The role of renewable energy in resolving energy insecurity in Asia

Peimani, Hooman; Taghizadeh-Hesary, Farhad Working Paper The role of renewable energy in resolving energy insecurity in Asia ADBI Working Paper Series, No. 1010 Provided in Cooperation with: Asian Development Bank Institute (ADBI), Tokyo Suggested Citation: Peimani, Hooman; Taghizadeh-Hesary, Farhad (2019) : The role of renewable energy in resolving energy insecurity in Asia, ADBI Working Paper Series, No. 1010, Asian Development Bank Institute (ADBI), Tokyo This Version is available at: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/222777 Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen: Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen. 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If the documents have been made available under an Open Content Licence (especially Creative Commons Licences), you may exercise further usage rights as specified in the indicated licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/igo/ ADBI Working Paper Series THE ROLE OF RENEWABLE ENERGY IN RESOLVING ENERGY INSECURITY IN ASIA Hooman Peimani and Farhad Taghizadeh-Hesary No. 1010 September 2019 Asian Development Bank Institute The Working Paper series is a continuation of the formerly named Discussion Paper series; the numbering of the papers continued without interruption or change. ADBI’s working papers reflect initial ideas on a topic and are posted online for discussion. Some working papers may develop into other forms of publication. Suggested citation: Peimani, H. and F. Taghizadeh-Hesary. 2019. The Role of Renewable Energy in Resolving Energy Insecurity in Asia. ADBI Working Paper 1010. Tokyo: Asian Development Bank Institute. Available: https://www.adb.org/publications/role-renewable-energy-resolvingenergy-insecurity-asia Please contact the authors for information about this paper. Email: [email protected] Hooman Peimani is a senior consultant in energy security and related issues in Canada. Farhad Taghizadeh-Hesary is an assistant professor at the Faculty of Political Science and Economics of Waseda University. The views expressed in this paper are the views of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of ADBI, ADB, its Board of Directors, or the governments they represent. ADBI does not guarantee the accuracy of the data included in this paper and accepts no responsibility for any consequences of their use. Terminology used may not necessarily be consistent with ADB official terms. Working papers are subject to formal revision and correction before they are finalized and considered published. Asian Development Bank Institute Kasumigaseki Building, 8th Floor 3-2-5 Kasumigaseki, Chiyoda-ku Tokyo 100-6008, Japan Tel: +81-3-3593-5500 Fax: +81-3-3593-5571 URL: www.adbi.org E-mail: [email protected] © 2019 Asian Development Bank Institute ADBI Working Paper 1010 Peimani and Taghizadeh-Hesary Abstract Energy security implies the availability, affordability, applicability, plausibility and acceptability of countries’ energy supply. Implying the sustainability of countries’ energy supplies, energy insecurity is widespread across Asia. Southeast Asia (SEA) serves as an example for Asia’s energy insecurity. Notwithstanding efforts to expand its share of renewable energy (renewables), fossil energy dominates the regional energy mix. Various factors have created obstacles for the expansion of renewables in SEA, prolonging this environmentally unsustainable situation. Their addressing demands a comprehensive approach to ensure the energy requirements of the regional countries and also their social and economic development in determining their choice of energy. Singapore and the Philippines serve as good examples of energy insecurity in SEA, having fossil energy-dominated energy mixes. Expanding the share of renewables in their energy mixes demands different plans linked to their sustainable development, which is true for the rest of SEA. However, achieving this objective demands different routes, given their differences in terms of the availability, affordability, applicability, plausibility and acceptability of energy, particularly those of environmentally clean renewables. It necessitates sustainable energy to make such renewables a necessity whose local production could serve as an engine for economic development while simultaneously ending their energy insecurity. Keywords: renewable energy, energy security, climate change, sustainable development, sustainable energy JEL Classification: Q42 ADBI Working Paper 1010 Peimani and Taghizadeh-Hesary Contents 1. INTRODUCTION ......................................................................................................... 1 2. CONTEXT OF ENERGY SECURITY .......................................................................... 2 3. ENERGY INSECURITY IN SEA .................................................................................. 