Govt will soon fix FIT for geothermal projects

The government will soon issue a regulation on Feed in Tariff (FIT) for geothermal power plants to ensure business certainty to independent power producers (IPP), a senior official at the energy and mineral resources ministry said.

"The regulation on Feed in Tariff will be issued next week,? the ministry?s Director General of New and Renewable Energy and Energy Conservation, Kardaya Warnika said in Jakarta on Wednesday.

He said that the tariff would be different from one location to another because the difference in production costs in each location. ?The character of a geothermal plant in East Nusa Tenggara will be quite different from those in Java,? he said, citing that for Java , the tariff would be fixed at about 10 US cent per kWh.

He said the new tariff policy would give more certainty to investors because they would be able to sell their power to state electricity company PLN in line with their operating costs.

He said that beside the price problem, the government had also addressed the problems of overlapping of landsites and ownership, as well as a guarantee that PLN would buy the electricity under the scheme of independent power producer (IPP).

?With that we hope that in the next two years geothermal electricity can be raised from the current 1,220 Megawatt to between 3,000 and 4,000 Megawatt,? he said, adding that Indonesia has a potential of 29,000 Megawatt that can be generated from geothermal.

Editing by Benget Besalicto Tnb.