“While India has an ambitious and accelerating renewable investment programme, the scale of electricity need is such that new coal investments and further growth in coal consumption are inevitable,” the MTCMR2015 concludes. “Key ASEAN countries are in a very similar position: energy access and poverty reduction ambitions drive coal investments in Indonesia, Viet Nam and the Philippines.”

In Southeast Asia, “coal is becoming the fuel of choice due to its availability and affordability,” Benjamin Sporton, CEO of the World Coal Association (WCA), told World Coal. “Indeed, the IEA has forecast demand for coal in Southeast Asia to grow by 4.5% every year to 2040 and its share of power generation to rise from 32% to 50%.”

Beyond such generalities, a number of specific drivers lie behind Southeast Asia’s push into coal. In the case of the region’s coal giant, Indonesia, it is the fuel’s ample availability. Indonesia is developing significant plans to expand its generation capacity and much of this will be based on its extensive domestic coal resources.² This article, however, will focus on those less-well-endowed Southeast Asian countries that are nevertheless turning to coal (upending a global trend) at the expense of natural gas.

According to Global Coal Plant Tracker, an online resource providing information on existing and proposed coal-fired plants, a number of Southeast Asian countries feature in the list of countries with the highest coal generation pipelines.³ Vietnam sits fifth on the list (behind China, India, Turkey and Indonesia) with 30 620 MW of planned coal generation capacity (including announced, pre-permit developments and permitted developments) and 15 780 MW under construction – although exactly how much will be built is an open debate (see discussion below).

Myanmar sits eighth on the list with 14 050 MW of planned coal capacity additions and 445 MW under construction. The Philippines is 13th with 10 046 MW of planned capacity and 3780 MW under construction, while Thailand lies 16th with 7425 MW of planned and 600 MW under construction. Global Coal Plant Tracker also notes projects in Cambodia, Malaysia and Laos in its latest list of proposed coal plants by country. Altogether, Global Coal Plant Trackers notes 212 468 MW of coal-fired generation that is planned in Southeast Asia with 67 549 MW under construction.

There is a general desire to boost coal in the energy mix at the expense of natural gas “across the board in Southeast Asia”, Dr Bart Lucarelli of Roleva Energy, told World Coal. “In the case of Thailand and Malaysia, this shift from gas to coal is due to their well-documented overreliance on gas in their power sectors (around 67% in the case of Thailand and 55% for Malaysia). For other countries, such as Vietnam and the Philippines, their moves to coal-fired power plants are due to a lack of gas resources and the simple fact that coal-fired power offers the cheapest and most reliable alternative to all other power sector sources, including gas.”

That issue of cost is key and effectively rules out other alternatives to gas, such as renewable generation (solar and wind) or nuclear – as Lucarelli explained: “At this time, solar and wind plants produce electricity at a cost that is significantly higher than electricity produced from coal-fired power plants. Coal’s cost advantage over solar will likely decline over the next decade but will not disappear entirely. Although nuclear plants produce electricity at a lower cost than solar and wind electric plants, they are still more expensive producers of electricity than coal plants.”

There are also additional complications beyond cost that further limit the appeal of renewable and nuclear generation: for solar and wind, it is the perennial issue of resource intermittency (or the prohibitive cost of battery storage as a solution to this). For nuclear it is an issue of the public's perception of nuclear as an unsafe technology.

According to Lucarelli, “a number of Southeast Asian governments have in the past expressed very strong interest in nuclear power as a means of reducing their CO₂ emissions. But after the Fukushima nuclear disaster of 2011, these same governments have backpedalled on their initial ‘nuclear commitments’ and have dropped their nuclear power concepts from further consideration. Vietnam and Thailand are good examples of Southeast Asia putting the nuclear genie back into the lamp.”

Yet for all of this enthusiasm, not all planned coal-fired plants will come to fruition. Vietnam is a case in point here and has been described as a “graveyard for IPP projects”.⁴ Indeed, according to the Global Coal Tracker, 44 292 MW of coal generation projects in Southeast Asia were shelved or cancelled between January and July 2016 alone.⁵

Although a number of reasons could lie behind project delay or cancellation, the major downside risk in coming years will be environmental. Should Southeast Asian countries join others in a concerted global push to limit global temperature rise to “well below 2°C”, as stipulated under the Paris Agreement of COP21 last year, the number of abandoned projects will rise significantly as coal’s role in the global generation mix is necessarily diminished