Energy is an integral part of the ASEAN Economic Community’s driver to achieve an inclusive and dynamic regional economic integration towards 2025 and beyond. It plays a significant role for a well-connected ASEAN which continuously drives to be a highly integrated, competitive, innovative, and global region. As the region’s economy is growing, the demand on energy is also soaring. The ASEAN Centre for Energy (ACE) projected that the energy consumption will be 2.5 times higher by 2040.
Identifying the affordable and clean energy options is an utmost important for the region. With the ongoing trend of declining prices of RE, the opportunity to provide affordable energy in a clean manner is wide open in the near future (ACE & GIZ, 2019).
At the same time, there is an urgency for ASEAN to do transformation towards a low carbon energy system while ensuring the region’s resiliency. Both are paramount for ASEAN as it is committed to pursue the energy development focus mainly on energy security, accessibility, and affordability, as well as its sustainability. The efforts to provide affordable and clean energy are not only main part of ASEAN energy cooperation blueprint – ASEAN Plan of Action for Energy Cooperation (APAEC) – but also in line with the UN Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) No. 7 on Energy. With various economic background and challenges, both at national and regional levels, it is important for ASEAN to map all the possible options on affordable and clean energy to create a resilience energy system in the future, especially for all ASEAN communities.
This roundtable will bring the experts from to present current actions, innovations, as well as strategies focusing specifically on how countries’ effort to build affordable and clean energy system for resilient communities. The roundtable will be continued with panel discussion where there will be experts from different sectors around the world discussing the challenge on policy, technology, and investment in strengthen energy system resilience and enhancing energy system reliability from their perspectives, while at the same time fulfilling the commitment on the climate change at the global level, such as Paris Agreement.
At this Roundtable, the ASEAN Centre for Energy (ACE) by the support of GIZ will also present sneak peek of the 6th ASEAN Energy Outlook (AEO6) – the latest series of the Southeast Asia official source of strategic insight on the future of energy and its related impact on emissions, investment and job creations. AEO6 is developed based on official data, policy and information from 10 ASEAN Member States (AMS) with detail scenarios that define various trajectories of the regional energy landscapes as a cumulative effort of every AMS to achieve its aspirational regional target as well as global commitment under SDG 7 to have affordable and clean energy. Developed through the cooperation with GIZ, the full report will be presented and launched at the 38th ASEAN Ministers on Energy Meeting (AMEM) on 4 November 2020. At the 38th AMEM, ASEAN will also launch its updated regional blueprint, the ASEAN Plan of Action for Energy Cooperation (APAEC) 2016-2025 Phase II: 2021-2025.