No clear plan to rein in coal: CREA’s response to Indonesia’s JETP Progress Report 2025

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On 24 October 2025, the Just Energy Transition Partnership (JETP) Secretariat for Indonesia released the JETP Progress Report 2025 for public consultation. Following an in-depth review of the report during the public consultation period, CREA has identified three major points of contention for Indonesia’s national strategy for energy transition that have been captured in JETP’s recent updates:

First and most urgently, the draft plan fails to address Indonesia’s rapidly escalating captive coal power, and lacks an enforceable phase-out commitment. In a decade where many countries are making strides towards net zero commitments by reforming their energy systems, Indonesia stands as an outlier, being the only country that has allowed its captive coal power capacity to nearly quadruple between 2019 (5.5 GW) and 2025 (nearly 20 GW in the draft plan’s latest tally).

Second, the draft plan demonstrates a clear lack of commitment to accelerating coal power retirement. The plan shows zero reduction in grid-connected coal power capacity between 2025 and 2035, despite units reaching a typical operating lifetime cap of between 25 to 30 years in this time period. At least 7.4 GW of coal power capacity should naturally retire by 2035.

Third, the report sets overly conservative targets for high-potential solar and wind power, favouring less optimal sources such as hydropower and bioenergy instead. By setting conservative implementation targets for solar and wind power and favouring hydropower and bioenergy, the plan fails to remove the barriers necessary to unlock the low-cost, high-volume renewable energy capacity required to meaningfully achieve emissions reduction after 2030.

CREA’s recommendations to all stakeholders involved in JETP, namely the Government of Indonesia, the International Partners Group (IPG), the JETP Secretariat, and all participating financial institutions and multilateral partners:

  • Establish alignment between JETP’s goals and the national electricity plan, RUKN 2024-2060, which currently outlines over 20 GW of fossil power expansion, to assess the true scale of the resources needed to maintain the integrity of the CO2 emission cap aim.
  • Immediately close regulatory loopholes and establish a mandatory, funded captive coal phase-out roadmap – particularly targeting the nickel processing sector – to halt expansion and manage existing capacity.
  • Revise Indonesia’s Green Taxonomy to explicitly exclude all coal-based activities (including co-firing and other LECO methods) from ‘transition’ or ‘green’ classifications, preventing financing that perpetuates coal usage.
  • Reduce reliance on biomass co-firing and mandate a stringent, comprehensive assessment framework for any bioenergy use, requiring verification of emissions and compliance with mandatory reporting on biodiversity impact and land-use changes throughout the entire value chain.
  • Restore dedicated funding to the original CIPP 2023 level and formally prioritize Early Retirement and Reuse (ER&R) over modification strategies (OpFlex/LECO) that would only guarantee slow transition, thereby hindering efforts to drive genuine acceleration.
  • Remove financial availability as the primary criterion for CFPPs to be shortlisted for early retirement, allowing technical and emissions impact to drive the decision-making process.
  • Prioritise policy alignment by aligning the SNDC and JETP targets with the high-ambition solar vision, in order to firmly establish the necessary regulatory certainty to unlock investment in VRE and energy storage, structurally addressing the need for coal-based stability.

Katherine Hasan, Analyst at CREA: ‘The JETP Progress Report 2025 not only fails to address Indonesia’s rapidly expanding coal power capacity – it effectively dismantles the country’s coal moratorium via persisting loopholes, reliance on dubious carbon-reduction mechanisms, and a loose green taxonomy that allows ample space for coal-based activities. There is no comprehensive framework to assess the JETP strategies and the broader societal costs they incur, such as increased air pollution-related burdens across Indonesia throughout the transition decades. Only by closing these policy loopholes can Indonesia avoid remaining an international outlier in net zero progress and shifting the financial and environmental burden of coal power onto future decades.’ 

Lauri Myllyvirta, Lead Analyst and Co-founder at CREA: ‘Besides greatly missing the mark on coal power retirement, the Indonesia JETP Progress Report also makes the mistake of setting overly conservative targets for high potential renewable energy sources like solar and wind power. In doing so, the current JETP plan joins the country’s SNDC in setting targets that are fundamentally misaligned with Prabowo’s vision of 100 GW of and a fossil fuel phase-out by 2040. Only by realigning targets with this vision can Indonesia unlock investment in the critical technologies needed to address its persisting structural reliance on coal.’  

Author(s): Katherine Hasan, Lauri Myllyvirta, Syahdiva Moezbar

Indonesia