5 4. OBSTACLES TO RENEWABLES AND CASE STUDIES ........................................... 6 4.1 Obstacles to Renewables ................................................................................ 6 4.2 Case Studies ................................................................................................... 9 5. SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT AND SUSTAINABLE ENERGY ........................... 14 6. CONCLUSION AND POLICY RECOMMENDATIONS ............................................. 15 REFERENCES ..................................................................................................................... 17 ADBI Working Paper 1010 Peimani and Taghizadeh-Hesary 1 1. INTRODUCTION Energy security, as an inter-disciplinary field, focuses on various factors (e.g., energy, natural resources, environmental, economic, social, political/geopolitical, military/ security and technological) and issues (e.g., economic, energy and foreign policies, crises and conflicts, climate change and sustainable development/energy) affecting countries’ efforts to firmly secure their energy requirements in an environmentally and economically sustainable manner while being socially acceptable. It also focuses on how these efforts influence the aforementioned factors and issues, in turn. In other words, it involves the availability, affordability, applicability, plausibility and acceptability of energy for countries. Implying the sustainability of countries’ energy supply, energy insecurity is widespread in Asia. Within this context, Southeast Asia (SEA) serves as an example of Asia’s energy insecurity. Despite the regional countries’ efforts to expand their share of renewable energy (hereafter renewables), fossil energy (oil, gas and coal) still dominates the regional energy mix. Various factors have created obstacles to the expansion of renewables in SEA, thus prolonging this environmentally unsustainable situation. Addressing these factors demands a comprehensive approach to ensure the energy requirements of the regional countries as well as their social and economic development, all of which determine their choice of energy. Having fossil energy-dominated energy mixes, Singapore and the Philippines serve as good examples of energy insecurity in SEA. Expanding the share of renewables in their energy mixes demands different plans linked to their sustainable development, which is true for the rest of SEA. Yet, achieving this objective requires different methods, given their differences in terms of the availability, affordability, applicability, plausibility and acceptability of energy supplies, particularly those of environmentally clean renewables (e.g., hydro, wind, solar and geothermal). The latter requires sustainable energy to make such renewables a necessity, the local production of which could serve as an engine for economic development while ending their energy insecurity. To shed light on this paper’s main argument, section 2 discusses the context of energy security in SEA while elaborating on different definitions of energy security and their respective implications. Serving as a background to the main argument, section 3 studies energy insecurity in SEA and the obstacles to renewables in this region; it concentrates on Singapore and the Philippines as case studies. Specific reasons for the domination of fossil energy in Singapore and the Philippines are the focus of section 4, which is followed by section 5, which discusses the relationship between sustainable development and sustainable energy in SEA and how renewables could benefit the region’s sustainable development. Finally, section 6 serves as the conclusion and provides certain policy recommendations for SEA on how to deal with regional countries’ energy insecurity by removing the obstacles to the expansion of renewables in the regional countries. ADBI Working Paper 1010 Peimani and Taghizadeh-Hesary 2 2. CONTEXT OF ENERGY SECURITY Energy security implies the availability, affordability, accessibility, plausibility and acceptability of energy for countries.1 Apart from the so-called traditional definition of energy security focusing on the availability and affordability of energy supplies as defined, for instance, by the International Energy Agency (IEA), i.e., “the uninterrupted availability of energy sources at an affordable price” (IEA 2019), other definitions have also been suggested such as the following broader perspective by Taghizadeh-Hesary et al. (2019a): The multi-faceted characteristics of energy security range from the inherent economic aspect of energy security to the strategic and geopolitical nature of energy security. This in turn presents four broadly defined dimensions on which energy security could be defined—economic, political, geopolitical, and institutional, legal, and regulatory context. The first dimension is the economics of energy security, which