Village energy programme reaches 269 sites, with the electricity treated as an input rather than the output

PT Pertamina set out the state of its Desa Energi Berdikari programme, meaning self reliant energy village, at a festival held on 27 and 28 August 2026 at Grha Pertamina in Jakarta. As of August, 269 initiatives are running across Indonesia. The target is 332 by the end of the year.

The installation mix is heavily weighted toward solar. Of the total, 237 are solar installations, 21 are methane or biogas units, 8 are micro hydro systems, 2 are biodiesel and 1 is a hybrid. Combined renewable capacity comes to approximately 1.35 megawatt peak, and the biogas and methane units have produced 959,302 cubic metres.

The festival brought together government, universities, innovators and community organisers, with strengthening collaboration among its stated aims. The Desa Energi Berdikari programme itself sits within Pertamina's social and environmental responsibility work, which the company links to the Sustainable Development Goals and to the net zero emissions aspiration for 2060.

The capacity figure is not the point

A reader who stops at 1.35 megawatt peak across 269 sites will draw the wrong conclusion. That is an average of roughly 5 kilowatt peak per programme, about the size of a domestic rooftop array. By any measure of national generation this is negligible.

The programme is not trying to generate a meaningful share of national electricity. It is using small amounts of energy to make other things possible, and the reported outcomes are accordingly economic rather than electrical. The programme is credited with reaching 283,961 people, among them 62 persons with disabilities, generating around Rp5.65 billion of economic value annually and supporting 21,357 tonnes of rice production a year.

Oki Muraza of Pertamina described the sequence plainly. The concept begins with community awareness of renewable energy potential, proceeds through training people to use it productively, and ends in economic benefit. Energy enters at the start of that chain and the value is realised at the end of it.

Five kilowatts on a village roof is not an energy statistic. It is a cold store that lets a fishing family sell next week instead of today, or a mill that lets a farmer sell flour instead of grain.

The composition of the 269 programmes reflects that purpose. There are 166 food security initiatives, 58 energy tourism projects and 45 modern coastal programmes. Not one of those categories is named after a generating technology.

The same logic appeared at Kalijaran in Cilacap, where a hybrid solar and wind system of 15,250 watt peak pumps irrigation water and the saving is reported per planting cycle rather than per kilowatt hour, and on Pulau Rengit in Belitung, where round the clock supply made cold storage possible for fishing households. In each case the installation is small and the reported outcome is about what the electricity allows someone to do. That is a consistent design philosophy rather than three separate coincidences.

Reading the carbon number carefully

The reported reduction of 1.09 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent, cumulative, deserves a moment of scrutiny, because it is very large relative to 1.35 megawatt peak of installed capacity.

Solar of that size, displacing grid or diesel electricity, could not plausibly account for a figure of that magnitude on its own. The likely explanation sits in the 21 methane and biogas installations and the 959,302 cubic metres they have produced. Methane captured rather than released carries a high carbon dioxide equivalent weighting, so a small number of biogas digesters can dominate a portfolio emissions figure that a much larger solar fleet would barely move.

That is not a criticism of the accounting. It is a useful observation about where the climate value in village energy programmes actually comes from. If the objective is emissions, capturing methane from organic waste outperforms installing panels by a wide margin per rupiah spent. If the objective is economic productivity, panels may well serve better. The two objectives point to different technologies, and a programme pursuing both should be explicit about which it is optimising at any given site.

The Local Heroes model

The element most likely to determine whether these installations are still working in five years is not technical.

The programme has certified 223 people it calls Local Heroes, village level operators responsible for keeping systems running. Oki Muraza tied programme sustainability directly to having such a person in each village.

This addresses the standard failure mode of distributed rural energy. Installations are commissioned with visiting contractors, work well for a period, then fail in a way nobody nearby can diagnose or repair, and the equipment becomes scrap. A trained resident with a reason to care is worth more to long term availability than a higher specification of hardware.

Certification adds something beyond the technical skill as well. It provides formal recognition the person can carry to a village administration, a cooperative or a lender, which gives the role a chance of becoming a livelihood rather than a volunteer duty. An unpaid role depends on one person's goodwill and ends when that person moves away. A recognised role that earns something can be handed to a successor.

The festival also drew in universities. Brian Yuliarto, Minister of Higher Education, said institutions hold research and innovations that can be developed further for village application, which points at the same maintenance and adaptation problem from the supply side.

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Three observations follow.

The first concerns how programmes of this kind should be evaluated. Reporting village energy in megawatts invites comparison with utility generation, a comparison it will always lose. Reporting it in households reached, income generated, produce preserved and hours of service gained describes what it actually delivers. Agencies designing similar schemes should fix the metric before the first installation, because the metric determines which sites get chosen.

The second concerns separating the emissions case from the livelihood case. Both are legitimate and they select for different technologies. Where a district's priority is measurable emissions reduction, organic waste and methane capture deserve first consideration. Where the priority is rural income, solar paired with a productive end use is usually the better route. Conflating the two produces programmes that underperform on both.

The third concerns the operator layer. Two hundred and twenty three certified operators for 269 programmes is close to one per site, and that ratio is the quiet reason this portfolio is still functioning. Public programmes that fund equipment without funding a trained local operator and a spare parts route are buying assets with a short working life. The training budget is not an overhead on the installation. It is what determines whether the installation is still an asset in a decade.

What to watch next is whether the 332 target is reached by year end, whether the capacity mix shifts further toward biogas as the emissions case becomes clearer, and whether the Local Heroes certification is extended to cover the additional sites as they come online.