REPUBLIKA.CO.ID, JAKARTA - Indonesia planned to build a coal-fired power plant with total capacity of 2,000 megawatts worth 20 trillion IDR (1.8 billion USD) in Jakarta, State-Owned Enterprises Minister Dahlan Iskan said on Tuesday. The comment by Iskan to reporters on the sidelines of a media briefing came ahead of a parliamentary election in the world's third-largest democracy on Wednesday.

Southeast Asia's largest economy is in desperate need of electricity as decades of under-investment in power projects and bureaucracy have led to frequent black-outs in offices and households. Indonesia plans to add up to 60 gigawatts of electricity capacity to meet demand that is expected to roughly double by 2022, requiring a total of 125.2 billion USD in investment, an energy ministry official said last month.

State-owned logistics and industrial parks developer PT Kawasan Berikat Nusantara (KBN) planned to reclaim 100 hectares of land near the Tanjung Priok port in Jakarta, where the power plant to be built, KBN President Director Sattar Taba told reporters on the sidelines of the briefing.

Taba said he expected the project, which would be a public-private partnership, to take four years to complete and ground-breaking was slated for the first quarter of 2015. Most of the funding for the project would come from a Chinese consortium, which would also be involved in building the plant, Taba said, declining to disclose specific names.

KBN might have a stake of up to 20 percent in the project, he said. The remainder of the shareholding structure is unclear.

"The need for electricity in Java is very high whereas supply is very low, so it is predicted that in 2017 there will be an electricity crisis if the plant is not built from now," Taba said. 

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