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Solar Energy

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As a tropical country, Indonesia has a relatively good potential of solar energy with average daily solar radiation of 4.8kWh/m 2. To utilize such potential of solar energy, two technologies have been applied, namely thermal solar energy and photovoltaic solar energy. A. PHOTOVOLTAIC Photovoltaic solar energy is used to meet rural electricity requirement, water pump, television, telecommunication, and refrigerator (such as: in Community Health Centers and for the fish saving cabinet used by fisherman) with the total capacities of about 5 MW. The utilization of solar energy, especially in the form of SHS (Solar Home Systems) has reached the semi-commercial phase. The barriers faced in the utilization of photovoltaic are: * High investment cost. As the main part of photovoltaic; module, is still imported. There is no industry yet in Indonesia that can produce the module of photovoltaic; * The price of photovoltaic energy could not compete to commercial energy, as high investment cost and the conventional energy is still subsidized; * The market of photovoltaic is still limited; * The absorption of photovoltaic technology is still low; * Less support of infrastructure, such as: there is no service center in the village or isolated area, so if one of component of PV is broken, the user has to go to the city area to buy the new one. It will take a lot of money and time just to fix the PV;
* Less support on capability of service; * As yet no sense of urgency and synergy among government institutions in application of regulation concerning renewable energy; * In standardization, there is still no socialize yet, so many stakeholders and society still don't know about the standard of photovoltaic. Indonesia has many standards, but because there is no producer of module itself, the standards still not implement yet. Government's programs in photovoltaic are: * Develop photovoltaic system for rural electricity program, especially to fulfill the electricity need in isolated area. * Increase the utilization of hybrid technology, especially to fulfill the lack of electricity supply from isolated power plant. * Replace all or some part of supply for Small Social Customer and Small Household Customers of public electricity company with the photovoltaic system. * Motivate the utilization of photovoltaic system at buildings, especially Government's buildings. * Investigate the possibility of developing module industry in Indonesia to fulfill the local need and foreign. * Motivate the private companies in utilize the photovoltaic. * Implement some cooperation with other countries for big scale development of photovoltaic system. B. SOLAR THERMAL ENERGY
Solar thermal energy in Indonesia is generally used for cooking (solar stove) , drying for agricultural products (plantation, fishery, forestry, food crops), and water heater. The use of thermal solar energy for cooking and drying for agricultural products is still very limited, while as water heater it has reached the commercial phase. Some devices that produced in Indonesia are: * Dryer ; * Domestic water heather; * Oven; * Water pump with Rankine- Cycle and Isopentane as working fluid ; * Solar Distillation/Stil l; * Cooler * Solar Sterilizer; * The power-plant that using concentrator and working fluid with the low boiling point. The barriers of solar thermal energy development are: * Lack of socialization to the people of Indonesia ; * Buying ability of society are low even the price of solar thermal devices are relatively cheap; * The human resource in solar thermal energy field is limited. For this time, human resource is available in Java Island and only in the universities/academics. Government's programs in solar thermal energy are: * Do inventorying, identification, and mapping the potential and application of photo thermal technology countinuesly. * Disseminate and transfer technology from developers to user (agro-industries, commercial building, etc) and national producer (manufacture, mechanic workshop, etc) by communication forum, education and training, and pilot project. * Make national standardization of components and system of photo thermal technology. * Investigate the financial schemes for national manufacturing development continuesly. * Increase the research activities and development for all kind technologies of photo thermal. * Increase the local production and investigate for the export possibility. * Develop the high temperature photo thermal technology, such as: electricity generation, stirling machines, etc.