mainly covers the consequences of import dependence and instability of energy markets. The second dimension is the political economy of energy security, which specifically examines interrelations between crude power and oil-importing and oil-exporting countries. The third dimension is the geopolitics of international relations, which explores how the geopolitics influences and shapes coalition, cooperation, or unilateral action for energy security. The fourth dimension is the aspect of energy security in terms of institutional, legal, and regulatory frameworks in the local, regional, and international contexts. Sopitsuda Tongsopit et al. (2016) offers another definition focusing on four elements, namely the availability, acceptability, affordability and applicability of energy supplies for countries. This paper uses one of its author’s definitions (Peimani 2011) as it is comprehensive and thus involves not only the economic elements (availability and affordability), but also political/security (accessibility), environmental and developmental (plausibility) and social (acceptability) ones in assessing countries’ energy security. Given this definition, which implies the sustainability of energy for countries, energy insecurity is widespread in Asia, although there are many differences between and among the Asian countries in terms of the contributing factors. SEA serves as an example for energy insecurity on this continent in spite of the differences in the scale and scope of this phenomenon between the regional countries. The six largest SEA countries in terms of land, population and/or GDP (Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Viet Nam) consumed 609.6 million tons of oil equivalent (mtoe) of energy in 2017 (Table 1), accounting for the bulk of their region’s consumption,2 registering an increase of 9.9 mtoe over their 2016 consumption of 589.7 (BP 2018).3 Their energy consumption is increasing significantly because of their expanding economies and growing populations. SEA’s annual energy growth rate in the period ending 2025 is estimated at 4%, “amounting to a rise of 50% over 2014 levels” (IRENA 2016). 1 For a detailed discussion of this definition, see Peimani (2011). 2 Comparable data on the smaller regional countries (Brunei Darussalam, Cambodia, the Lao PDR, Myanmar, and Timor-Leste) are unavailable. 3 Total consumption, increased consumption and the percentage of growth were calculated by the author. ADBI Working Paper 1010 Peimani and Taghizadeh-Hesary 3 Table 1: Energy Mix of SEA 2017 (MTOE) Country Oil Gas Coal Nuclear Energy+ Hydroelectricity Renewables Total Brunei Darussalam* – – – – – – – Cambodia* – – – – – – – Timor-Leste* – – – – – – – Indonesia 77.3 33.7 57.2 – 4.2 2.9 175.2 Lao People’s Democratic Republic* – – – – – – – Malaysia 36.9 36.8 20.0 – 5.6 0.4 99.6 Myanmar – – – – – – – Philippines 21.7 3.2 13.1 – 2.2 3.1 43.3 Singapore 75.3 10.6 0.4 – – 0.3 86.5 Thailand 63.9 43.1 18.3 – 1.1 3.4 129.7 Viet Nam 23.0 8.1 28.2 – 15.9 0.1 75.3 *Comparative data are unavailable. +SEA’s energy mix lacks nuclear energy. Source: Author’s creation based on data provided in BP (2018). This significant estimated increase makes addressing the region’s energy security a priority for at least two major reasons. On the one hand, SEA’s own fossil energy resources are unevenly distributed among the regional countries, leaving Singapore with no reserves and small or insignificant reserves for others (Cambodia, the Lao People’s Democratic Republic, and the Philippines), as reflected in Table 2. Table 2: Proven Reserves of Fossil Energy in SEA 2017 Oil billion barrels Gas trillion cubic meters Coal million tons Brunei Darussalam 1.1 0.3 _* Indonesia 3.2 2.9 22,598 Malaysia 3.6 2.7 _* Myanmar _* 1.2 _* Thailand 0.3 0.2 1,063 Viet Nam 4.4 0.6 3,360 *Insignificant or no reserves at all. Source: Author’s creation based on data provided in BP (2018). The proven regional fossil energy reserves are not enough to fully satisfy even their current energy requirements, making the region dependent on energy imports (Table 3) with its associated financial burdens and risks. Thanks to SEA’s growing economies and populations, alongside improving living standards, the growing increase in energy demand will expand their dependency on energy imports. ADBI Working Paper 1010 Peimani and Taghizadeh-Hesary 4 Table 3: Energy Imports of SEA 2017 Country Oil Production MT* Consumption MT Imports+ mtoe Brunei Darussalam 5.5 _** 00.0 Indonesia 46.4 77.3 30.0 Malaysia 32.2 36.9 4.7 Myanmar _** _** _** Philippines _** 21.7 _** Singapore 00.0 75.3 75.3 Thailand 16.8 63.9 47.1 Viet Nam 16.1 23 6.9 Country Gas Production BCM++ Consumption BCM Imports BCM Brunei Darussalam 12 _** 0.0 Indonesia 68 39.2 0.0 Malaysia 78.4 42.8 0.0 Myanmar 18 _** _** Philippines _** 3.8 _** Singapore 00.0 12.3 12.3 Thailand 38.7 50.1 8.2 Viet Nam 9.5 9.5 0.0 Country Coal Production MTOE Consumption MTOE