The large Southeast Asia region of more than 500 million inhabitants was spotlighted this summer as a potential zone of priority need and growth for renewable energies in the near future at a conference in August in Bangkok organised by the Greenpeace chapter there and other organisations.

The promotion of renewable energies as been selected as a priority by the European Union before and again at the 2003 Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development and is now the target of a number of various EU programmes and projects, some directed specifically Asia and Southeast Asia.

Peter Ahmels, president of the German Wind Energy Association (BWE), who attended the meeting, welcomed it as a first promising step in establishing contact and developing renewable energy in the promising region. He noted that one of the Asian project developers was expected to follow-up the Bangkok meeting with a visit to the regular planned wind energy fair in Husum in Germany later this year.

The Bangkok gathering brought together regional government agencies, business project developers (even oil companies) and non-governmental organisations to try to develop a framework and strategy for developing RESin the region. Greenpeace said the information and contacts should assist in this development.

Region realising its needs

Greenpeace media campaigner Arthur Jones Dionio told the French news agency AFP that, "What we would like to do here is get people from the community along with the government to sit down together and say okay, we're in this situation right now with impacts already from climate change -- floods in Asia, heatwaves in Europe -- and see if we can chart a course together," he said. "We think that governments in Southeast Asia are starting to realise the importance of expanding their energy markets but at the same time being able to preserve the environment and climate," he added.

The meeting focused largely on Thailand and the Philippines, although the region comprises a number of other countries with major energy and environmental needs. The two were said to be showing promising signs of working on such development. "We think that currently because of new projects being undertaken by the Thai government that they are actually moving on track, and in the Philippines the movement is also the same direction," he said.

Delegates at the conference indicated that while governments are still searching to formulate sustainable and clean energy policies, development projects on solar, wind and biomass have already been or are currently on the works. “Southeast Asia has great potential of developing our indigenous power sources with abundant wind, sunlight and agricultural by-products. This will not only significantly reduce our dependence on oil and coal imports and provide energy security, but also preserve our community livelihoods and environment. We want to do our share in reducing the disastrous threats of climate change to people around the world,” said Penrapee Noparumpa, Climate and Energy Campaigner of Greenpeace Southeast Asia.

Renewable energy projects of all sizes have been sprouting in Thailand and the Philippine archipelagos in the past few months. “These rapid developments are unprecedented in Southeast Asia.

Governments, businesses and local communities have moved despite significant hurdles in regulations,” also said Sven Teske of Greenpeace, author of several global research papers on renewable energy.

In Thailand, solar power and bio-mass plants have been in the forefront of this still nascent trend, while in the Philippines wind energy has been tapped to boost the country's electricity supply.

Solar and biomass in Thailand

"With excellent sunshine all year-round, Thailand is primed for massive development in solar energy," Greenpeace said in a statement. "The current installed capacity of the Kingdom is only 5 megawatts, but new projects will push this capacity to 50 megawatts in five years." The Thai government recently announced it would begin a project in October to get 300,000 homes installed with solar cells, generating some 36 megawatts of electricity by its completion target in 2008. Another 4.7-megawatt government-funded solar pilot project in the northern province of Mae Hong Son was expected to be completed in two years.

The Thai government recently revealed plans to kick off a project in October aimed at providing 300,000 homes with solar cells through a project that will generate close to 36 megawatts of electricity. This comes on top of work already underway in the northern province of Mae Hong Son, close to the Burmese border, to build South-east Asia's largest solar power plant. It is due to start functioning next year. Likewise, 18 independent producers have been given licenses to generate power from their small bio-mass plants across Thailand. "With steady development in the succeeding years, Thailand can become one of the most important solar markets in Asia," Greenpeace said. "By 2010, a Greenpeace study predicts that the country's solar energy market will be worth some 153 million dollars, creating jobs for nearly 2,000 people. By 2020, the figures jump to 745 million dollars and 17,000 jobs."

