Initiatives for Sub-Regional Power Trade in ASEAN: An Emerging Approach to Progress

Building on the model of LTMS-PIP, countries and regional stakeholders have started consideration of new sub-regionalapproaches to power trade and integration in Southeast Asia as a way of making near-term progress on MPT, withconsultations revealing a preference for these more manageable approaches among policymakers.

There are compelling reasons to pursue such arrangements between subsets of AMS based on different power supply and demand profiles among neighbouring countries, with initiatives among BIMP and LTC countries emerging examples of this.

Multilateral discussions on these initiatives are in their infancy, however countries should seek to move quickly towards concrete coordination on initial planning and feasibility, identification and resolution of technical issues, and infrastructure financing/investment solutions. LTMS-PIP governance structures provide a template for how this can be approached.

Given the immense benefits of region-wide integration under the APG, sub-regional initiatives should be considered as an intermediate step in the process of ASEAN power system integration, providing the building blocks that can be joined together to implement deep regional integration over time. This will require harmonisation among sub-regional initiatives, and between these and regional efforts.