Overview

The Indo-Pacific is home to 4.3 billion people – more than half of humanity. Studies indicate that the Indo-Pacific could meet ~90 per cent of its power demand using renewables such as solar and wind, but this needs a clear and defined vision for its energy future. This paper focuses on six Indo-Pacific countries – Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Singapore, and Viet Nam, which collectively house a quarter of the world's population, explores the gaps in existing multilateral processes, and notes the critical requirements to accelerate the Indo-Pacific energy transition.

Key Findings

This Issue Brief sought to map the energy transitions of six representative Indo-Pacific countries to identify challenges, and the financial and multilateral mechanisms that can accelerate the Indo-Pacific energy transition. The key learnings are:

• Policy: Some Indo-Pacific countries have transition strategies that seek to identify and plug technology, finance, infrastructure, and policy gap; while others still need an integrated domestic energy transition roadmap or policy framework.
• Trade-offs: A shift away from fossil fuels also means a decline in fossil fuel revenues, subsidies for primary energy access, jobs in fossil fuel-based and ancillary sectors, and high expenditure to decommission fossil fuel infrastructure.
• Technology and resources: Concentrated ownership of solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, fuel-cell, and waste management technology hinders the energy transition of most Indo-Pacific countries. The renewable energy supply chain of Indo-Pacific countries is also vulnerable to concentrations in critical mineral reserves, processing technology, and markets.
• Energy transition finance: Current investment flows towards the energy transition in Indo-Pacific countries are inadequate due to high real or perceived risk, low returns, and limited finance and concessional lending. To attract finance, countries are using a mix of public, debt, and catalytic concessional finance which have yielded meaningful progress in some countries.
• Multilateral energy cooperation: Bilateral, multilateral, and regional cooperation are needed for vital energy and resources trade, supply chain resilience, finance and technology access, and capacity building. Multilateral forums categorise the Indo-Pacific into South and South-East Asia but most are under-utilised due to the narrow and often conflicting priorities of their members.