- In a district that holds Indonesia’s biggest coal reserves and sits near the new national capital, the country’s largest construction site, a large share of households in Paser district remain without an electricity connection.
- Data published by Indonesia’s statistics agency showed 10% of Paser district had yet to receive a connection to the grid.
- Households without electricity told Mongabay Indonesia that the lack of basic infrastructure provided by the state restricted economy activity and cultivated security fears at night.
RANGAN, Indonesia — Every night for three decades, Marwati would worry about snakes crawling out of the walls of her house near the east coast of Borneo. Today, a small rooftop solar panel powers a 3-watt bulb, illuminating the interior of her timber home in a reassuring glow.
However, Marwati begins to worry again when the sky darkens in November as the rainy season grows in intensity.
“If there is no sun, it’ll be too dim,” she says, pointing to a small array of small flashlights at her home in Paser district, in Indonesia’s East Kalimantan province. “So for the night, we add flashlights.”
Sometimes Marwati prioritizes buying batteries for the constellation of flashlights in her home ahead of groceries.
Marwati is not alone. Data from the provincial energy department of East Kalimantan showed that 10% of households in Paser district did not have a formal electricity connection in 2022.
Many households here query why the prosperity promised by the construction of Indonesia’s new capital city, Nusantara, which is being built 140 kilometers (87 miles) up the road, has yet to trickle down to basic services like electricity.
Moreover, Paser is among the highest-ranking districts for coal output in a country that produced 831 million metric tons of thermal coal in 2024, an all-time high.
Last month, the Indonesian ministry for villages and remote communities told parliament that 3,264 villages across the archipelagic country had yet to receive electricity access.
“If there’s no electricity,” Taufik Madjid, the ministry’s secretary-general, asked a parliamentary commission hearing on May 19, “how are children going to study?”
To soundless dark
Life without electricity is to live day and night with risks and opportunity costs that fuel negative development outcomes.
Almost 700 million people around the world lack access to electricity, more than 80% of them in sub-Saharan Africa, according to the World Health Organization.
Households without electrical lighting in Indonesia typically resort to using lamps that run on kerosene, an expensive accelerant responsible for countless tragedies — stories of house fires are common in communities burning fuels inside the home.
Families living without refrigeration inevitably endure higher risks of ill health from foodborne illnesses, with diarrhea among the leading causes of death for children worldwide.
“We’re always catching fish in the river,” Marwati says. “There’s no way to make ice to preserve the fish, and we don’t have a fridge to put it in.”
Meanwhile, reliance on firewood to boil water and cook food generates an ever-present pall of air pollution. A large share of pneumonia deaths, which kills around 19,000 children every year in Indonesia, is blamed on burning firewood indoors.
Progress toward meeting the United Nations’ 7th Sustainable Development Goal — the realization of reliable and affordable energy for all by 2030 — was set back in 2022, after the number of people without electricity increased for the first time in more than a decade.
“We will need much more investment in emerging and developing economies to expand access to electricity and to clean cooking technologies and fuels,” Fatih Birol, the executive director of the International Energy Agency, said in a statement last year.
A solution to these health burdens is so close to Marwati that she can almost reach out and touch it: the state power lines run just a few meters above her home.
Her village of Rangan received a grid connection for the first time in 2019, but a large share of homes have yet to be connected.
Marwati’s neighbor, Karyadi, bites her tongue whenever grid workers call on the family home to ask to cut back the palm fronds growing dangerously close to the power line. Instead, Karyadi makes do with a small solar panel.
“It can light only one lamp, and that’s for no more than 12 hours,” she tells Mongabay Indonesia.
The village where Karyadi and Marwati live, which is just a few miles from the main road and nearest power substation, is not classified as a remote area.
Mashur Sudarsono Wira Adi, head of East Kalimantan’s energy and mineral department, said around 12,000 families in the province lack grid electricity, most of them in West Kutai district.
“We still have 110 villages that don’t have electricity,” Mashur said. “We are focusing on that for the next three years.”
Through a glass darkly
At night, Marwati says, she hears animals moving around, and has on occasion heard strangers knocking on the wooden walls of her home.
“I’m afraid of snakes, and also afraid of people,” she tells Mongabay Indonesia. “We don’t know what other people are up to.”
The local government provided solar panels to several homes in 2022. Yet, like many recipients of this basic electrification in Indonesia, residents received no training on what to do when a component failed.
Mashur, the East Kalimantan energy lead, said the government is currently targeting 25 villages and aiming for 100% electrification by 2027.
PLN, the state-owned electricity utility, “also has an obligation to provide power,” said Happy Aprillia, a researcher at the Kalimantan Institute of Technology, a university.
Marwati says PLN told her family they’d have to pay around 17 million rupiah ($1,050) for an electricity connection.
“We wanted it badly,” Marwati says. “But what could we do, we can’t afford it.”
This story was first published here in Indonesian on May 21, 2025.
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