya said.
Japanese companies are furious over six months of major blackouts on the densely populated islands of Java and Bali, which they say have cost them 41 billion rupiah (4.51 million dollars) in losses.
The roughly 1,000 Japanese companies in Indonesia are major investors in everything from heavy industry to retail but Amaya said they were being hit by power outages without prior notification in 60 percent of cases. "Sudden halts in production generate many defective products and damage production facilities, largely in chemical, tyre manufacturing and precision parts factories," he said.
Businesses in Jakarta are bracing for millions of dollars in losses when the rolling blackouts kick in Friday, switching off patches of the capital for eight hours a day. The cuts are officially due to maintenance work that will interrupt gas supplies to two state-owned generating stations in North Jakarta, but analysts have blamed the country's crumbling infrastructure.
Rising demand for electricity has led to increasing numbers of blackouts across Southeast Asia's largest economy in the past few years despite the archipelago's vast resources of oil, natural gas, coal and geothermal energy. The power crisis appears to be deteriorating even though only 53 percent of the archipelago's 234 million people has access to electricity.
The government is planning to boost capacity by some 30 percent to about 40,000 megawatts by 2011, but the first new power station is not expected to be operational until mid-2009. Central bank Governor Boediono told reporters Wednesday that the "electricity crisis" was symptomatic of infrastructure restraints which were the biggest obstacle to growth in the country.
Comments
Comments are closed.