Yet such encouraging signs do not suggest that the region's governments are keen to embrace the entire range of renewable energy sources, the reports indicate. "The governments that need renewable energy are still in a wait-and-see position," commented Sven Teske. "They haven't decided which road to go down."

Strategy is needed

What is missing, he added, is a comprehensive energy strategy that includes the power that can be garnered from the clean energy sources, such as wind, solar power, marine and modern bio-mass fuel. "No government has clearly admitted that it has a defined target for renewable energy and has gone after it."

This attitude is reflected in the marginal presence of renewable energy in countries that need it most. "No country in Southeast Asia reaches over one percent in renewable energy output," Alongkorn Ponlaboot, vice chairman of the Energy Standing Committee in the Thai parliament, told the conference. The case of Thailand illustrates this point. Renewable energy from solar power and bio-mass contributes just one percent to the country's energy needs, states 'Positive Energy Choices', a study on alternative fuels for Thailand that Greenpeace released at the conference. Most of the country's power needs are met by the energy generated from imported oil, for which Bangkok has been footing a hefty bill of 300 billion baht (7.3 billion U.S. dollars) annually.

But not all South-east Asian countries are in the same predicament of paying huge sums to import oil. The region's oil and natural gas producers - such as Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei and Burma - can turn to their own fossil fuel resources. The region's other half that import fuel for their energy security are Singapore, Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam, in addition to Thailand and the Philippines. Yet as clean energy campaigner Bobby Julian pointed out, this divide within South-east Asia does not take away from the fact that both groups are vulnerable due to their high dependence on only fossil fuel for their energy needs. "In order to enjoy real energy security, it is better for the countries to diversify their sources of energy," says Julian, finance director at Preferred Energy Investment, a Manila-based non-governmental organisation that promotes renewable energy use in the Philippines and in select Southeast Asian countries. "Governments should not see renewable energy as a contradiction to their national energy policies but a complementary source," Julian said. "Indigenous energy sources fit the big picture perfectly."

Wind potential in Philippines

Environmentalists are trying to make that point by highlighting the rewards from wind energy in the Philippines. According to Greenpeace, three wind power projects will soon be offering sections of the archipelago close to 100 megawatts of energy, including 40 megawatts from wind farms north of the capital Manila. The current push for alternative energy sources in this region stems from the global trend to achieve set production targets for clean fuels - an issue that gained prominence during the U.N. summit on sustainable development in South Africa last year. But an initiative led by Brazil during that summit - to get all countries to generate 10 percent of energy through renewable sources by 2012 - failed to gain universal support. That setback exposed governments for failing to keep a promise they made at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro to change unsustainable energy consumption patterns. "We have to stop the business-as-usual scenario," Jiragorn Gajaseni, who heads the South-east Asia office of Greenpeace. "We need to get rid of the obstacles and set clear deadlines to achieve renewable energy targets." Jiragon argued, for instance, that Thailand has the potential of meeting one-third of its electricity demand through renewable energy by 2020. For that to actually happen, governments should be pressured to give incentives to encourage the growth of renewable energy plants, said Silver Navarro, a project engineer at Solar Electric Co, a Manila-based business that is setting up small solar power plants in the Philippines. "It is difficult for a private company in the renewable energy business to make good, when up against national electricity projects that receive grants and aid," he adds. "But the region has so much potential to tap, given the amount of sun and wind that we have."

A world conference on renewable energy is scheduled to take place in Bonn in June 2004 after being proposed by German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder at the Earth Summit in Johannesburg last September.The meeting will be open to governments, businesses and NGOs and will be preceded by regional conferences in Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America. The Earth Summit was marked by a row between the United States and the European Union (EU) over whether its final documents should set targets for boosting the share of renewable sources in the world's energy mix. In the end, the conservative US view prevailed, leaving EU countries to launch a separate initiative with other countries. They pledged, albeit without specific commitments, to work together to promote renewable energy.