Asia’s decarbonisation needs proactive developers, not new tech

Unsolicited clean-energy projects and clearer regional policies for net zero urged.

Asia produces over half of the world’s carbon emissions, and its ability to decarbonise will determine the pace of global progress toward net zero. But according to Andre Susanto, Chief Technology Officer of Quantum Power Asia, the region’s transition cannot rely on traditional market mechanisms alone.

“Typically, project developers and implementers are looking for the industries to come up and issue a request for proposal or a tender,” Susanto said. “But there's a large untapped market here that has more solutions based on unsolicited energy transition opportunities.”

Susanto explained that many high-emission industries across Asia “know they need to decarbonise” but “don’t know how to implement decarbonisation solutions that also have side benefits for them.”

“This is where the clients are not yet aware or fully educated of the technologies and how the implementation of those technologies can benefit them,” he said. “Decarbonising can also mean lower energy costs, [and] lower operational cost, in addition to just reducing the pollution.”

When asked about the key innovations needed to accelerate the shift, Susanto noted that technology is no longer the limiting factor. “There is not a single innovation that's going to scale this up. It's no longer technology and no longer innovation that's holding back the scale up of clean energy,” he said.

Instead, he pointed to the need for clearer regional collaboration and regulatory transparency. “What we need are policies and regulations that are transparent, clear how we can implement clean energy projects, and it allows us to do what we need to do to scale up,” he said.

Looking ahead, Susanto said the next five years will require developers to take on “high risk development cycles” to drive solutions-oriented decarbonisation pipelines. “There’s a lot of these people who don’t know how to really decarbonise, but they want to, and they need to,” he said. “So we need to tell them how to deploy them.”