Imports MTOE Brunei Darussalam 0.0 0.0 0.0 Indonesia 271.6 57.2 214.4 Malaysia _** 20 _** Myanmar _** _** _** Philippines _** 13.1 _** Singapore 0 0.4 0.4 Thailand 4.1 18.3 14.2 Viet Nam 21.3 28.2 6.9 *MT: Million tons. **Data unavailable. +Calculated by the author. ++BCM: Billion Cubic Meters. Source: Author’s creation based on data provided in BP (2018). On the other hand, the current heavy consumption of oil, gas and coal by SEA countries is unsustainable and worsening climate change, with its devastating environmental, health and economic/financial consequences of delaying, damaging and, quite possibly, preventing the sustainable development of these countries should the current trend continue. Meeting their increasing energy demand with mainly oil, gas and coal will certainly have catastrophic consequences for the regional countries, as is the case in all ADBI Working Paper 1010 Peimani and Taghizadeh-Hesary 11 particularly in certain fields. Based on the most recent available statistics (2017), the Philippines’s geothermal sector (868 MW) now ranks second globally after the United States (3591 MW) (Think Geoenergy 2019). Unlike most renewables (wind and solar), geothermal is not an intermittent source of energy and thus it is suitable for supplying baseload electricity. Appreciating the necessity of decreasing its fossil fuel consumption for health and environmental reasons and being mindful of the heavy cost of its dependency on imported fossil energy, the Philippines’ government has sought to encourage and facilitate the production of indigenous renewables by using its largely unharnessed potential. As a recent major example, its National Renewable Energy Program (NREP) of 2011 “outlines the policy framework enshrined in Republic Act 9513” by stating: the strategic building blocks that will help the country achieve the goals set forth in the Renewable Energy Act of 2008. The NREP signals the country's big leap from fragmented and halting RE [renewable] energy initiatives into a focused and sustained drive towards energy security and improved access to clean energy. The NREP sets out indicative interim targets for the delivery of renewable energy within the time frame of 2011 to 2030 (DOE 2019a). The NREP seeks a three-fold increase in the Philippines’ renewable-based capacity of 2010 to 15,304 MW by the year 2030 (DOE 2019b). Apart from institutionalizing “a comprehensive approach to address the challenges and gaps that prevent and/or delay wider application of RE technologies in a sustainable manner,” and outlining “the action plans necessary to facilitate and encourage greater private sector investments in RE development,” the NREP intends to realize the following specific objectives: 1. Increasing geothermal capacity by 75.0%; 2. Increasing hydropower capacity by 160%; 3. Delivering an additional 277 MW biomass power capacity; 4. Attain wind power grid parity with the commissioning of 2,345 MW additional capacity; 5. Mainstreaming an additional 284 MW solar power capacity and work towards achieving the ultimate target of 1,528 MW; 6. Developing the country’s first ocean energy facility (DOE 2019b). Despite governmental support, the Philippines still lags behind its extensive renewable potentials in hydro, ocean energy, geothermal, wind and solar. According to the available statistics provided by its Department of Energy (DOE), many renewable projects have been awarded in these fields, most of which have not been implemented. Of the awarded projects, only geothermal, biofuel and biomass ones have exceeded the expected potentials as apparent in Table 7, although the fact that the awarded projects are still a fraction of the country's achievable potential in renewables should be kept in mind. ADBI Working Paper 1010 Peimani and Taghizadeh-Hesary 12 Table 7: Summary of the Philippines Awarded Renewable Energy Project by End of 2017 Awarded Projects Potential Capacity MW* Installed Capacity MW Commercial Own-Use Commercial Own-Use Commercial Own-Use Hydro Power 444 – 13,467.53 – 974.79 – Ocean Energy 7 – 26.00 – – – Geothermal 41 – 575.00 – 1,906.19 – Wind 65 1 2,461.50 – 426.90 0.006 Solar 216 16 6,882.92 4.286 905.18 3.218 Biomass 55 24 346.68 16.77 407.15 128.16 Sub-Total 828 41 23,759.63 21.056 4,620.21 131.38 Total 869 23,780.69 4,751.59 *MW = megawatt. Source: Author’s creation based on data provided in DOE (2019c). 