Page 49 - MASHRAE 35th Anniversary

Reshaping ASEAN’s Energy Landscape Post COVID-19
By Dr. Han Phoumin1, & Ir. Leong Siew Meng2
The remarkable progress in ASEAN’s energy sector over the past 2 decades has seen improved rural electrification access, rapid provision of large-scale and high-voltage national grid systems, successful mobilization of indigenous resources, adoption of new technologies, gradual share of renewables into energy mix and the beginning of cross-country entry trade also taking place. However, the future energy landscape of ASEAN will rely on our actions or policies today and investments to change the course towards a future cleaner energy system.
As the world continues to pull out all the stops to contain the spread of COVID-19, any contested policy measures at this time will have mixed outcomes as to when would be appropriate to reopen economies, either partially or fully, to mitigate the economic fallout. What we do know, the COVID-19 pandemic has already brought the world economy into recession whereby global growth is predicted to contract by -4.9%and ASEAN-5 (Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippine, and Thailand) by -1.3% in 2020.
The global energy demand is expected to fall by 6% in 2020 compared to 2019 levels. However,
countries experiencing partial or full lockdown could see energy demand drop from 18-25% throughout 2020. The global oil demand is also expected to decline by 8 mb/d in 2020. As a positive outcome, global CO2 emissions are also expected to fall by 8% in 2020 compared with 2019 levels.
The crisis has already put 300 million jobs at risk globally, in which 3.2 million jobs out of 40 million jobs directly provided by the energy sector may have already been lost. Many millions of jobs in the informal sector have already been impacted severely and millions of people may already be living in poverty. During the crisis, some countries in ASEAN may have already faced the challenge of increasing national debts or depleted national savings as more spending will be needed to protect life and wellbeing and the need to have appropriate stimulus packages to save the economy. Without proper economic stimulus packages, economic recovery will be slow, and the impact will be enormous. However, post COVID-19 – hopefully by 2021, energy demand is expected to bounce back strongly along with CO2 emissions.
Currently, most parts of the world as well as ASEAN face tremendous challenges for the future
1 Dr. Han Phoumin, is Senior Energy Economist, Economic Research Institute for ASEAN and East Asia (ERIA)
2 Ir. Leong Siew Meng is Consultant, Green Technology Solutions PLT, Malaysia, ASHRAE Malaysia Chapter Past President (2001- 02) and current Newsletter Editor (2019-21), and IEM Building Services Technical Division Past Chairman (1998-2000)