MANY MINDEDIndonesia Approves First Phase of Its 100 GW Solar Push
Indonesia's Minister of Energy and Mineral Resources, Bahlil Lahadalia, said the first phase of the country's 100 GW solar program has been approved and will soon mark a groundbreaking ceremony. The plan, first announced in August 2025, splits the target into 80 GW of decentralized small-scale solar paired with battery storage across 80,000 villages, and 20 GW of centralized solar.
The scale is the point. Indonesia only surpassed 1 GW of installed solar in 2025, reaching 1.49 GW total, so a 100 GW goal is a leap of nearly two orders of magnitude. The village-level component connects to Indonesia's Village Electrification Program, known as Lisdes, which Lahadalia said has reached more than 1,400 of roughly 11,000 villages still without electricity.
For a developing market of this size, distributed solar with storage attacks two abundance problems at once: it expands clean generation and it brings first-time electricity to communities the grid never reached. Power that arrives village by village, rather than through a single central plant, can make basic energy cheaper and more available where it has been absent entirely.
The caveats are real. The groundbreaking is described as forthcoming, not held. An IESR report estimated the 100 GW goal requires $140–210 billion through the first phase — an estimate, not a committed budget — and warned against a one-size-fits-all approach to electrifying 80,000 diverse villages. Watch whether financing and the first physical projects materialize behind the announcement.
Source: pv magazine