4.2.3 Comparative Analysis The Philippines and Singapore have both taken measures to create and expand their renewables sectors. As is the case in all other countries, both in SEA and other regions, these measures are mainly aimed at replacing fossil energy with renewables for electricity generation, but not as an alternative to liquid fuel for transportation. As it stands, these two countries, like other ASEAN nations, will not be able to meet ASEAN’s aspirational target for their renewable energy mix share (23%) by 2025 and thus must increase their efforts to cover the projected gap of 6%. The following Tables 8 and 9 reflect this situation. Using their actual achievements in 2014 as the reference date, they compare the Philippines’ and Singapore’s government-projected expansion of their electricity generation by renewables by the target year (Reference Case 2025) with the required increase in their electricity generation to meet the target share in renewables (REmap 2025). Thus, in the case of the Philippines, the actual renewable electricity generation in 2014 (19.8 WWh) was 25.62% of total electricity generation, reflecting the large share of GHGemitting fossil energy in the country’s electricity generation. As it stands, the Philippines’ renewable share of its electricity generation will increase to 28.47% (40.6 WWh) in 2025, while it must reach 32.56% (46.7 WWh) to meet the target share. The projected volume of generated electricity in 2025 matches the required volume only in the cases of hydropower and geothermal, but lags behind in wind, solar PV and biofuels, as reflected in Table 8. In the case of Singapore, the share of renewables in its electricity generation in 2014 was 1.90% (0.92 WWh) of the country’s total electricity generation of 48.27 WWh, indicating the almost total domination of GHG-emitting fossil energy in the country’s electricity generation energy mix. According to its government projections, the expected growth in renewables will secure a share of only 2.26% (1.47 WWh) of the country’s total electricity generation in 2025. Meeting the ASEAN’s aspirational goal means that Singapore must increase this share to 9.53% (6.18 WWh) of that year’s total projected electricity generation of 64.81 WWh. Lacking hydropower, wind, geothermal and marine energy, the expected growth in biofuel and solar PV will not be large enough to help the country match the required growth in renewables to meet the aspirational target, which requires not only large contributions from biofuels and solar PV, but also from wind, marine and other types of renewables. ADBI Working Paper 1010 Peimani and Taghizadeh-Hesary 13 Table 8: Share of Renewables in Electricity Generation in 2014 and Projected Shares in 2025 – The Philippines Unit 2014 Reference Case 2025 REmap 2025 Total electricity generation TWh check 77.3 142.6 143.4 Renewable generation TWh 19.8 25.62% of Total 40.6 28.47% of Total 46.7 32.56% of Total Hydropower TWh 9.1 14.8 14.8 Wind TWh 0.2 0.6 2.2 Biofuels (solid, liquid, gaseous) TWh 0.2 2.5 3.8 Solar PV TWh 0.0 2.6 5.7 Geothermal TWh 10.3 20.1 20.1 Marine, other TWh 0.0 0.0 0.0 Non-renewable generation TWh 57.5 101.9 96.8 Source: Author’s creation based on data provided in IRENA (2016). Table 9: Share of Renewables in Electricity Generation in 2014 and Projected Shares in 2025 – Singapore Unit 2014 Reference Case 2025 REmap 2025 Total electricity generation TWh 48.27 64.81 64.81 Renewable generation TWh 0.92 1.90% of Total 1.47 2.26% of Total 6.18 9.53% of Total Hydropower TWh 0.00 0.00 0.00 Wind TWh 0.00 0.00 0.83 Biofuels (solid, liquid, gaseous) TWh 0.88 1.18 1.51 Solar PV TWh 0.04 0.29 3.34 Geothermal TWh 0.00 0.00 0.00 Marine, other TWh 0.00 0.00 0.50 Non-renewable generation TWh 47.35 63.34 58.63 Source: Author’s creation based on data provided in IRENA (2016). 4-2-4 Specific Reasons for the Domination of Fossil Energy in Singapore and the Philippines By and large, the above-mentioned obstacles to the expansion of renewables have served as the common reasons justifying the Philippines’ and Singapore’s opting for fossil energy as their main source of energy. However, the differences in their overall situations demand different solutions in order to significantly expand the renewables share of their energy mixes. The cost of switching to renewables is certainly a common reason discouraging not just for these two countries or SEA countries in general, but for just about any other country in the expansion of renewables, as discussed in detail in many scholarly works and, most recently, by J. Sachs et al. (2019) in their dealing with the importance of green financing. However, cost is more of a reason for the Philippines as a middle-income SEA country than for Singapore, the region’s wealthiest and most developed country, although it is certainly a major consideration for Singapore as well. Despite this, Singapore’s lack of potential for hydro and geothermal eliminates these two renewables as options. Weak ADBI Working Paper 1010 Peimani and Taghizadeh-Hesary 14 wind speeds mean the commonly-used horizontal wind turbines are not an option for it either. Lacking gas and oil reserves, making it 100% dependent on imports, the local availability of these fuels is not the reason for the negligible share of renewables in its energy mix, although their global availability compensates for this shortcoming, while creating a very heavy financial burden on the country. Having said that, land scarcity is the