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KUTAI KARTANEGARA, Indonesia — Asniah recalls nights lying in darkness listening to cicadas and the passing hum of outboard motors after her family moved to Muara Enggelam in the 1990s, an over-the-water village in the interior of Indonesian Borneo, cut off from basic services.
Around the turn of the century, a handful of homes in Muara Enggelam acquired diesel generators, bringing electric lighting for the first time to the timber stilt houses that still line the last mile of the river where the Enggelam meets Borneo’s Lake Melintang.
The Kutai Kartanegara district government here later expanded this basic electrification program, but residents paid several times more for power than a grid-connected urban household.
Moreover, the generators ran only from dusk to dawn and would frequently break down, plunging Muara Enggelam back into the void Asniah recalled on moving here three decades earlier as a child.
“We were just grateful — things had been harder before,” Asniah, a mother of three now in her early 40s, told Mongabay Indonesia at her home.
“Even though there was 24-hour electricity in the city at the time,” she added.
Uneven access to electricity has abetted inequality in what is now Indonesia ever since Dutch colonialists introduced captive coal plants in the 19th century to power their plantation operations.
Indonesia’s Gini coefficient, a measure of inequality, records the wealth gap between rich and poor as wider today than in 1998, the year the autocrat Suharto exited power after more than three decades, sparking the country’s transition to democracy.
Energy ministry data show Indonesia’s electrification rate increased from around two-thirds of households in 2010 to 99% a decade later, implying near-universal access today.
In remote areas, however, this can mean village offices receive electricity but outlying households remain powerless.
Muara Enggelam is home to around 750 people and is accessible only by boat, with the nearest town an expensive two-hour journey away.
Indonesia’s energy ministry says 1.4 million people remain without electricity nationwide, highlighting the challenge of connecting remote communities across an archipelago of more than 17,000 islands, where more than half the population lives on just one, Java.
Research shows life without access to gas and electricity can cause disproportionate harm to women and children. UNICEF, the United Nations’ children’s agency, estimates indoor burning of solid fuels — like kerosene for lighting — is responsible for thousands of annual pneumonia deaths among children under the age of 5 in Indonesia.
Across remote areas of Indonesia, local governments and charities have used small solar systems, microhydro projects and even bamboo-burning generators to bring electricity for the first time to isolated communities.
In many cases these are intended to replace diesel generators, which remain the primary power supply for hundreds of villages across the country.
Data from Indonesia’s energy ministry showed the capacity of diesel-generated power plants in Indonesia declined by 8.5% from 2018 to 2024, bringing diesel electricity to around 6% of Indonesia’s total generation in 2024.
In late 2024, Muara Enggelam received an additional 23.1 kilowatts-peak of solar capacity from the Kutai Kartanegara district government from a 4.5 billion rupiah ($257,000) upgrade using lithium-ion batteries, which are more efficient than the tubular gel batteries used previously.
“We’ve expanded capacity four times through community contributions and government support,” said Madi, the village head of Muara Enggelam. “Because the village has repeatedly been included in national pilot programs, we’ve continued to receive financial assistance.”
Available data show that the experience of Muara Enggelam does not reflect the broader national trend across Indonesia.
Energy ministry data showed the total capacity of solar power plants increased almost threefold between 2018 and 2024, but to a total of just 35 megawatts. That meant solar accounted for less than 1% of the power generation of diesel across the archipelago in 2024.
And a new report this year by civil society organization Celios and Greenpeace, a pressure group, found this renewable energy uptake in rural households had mostly stalled across Indonesia’s 84,000 villages, even as the government pledges a sweeping energy transition over the next decade.
The number of villages and subdistricts reporting at least some household solar power use declined from 4,176 in 2021 to 3,076 in 2024, a reduction of 26.4%, according to the Celios and Greenpeace report.
“Urban areas and provinces with large-scale investment (such as Jakarta) have seen rapid improvement, while eastern regions and rural areas continue to lag significantly behind,” the report authors concluded.
Since 2017, Indonesia’s energy ministry has targeted the archipelago’s remotest communities through the Indonesia Terang (“Bright Indonesia”) program, which intended to bring electricity to around 2,000 communities, largely through replication of the solar system built here in Muara Enggelam.
Last year, the energy ministry announced a rebrand of its electrification initiatives under the name Merdeka dari Kegelapan (“Freedom from Darkness”).
In Muara Enggelam, the first signs of an energy transition emerged around 2015, after the energy ministry allocated 3.4 billion rupiah ($195,300) for a 30-kWp solar array, an upgrade on the diesel generators that had provided lighting.
The year after solar electricity reached Muara Enggelam, Asniah started a home business using a blender to produce amplang, a local fish cracker made from the Enggelam River’s belida fish (genus Chitala).
“Using a blender was a bit of a worry before because the fuel would run out quickly,” Asniah said. “A liter [of diesel] wouldn’t last an hour — now it’s much more convenient.”
Efforts to electrify remote Indonesian villages often struggle with failing equipment, difficult access to technicians and limited power supply. In Muara Enggelam, however, the 30-kWp solar installation launched in 2015 has gradually expanded through community fees and government support to around 80 kWp, enough to supply nearly 200 homes.
“Using a generator was expensive — that’s why so few people started businesses,” said Jam’ah, who manages the village-owned enterprise, which is known in Indonesia as a BUMDes. “The solar energy has been a relief for people.”
For Jam’ah, a mother of one, management of the solar array is helping attend to another form of entrenched inequality across Southeast Asia’s most populous country. According to the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), less than 5% of energy managers in Indonesia are women.
Reliable electricity has enabled the village enterprise to since extend its commercial footprint to basic banking services and sales of drinking water. Next, the village plans to open refrigerators powered by the solar panels, which will give households and fishers more options.
“The people here are fishers — a good catch increases their purchasing power,” Jam’ah said, wearing a ruby-colored hair-covering. “And that supports all businesses here.”
Electricity has also enabled smartphone charging and internet access sufficient to access the social media marketplaces vital to showcase Asniah’s business. She has gone on to open a food stall, where a day’s sales often reach 1 million rupiah (nearly $60).
“Thank God, it’s so much more practical now,” Asniah said. “This just wouldn’t have been possible before.”
Banner image: Solar panels in Bali, Indonesia. Image for representational purpose. Image by Selamat Made via Flickr (CC BY 2.0).
This story was first published here in Indonesia on April 17, 2026.
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