The ideational impacts of Indonesia's renewable energy project failures

Abstract

Transitioning to a sustainable future involves a comprehensive shift into a new technical configuration and set of institutional arrangements. Despite global efforts to achieve sustainable development goals (SDGs), many energy projects have failed due to technical and institutional problems and misunderstandings. Failure leads to uncertainty at the end of long-term transformative change, but discussion of failure in socio-technical transitions has been limited as the current body of knowledge focuses primarily on highlighting ‘winning’ innovations and their historical path. Exploring project failure can potentially reveal the misalignments in socio-technological configurations that lead to stagnation in progression of transition trajectories. Failures have discursive implications as they can result in a period of instability and so trigger actors to revisit their commitment towards transition visions and effectiveness of trajectories. This article contributes to debates around project failures by tracing their impact on overarching ideas of transition. The case of Sumba Iconic Island (SII), as one of the strategic efforts of Indonesia's energy transition, is selected for an in-depth exploration. Our analysis found that the ideational power of SII, which is embedded in the overarching discourse of Indonesia's energy transition, is relatively stable despite numerous technical and managerial failures. However, people's trust in renewable energy ambition has been diminished as centralised diesel-generated electricity offers better reliability.