Bali breaks ground on its first waste-to-energy plant

A new plant for an old and urgent problem

Bali held a groundbreaking ceremony on 8 July 2026 for the Denpasar Raya waste-to-energy facility, the island's first plant of this kind, and the timing was not incidental. The project is designated a National Strategic Project and is being built by China's Zhejiang Weiming Environment Protection, with state utility PLN signing a power purchase agreement at the ceremony to take the electricity generated, priced at US$0.20 per kilowatt-hour under Presidential Regulation 109/2025. Total investment is reported at Rp3 trillion, roughly US$165 million. Once operational, targeted for late 2027 with commercial operations beginning in 2028, the plant is designed to process up to 1,500 tonnes of municipal waste a day, more than 500,000 tonnes a year, enough to supply electricity to around 100,000 households.

The urgency behind the project is visible just down the road. Bali's main landfill at Suwung, which has received the island's waste for more than 40 years and now holds refuse piled higher than ten storeys across 32 hectares, is set to close completely on 1 August 2026, weeks after the new plant's groundbreaking. Governor Wayan Koster has been direct about the deadline.

"Starting August 1, the Suwung Landfill must be completely closed," Koster said, adding that processing organic waste on-site, rather than trucking it to Suwung, is now mandatory for municipalities across the island.

The scale of what it addresses

Bali generates an estimated 3,436 tonnes of waste daily, close to 1.2 million tonnes a year, driven by both a resident population and a tourism economy that has drawn growing international attention to how the island manages what it discards. Indonesia's Ministry of Environment and Forestry estimates that around 40 percent of that volume is still burned in the open or dumped illegally rather than collected through a formal system, a gap the Denpasar Raya plant alone will not close, since it is sized to absorb 44 percent of Bali's total daily waste generation, not all of it.

Officials project the plant will cut landfill-bound waste by up to 80 to 90 percent relative to current disposal and reduce annual carbon dioxide emissions by around 640,000 tonnes, while creating roughly 1,200 jobs during construction and operation. Governor Koster framed the project as a way to protect the island's environmental reputation, a factor closely tied to its tourism appeal, while Environment Minister Mohammad Jumhur Hidayat called it a model other regions could adapt, provided the technology is matched to local waste composition.

More than a power plant: how the system is designed

Fadli Rahman, chief executive of PT Daya Energi Bersih Nusantara, the Danantara subsidiary building the plant, has been explicit that Denpasar Raya is meant to function as more than a generator bolted onto a landfill.

The facility represents "a waste management system integrated from upstream to downstream, not merely electricity generation," Rahman said, describing a process where mixed waste is dried for five to seven days to reduce moisture content before being burned at temperatures above 850 degrees Celsius.

That pre-treatment step matters because wet, unsorted waste burns inefficiently and generates more pollution, a problem legal and industry analysts have flagged elsewhere in Indonesia's wider waste-to-energy rollout. The Denpasar Raya design also builds in valorisation for what incineration leaves behind: bottom ash is converted into construction materials and bricks, and leachate is treated into clean water, rather than left as untreated by-products requiring separate disposal. Officials describe the combined process as achieving an 80 percent emissions reduction compared with continuing to landfill the same waste untreated.

The financing structure that makes it bankable

For government and public institutions elsewhere in Indonesia, the Denpasar Raya project is worth studying less for its size than for how it was put together. A National Strategic Project designation, a foreign technology and construction partner, and a signed offtake agreement with the state grid operator at a fixed, bankable tariff were combined into a single deal at the groundbreaking itself, rather than negotiated separately over years. That structure directly addresses financing risk, the persistent barrier that left similar projects stalled elsewhere in the archipelago under the previous regulatory framework, and it is the same fixed-tariff, centralised-coordination model that Presidential Regulation 109/2025 has since made the template for waste-to-energy projects nationwide.

The gap between the landfill closing and the plant opening

The one element of the timeline that deserves close attention is the gap between Suwung's closure and Denpasar Raya's completion. Suwung stops accepting any waste on 1 August 2026. The new plant is not targeted for completion until late 2027, with commercial operations beginning in 2028, roughly a year and a half after the island's primary disposal site shuts its gates. Bali's phased approach in the run-up to closure, sorted waste required by the end of March 2026 and organic waste banned from the site from April, is designed to push composting and residual-waste handling down to the municipal level during that interim period, but it places real short-term pressure on local governments to build out sorting and organic processing capacity faster than the flagship plant itself can be built.

Sirkularium's view

For government and public institutions across Indonesia and the wider region, the Denpasar Raya project is worth watching for its financing structure as much as its scale, a bundled national designation, foreign investment, and a signed offtake agreement is a genuinely replicable template. But the project also illustrates a sequencing risk that other regions planning a landfill closure alongside a new facility should plan around explicitly: a waste-to-energy plant on a roughly two-year construction timeline cannot be the only answer to a landfill closing in weeks. Institutions considering similar facilities should track whether construction holds to the late-2027 target and whether the promised landfill diversion and emissions figures materialise once the plant is operational, but they should give equal attention to whether Bali's municipalities can sustain source sorting and on-site organic processing through the full interim period, since that bridge, not the groundbreaking ceremony, is what determines whether the transition actually stays clean.