Antara News, Tuesday, July 27, 2010 21:11 WIB
Mataram, West Nusa Tenggara (ANTARA News) - President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono said 19 million households in Indonesia still had no electricity, emphasizing the need for concrete efforts in the sector.
"The government continued striving so that the poor will be able to enjoy it," he said when launching an Indonesia Free of Power Outage program here on Tuesday.
He said after the state electricity company PT PLN could meet its committment to free the country from rotating power outages in six months the next target should be assuring that all applications for electricity would be met.
He said some 500,000 households in eastern and western regions are still in the waiting list for access to electricity.
"Everyone knows it is our homework. Access to electricity is also connected with justice. It is unfair if some of our people still do not have access to electricity," he said.
In view of that he said the central as well as regional government kept working to overcome electricity supply problem while increasing supply.
Yudhoyono said electricity supply in the country has remained at 25,000 megawatt from the era of first president Soekarno to 2005 while demand has kept increasing.
Therefore, he said, the government had carried out the first and second phase of the 10,000 megawatt electricity development project.
"However developing power plants take time. It could take two to four years to build a 2 X 200 megawatt power plant," he said.
Minister of energy and mineral resources Darwin Zaidi Saleh meanwhile said on the occasion that rotating power outages could not be avoided before because demand during peak hours could not be met.
As a short-term program to overcome the problem the government had bought power from private companies, leased generator sets, shortened time of maintenance and called on the people to economize.
He said what was meant by the outage-free program was assuring supply so that no rotating outages would occur again.
"In case outages still occur later they must be because of local problems," he said.
Darwin said 35 percent of households in Indonesia or around 19 million people especially those living in the Indonesian eastern region have not had access to electricity.
President Yudhoyono was in the region for launching the outage free campaign. He returned to Jakarta after launching the campaign.
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