single major obstacle for the limited growth of renewables. This explains why the country, which is blessed with sunshine, has had very limited progress in solar energy, notwithstanding its aims at turning itself into a hub of research and development for solar technology and eventually a technology exporter. To this end, it established the Solar Energy Research Institute of Singapore (SERIS) in 2008 to, for example, “conduct industry-oriented R&D in solar energy technologies and their integration into power systems and buildings” (APERC 2018). Hence, removing the major obstacles to renewables’ expansion in Singapore necessitates that the country addresses this issue through certain innovations to be discussed in this paper’s section on policy recommendations. In the case of the Philippines, land scarcity is not a reason for the limited progress of renewables, although such progress is much larger than that of Singapore, nor are the geological realities, as the country has unharnessed potential for geothermal, wind, solar, ocean and hydro energy. Surely, the Philippines' reserves of oil and coal in particular, while not enough to wholly meet its requirements of fossil energy, have created an incentive to use them. Nevertheless, the cost of switching to renewables, which requires imported technology, has certainly functioned as a major disincentive. This explains why locally-available renewables, i.e., traditional biomass, are widely used in SEA, including the Philippines. Addressing the cost issue is therefore the main solution in expanding the renewables energy mix share for as long as the country is dependent on foreign technology for this purpose. 5. SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT AND SUSTAINABLE ENERGY In a broad sense, sustainable development is the main objective of the Philippines and Singapore and, in fact, in all the SEA countries, even though achieving this objective demands different approaches and plans. The reason lies in their differences with respect to their current level of development, on the one hand, and the availability, affordability, applicability, plausibility and acceptability of supplies of energy to fuel such development on the other. Consequently, sustainable development necessitates sustainable energy to make environmentally clean renewables (wind, solar, geothermal and run off-river hydro), but not all types of renewables (e.g., biomass and biofuel) a necessity. After all, renew-ability does not mean energy sources are non-pollutive and thus environmentally clean. Added to generating clean energy for the aforementioned countries as representatives of their region and, in a broad sense, Asia, the local production of the required renewable technologies could, in itself, serve as an engine of economic development and/or its consolidation, depending on the case (i.e., the level of development of a given country and the available options for development). This is a feasible solution, of course, to a varying extent depending on the concerned countries’ industrial and scientific development, among other factors. ADBI Working Paper 1010 Peimani and Taghizadeh-Hesary 15 6. CONCLUSION AND POLICY RECOMMENDATIONS Briefly, environmentally clean renewables have an essential role in ending energy insecurity in Asia in a sustainable manner, which cannot be achieved using other types of energy. While some of these types are environmentally unsustainable (e.g., coal and thus coal-fired electricity generators), another type, which does not emit GHG (nuclear power generators), is perhaps too costly and/or unaffordable for many Asian countries, including SEA ones. As a result, renewables are the best option for the majority of the SEA countries, which are developing and low or middle-income. However, given most of the major types of renewables are intermittent sources of energy, not being available all the time (e.g., wind and sunshine), a combination of intermittent (wind, solar and ocean energy) and continuous (mainly hydro, run-off river hydro and geothermal) energy needs to be used together to ensure the availability of reliable alternative energy to oil, gas and coal for a large part of countries’ energy needs for commercial, industrial, residential and agricultural activities. For the total replacement of fossil energy and permanently halting the bulk of human-made emissions and related unsustainable practices (e.g., the rapid depletion of fresh water resources), environmentally clean alternatives to fossil liquid fuels (gasoline and diesel fuel) for transportation are yet to be developed at a large scale. In spite of the common belief, the currently-available biofuels are not sustainable alternatives to such fuels. This is because of their unsustainable water and fossil energy-intensive nature at the production level and/or the damage they inflict to the environment, especially to forests, at the cultivation level due to these