Sustainability scores a victory:

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1 Kammen Sustainability scores a victory Page 1 Sustainability scores a victory: The transition to clean energy in the rainforests of Malaysian Borneo Daniel M. Kammen 1 Going up that river was like travelling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings. Blank spaces on a map I caught the Borneo bug early, and it has held tight to me ever since. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness As a graduate student in physics, long before my career evolved into the research and praxis of renewable energy and sustainability I used to take breaks from my calculations and computer coding to walk across campus away from the science and engineering buildings on Oxford Street, to the Pusey library which housed in a mysterious and musty underground set of chambers, the Harvard Map Collection 2. It was one of the two most inspiring locations for me on campus, the other being the Museum of Comparative Zoology and the Biological Laboratories. It was in the MCZ that one of the iconic leaders in the crossover between natural science and cultural understanding, Richard Evans Schultes 3 had his offices and famous collections of medicinal plants collected from both documented and first contacted communities in the Amazon. I often imagined Schultes own preparations for an expedition involving taking the same walk I did, past the Harvard museums and the chemistry department, through the Yard, and to the map collection. There, in pre-digital days I would pull both new and crisp, and old decaying, maps of the world s great rainforests: Schulte s Amazon, King Leopold s Congo, and, of my target, Borneo. What fascinated me were the linkages between towns and the geography, ulu-this and long-that: upriver-this, and longhouse-that. Not only did the rivers define access to and intrigue in the interior, but also provided the only routes to Joseph Conrad s rioting forests. Ultimately these 1 Professor in the Energy and Resources Group, and in the Goldman School of Public Policy, and in the Department of Nuclear Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley E: Kammen@berkeley.edu URL: Kammen serves as a Science Envoy for the U. S. State Department, with a focus on energy and climate in the Middle East and Africa. 2 The Harvard Map Collection, founded in 1818, houses one of the largest collections of maps, atlases and now digital data in North America. As part of the Harvard Library, we support learning and research into all things geospatial. 3 Schultes, who parachuted into the Amazon to search for natural supplies of rubber as part of the U. S. effort during WW II, was also the author of The Plants of the Gods: Their Sacred, Healing, and Hallucinogenic Powers (1979), which he co-authored with Albert Hofmann, the discoverer of LSD. 1

2 Kammen Sustainability scores a victory Page 2 river highways would yield even then in end with areas left blank, replaced instead with printed warnings: This Area Not Surveyed: Locations Approximate, not to be used for navigation. For me nothing could be better. In fact, it was precisely those warnings that were my greatest interest, and motivation for myself and my brother. Doug, now a Professor of Politics in Singapore, was living, it seemed, to me rather exclusively on cengkeh (clove) cigarettes in Jakarta while he studied labor politics by culling data from Indonesian newspapers. Our self-appointed mission was to embark on a poorly researched crossing of Indonesian Borneo, Kalimantan. During that trip, by river bus, dugout canoe (Figure 1), and foot, we went rapidly from steamy ocean and riverside city to dense jungle with only a thin transition zone of cleared fields and logged tracts, even though we saw ample signs of damage and transition in the form of great floats of logs moving downriver, and heavy machinery precariously perched on barges and makeshift pontoons headed for the deep interior. Figure 1: LEFT: Images and experiences from our 1985 crossing of Borneo, completed at a time when only two or three such crossings were recorded each year, and when, among other events, the Swiss environmentalist Bruno Mansur 4 was roaming the Kalimantan forests it is said with the Indonesian military in pursuit. RIGHT: feeding a pet hornbill. 4 Bruno Manser (b. 25 August 1954, (declared) d. 10 March 2005) was a Swiss environmental activist. From 1984 to 1990, he stayed with the Penan tribe in Sarawak, Malaysia, organizing several blockades against timber companies. After he emerged from the forests in 1990, he engaged in public activism for rainforest preservation and the human rights of indigenous peoples, especially the Penan, which brought him into conflict with the Malaysian government. He founded the Swiss non-governmental organization (NGO) Bruno Manser Fonds in 1991 which has subsequently 2

