Committed to improving socio-economic conditions through stable and reliable energy access, some countries with the right resources are pursuing geothermal energy. Challenging this pursuit, however, has been the struggle to attract financing — showing that to succeed a geothermal project needs to be more than just technically possible.
“Tapping into geothermal energy is about more than just steam,” says Abdulmalik Oricha Ali, an IRENA program officer helping to coordinate the new geothermal assessment pilot schemes.
The UNFC system holistically encompasses the management of socio-economical, technological and uncertainty aspects of energy and mineral projects. Using the classification system’s project maturity and resource progression model, investors can identify projects to match their preferred risk profile, reduce exposure to potential costly failures and protect their investments.
IRENA and partners from the IGA and World Bank recently shared with Indonesian government officials and geothermal project investors how the UNFC system can help classify Flores’s numerous geothermal fields — acknowledging the difference between technical feasibility and economic viability.
“By 2025 we plan to have over 7 GW of geothermal capacity,” said Pak Sanusi Satar, Vice Chairman of the Indonesian Geothermal Association, describing his country’s geothermal ambitions. INAGA representatives attended the Flores workshop and were presented with an overview of the initiative’s objectives — joining in group work to classify a subset of Flores’s projects.
“This workshop has been useful to us because in our standards we’ve been focusing on just the technical aspects of geothermal projects, but in the UNFC we include it all — the social, economic, financial, and geological aspects. I find them interesting and useful and hope we can apply classification,” Satar added.
The sessions provided hands-on training to empower the Indonesian authorities to continue the work themselves to classify projects in the rest of Indonesia.
“For us this session was very much needed,” says Pak Dikdik Risdianto, a geologist with the Indonesian Geological Agency. “Our work has only looked at exploration without feasibility or economic considerations, but after this UNFC course, we’ve realized we need to look beyond just resources and think about economics.”
