The timing is always uncanny. I'll be soaping myself in the shower, at the most exciting page of my bedtime reading or the trickiest part of making mayonnaise in the food processor when the electricity goes off. I have a propane hot water heater, but electricity drives the pump that brings the water to the shower. I have a gas stove, but when the lights go out at night cooking becomes quite an adventure. Have you ever tried to check a casserole in a gas oven with a flashlight between your teeth?
Until I bought a UPS (uninterrupted power source), my poor computer was clocking up more crashes than Aeroflot. I learned to keep a flashlight in every room, to always have fresh batteries in the house, to keep candles ready to be lit and matches in the fridge (it's the only place they stay dry enough to strike). "Listrik mati!" Wayan informs me at least once a day, if I haven't already found out the hard way. Sometimes it goes off three times in a single day, and then again after dark.
Until I came to Ubud I'd always taken a plentiful, uninterrupted supply of electricity for granted. I didn't know a watt from a volt and couldn't care less, as long as I was able to check my email. Now I know that 2200 watts serve my little cottage in Andong. I was astonished by the simplicity of electricity arithmetic. You add up all the watts of all the appliances and lights you are using, and the sum has to be less than 2200 or it's lights out. I'm embarrassed to tell you how old I was before I figured this out.
I had to focus on the issue of electricity while staying in a hotel in Nyuh Kuning for a month. The whole hotel - 14 guest rooms, a kitchen and a giant TV in the lobby was wired for 4300 watts. When the staff turned on the lights around the pool every night, my computer died. I bought a 100 watt light bulb for the balcony so I could read in the evening, and all the other lights in the room dimmed when I turned it on. Aha.
I was humbled to discover the existence of a 5 watt light bulb at the corner toko. Many local homes are wired for 600 watts considerably less than it takes to heat a cup of coffee in most microwave ovens. Take a minute to picture running your house on 600 watts. No air conditioning. No ice cubes for your G&T. Suddenly, Bali becomes a hardship posting.
I stay well within my modest (by Canadian standards) 2200 watts, having neither air con nor microwave. So imagine my indignation, after suffering the inconvenience of constant and sometimes lengthy power cuts, to discover that my electricity bills had suddenly grown enormous. Phone calls to PLN proved fruitless, so I went to the head office in Gianyar. There, the officer tapped my code onto his keyboard and impressive rows of numbers in different coloured boxes instantly appeared on the screen, with my name and address at the top. It took half an hour of agonizing mistranslations to establish that this model of high technology was in no way connected to my electricity meter. The number of units consumed that appeared on my outrageous bills were 'estimated' at the desa. I began to track my daily usage at home and found that the desa estimations were 200 - 300% higher than actual consumption. Back to Gianyar I went, with a translator this time, insisting that someone come in and read my meter every month.
Around this time I learned that many others in Ubud, Andong and Peliatan, both tamu and Balinese, were also getting astronomical bills from PLN. One friend reported that his latest bill was for 7 million rupiah. I stopped paying these crazy bills in June. After 8 months of discussion and regular meter readings PLN and I have finally kissed and made up, but I notice the last bill was drifting up again
Poor service and padded bills aside, there is just not enough electricity to go around. As far as I'm aware, just one power station in East Java serves its own province, Bali and East Nusa Tenggara. Although Bali has good potential for both thermal and hydroelectric power, no infrastructure has been developed here. In another life when I wrote country reports on Indonesia for the Financial Post, I researched a story on this country's energygeneration potential and infrastructure development. At that time, during Asia's economic boom, there were several large projects being planned in Java. They may well have fallen off the drawing board in the three administrations since that time. I can find no information on upcoming power generation projects or strategies to meet growing shortfalls, either in Java or on Bali itself.
Now that I am about to start building my own house, I'm acutely aware of the energy issue. As demand continues to rise and supply fails to grow to meet it, brownouts and blackouts are going to become more frequent. Politicians are much more interested in sexy, short term projects that make them look good immediately than expensive, medium-to-long term ones that won't even come on line during their terms in office. This is true all over the world. Only when the situation becomes dire, as it recently did in California, are solutions sought.
So we can expect the lights to keep going out. Those of us planning to build should factor in increasingly uncertain electrical service (at whatever price) and start exploring alternatives. I'd be very happy to opt out of the PLN grid altogether, but what are my options? Unreliable, expensive solar and environmentally unsustainable generators. If anyone has another solution please, please call me. Meanwhile, I'm off to buy new batteries for the flashlights