environments being destroyed to clear land to grow raw materials such as corn and palm trees. The ten SEA countries are yet to harness, at least to a significant extent, let alone fully, their renewable potentials for a differing number of the above-mentioned factors. Given cost is an obstacle for all of them despite the differences among them as to its actual preventive strength (i.e., from a factor to the single most important one), addressing it is a necessity for which certain options are recommended. Opting for less-technologically challenging renewables, which are environmentally clean unlike biomass but can easily or relatively easily be developed in all these countries, is one option. Examples include solar boilers; these use direct sunshine to boil water and thus do not require the sophisticated technology needed to turn sunbeams into electricity, which is not locally available and/or is too expensive to be affordable at a large-scale. Such boilers, which can easily be installed on the rooftops of all buildings, large and small alike, will replace a significant amount of fossil energy now used for boiling water for a range of consumers from small-scale residential to large-scale commercial/industrial ones. Advancing modern technology in the SEA countries is a fortunate by-product of developing and manufacturing water boilers for these countries. Also known as run-off river hydro, small hydro generators constitute inexpensive and thus affordable types of renewable technologies for all the regional countries. They can easily be developed in all of them, including the Philippines, as has been the case in the lowand middle-income countries of the Asia and Pacific region such as India. There is a wide-range of run-off river hydro options, which, by and large, are not technologically complicated and can meet the small-scale electricity needs of the regional countries. Vertical wind turbines are a serious option for all the regional countries. They require much weaker winds than those needed for the widely-used large horizontal ones and are less-expensive and much easier to locally develop, install and maintain. These are an especially sensible option for Singapore, which suffers from land scarcity, as they can be installed on rooftops. Singapore is currently using a small fraction of its rooftops to ADBI Working Paper 1010 Peimani and Taghizadeh-Hesary 16 install solar panels, now exclusively part of those of its government-built HDB (Housing Development Bureau) buildings for mainly low-income families. Therefore, the country still has hundreds of such rooftops, as well as thousands of its large high-rise ones to be used for small vertical turbines. Singapore, which can afford to import advanced foreign technologies, can also use some of its rooftops for vertically concentrated solar, which has been developed to provide the benefits of in-use horizontal ones for large-scale solar energy generation, without taking up the space required by the latter. Adding platforms to the sides of rooftops for solar panels, concentrated solar units, solar water boilers and vertical wind turbines can help Singapore to create space to expand its renewables generation and thereby overcome the challenge of land-scarcity to a significant extent. This is a solution for all other countries suffering from land scarcity in Asia and elsewhere. Apart from horizontal solar technologies, these recommended measures are relatively feasible, inexpensive and easy-to use technologies that can be developed locally. Once adopted, they will help the SEA countries, lowor high-income alike, decrease their dependency on fossil energy, meet their growing electricity requirements, including those of their rural areas demanding small-scale technologies, and reduce the financial burden of their heavy imports of fossil energy, while also substantially reducing their GHG emissions. Thanks to their expanding production and technological developments, the ongoing declining cost of renewables technologies, which are not currently produced in these countries, such as wind and solar energy, will make them more affordable to import for the regional countries, particularly the lowand medium-income ones (e.g., Cambodia, the Lao PDR, and the Philippines) in the future so long as they lack their home-grown technologies. ADBI Working Paper 1010 Peimani and Taghizadeh-Hesary 17 REFERENCES ASEAN Centre for Energy (ACE). Total Primary Energy Supply ASEAN 2011-2016. Jakarta: ACE, 2017. http://aeds.aseanenergy.org/total_energy_supply/. Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC). “Energy Working Group.” APEC. 2017. https://apec.org/Groups/SOM-Steering-Committee-on-Economic-and-TechnicalCooperation/Working-Groups/Energy. Asia Pacific Energy Research Centre (APERC). “Singapore.” APEC Energy Overview 2017. Tokyo: Asia Pacific Energy Research Centre, 2018. _____. 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