3 Kammen Sustainability scores a victory Page 3 From ecological amateur to energy professional These amateur explorations and adventures did little to prepare me for the transformation that was to come to Borneo. Since my initial trip in 1985 both Malaysian Borneo Sabah and Sarawak, and Indonesian Borneo, Kalimantan have become ground-zero for the most aggressive wave of tropical deforestation worldwide. So many of those exquisite blank-on-the-map remote upriver areas are now palm plantations that whole communities of Iban, Penan, and other tribes no longer recognize the landscape around them 5. My fascination with Borneo continued as I transited academically from theoretical physics and neuroscience to energy systems, and at long-last came full circle when my energy systems modeling efforts 6. First, my laboratory was approached by a consortium of NGO groups In Sabah, Malaysia 7 to offer alternatives to a coal-fired power plant. Sabah, a small, and rather well managed state, is the former British North Borneo, famous for rare mega-fauna and Mount Kinabalu (Figure 2). Our report, Clean Energy Options for Sabah 8 (Figure 3) and a great deal of community education and outreach helped to overturn a decision to purchase a 300 MW used coal-fired power plant from China and instead to invest in expanded distributed renewables, and improved grid, and natural gas. funded some of my work reported on here, including speaking at the current blockades against both logging and the construction of mega-dams. He disappeared in Sarawak, Malaysian Borneo, in May 2000 and was presumed dead or killed, and then officially declared dead in While dramatic, the trend has been ugly for some time. According to just one important study, the hemorrhaging of wood is much, much worse" than had been thought, says Curran. Between 1985 and 1999, for example, most of the 10-kilometer-wide buffer zone around the 1000-square-kilometer Gunung Palung National Park was felled. Since then, forest within the park itself has been disappearing at a rate of 10% per year despite its protected status. The same hollowing-out of supposedly protected areas takes place throughout Kalimantan, where more than half of the forest cover has been lost from them since 1985, some 3 million hectares in all (Curran, et al., 2004). 6 Described in detail on the projects page of my laboratory website, rael.berkeley.edu involved the creation of models for the life-cycle, or cradle to grave to cradle again impacts of different fuels, most notably biofuels, and of models of power systems for both industrial economies such as the U. S. and China, but also for emerging economies such as Kenya, Bangladesh, and, eventually, Malaysian Borneo and now the Mekong region. 7 LEAP: Land, Empowerment, Animals and People ( directed by Cynthia Ong, a woman of amazing energy, drive, and with the most compelling pitch of any NGO leader I ve ever met. 8 McNish, T., Kammen, D. M. and Gutierrez, B. (2010) Clean Energy Options for Sabah (Sabah Unite to Re-Power the Future & World Wide Fund for Nature, WWF-Malaysia), and available on my website, 3

4 Kammen Sustainability scores a victory Page 4 Figure 2: The many facets of Sabah: LEFT Puntung, and old, blind, pygmy rhino at an enclosure in X State Park; MIDDLE Climbing 4096 meter talk Mt. Kinabalu; RIGHT the wet, descent down the cliff face of Mt. Kinabalu This victory helped to connect our team to a more challenging case, that of the larger and more ecologically and culturally brutalized state of Sarawak. My excitement, simply to have been approached by the community activists organized by LEAP in Sabah, however was multiplied when I learned that the reward for taking on one seemingly lost cause can be others. Soon thereafter, we were asked to look at the conditions in the far more degraded ecological situation that is Sarawak. My interest was compounded because of the first readings and maps I had read of not only the story in the Amazon, but of the complex mixed-messages of western partners and exploitation of Professor Richard E. Schultes work, and of his Sarawakian counterpart, the highly controversial Major Tom Harnett Harrison 9. 9 One could write forever about Tom Harrison, (26 September January 1976) was a British polymath. In the course of his life he was an ornithologist, explorer, journalist, broadcaster, soldier, guerrilla, ethnologist, museum curator, archaeologist, documentarian, film-maker, conservationist and writer. Although often described as an anthropologist, and sometimes referred to as the "Barefoot Anthropologist", his degree studies at University of Cambridge, before he left to live in Oxford, were in natural sciences. He was also a founder of the social observation organization Mass-Observation. He conducted ornithological and anthropological research in Sarawak (1932) and the New Hebrides ( ), spent much of his life in Borneo (mainly Sarawak) and finished up in the US, the UK and France, before dying in a road accident in Thailand. He drove around Kuching, capital of Sarawak with a an orangutan in the front seat of his car, and his biography was titled, The Most Offending Soul Alive: Tom Harrison and his Remarkable Life. 4

5 Kammen Sustainability scores a victory Page 5 Renewable & Appropriate Energy Laboratory Energy & Resources Group University of California, Berkeley Clean Energy Options for Sabah an analysis of resource availability and unit cost Tyler McNish 1, 2 Prof. Daniel M. Kammen Benjamin Gutierrez 5 March , 3, 4 * 1 University of California, Berkeley Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory 2 University of California, Berkeley School of Law 3 University of California, Berkeley Energy and Resources Group 4 University of California, Berkeley Goldman School of Public Policy 5 Harvard College * Address correspondence to Professor Kammen, Director of RAEL, 1 Figure 3: TOP LEFT - The RAEL report, Clean Energy Options for Sabah; TOP RIGHT Presenting the Report to the Environment Minister; BOTTOM LEFT Coverage in The Borneo Post, Anti-coal stand has support ; BOTTOM RIGHT large public turnouts at events to discuss and debate the report findings. A clever deception: the Sarawak Corridor of Renewable Energy (SCORE) In Malaysian Borneo, like much of Southeast Asia has experienced not only a brutal wave of deforestation, but also a surge in mega-hydro power projects ostensibly to facilitate industrial productivity and consumption 10. The Three Gorges Dam of China was completed in while the Nam Theun Dam (completed in 2010) and the Xayaburi Dam (under construction) in Laos are 10 International Energy Agency, Southeast Asia Energy Outlook: World Energy Outlook Special Report. OECD Publishing, 2013; OECD, Economic Outlook for Southeast Asia, China and India OECD Publishing, T. Nakayama and D. Shankman, Impact of the Three-Gorges Dam and water transfer project on Changjiang floods, Glob. Planet. Change, vol. 100, pp , Jan. 2013; S. Jackson and A. Sleigh, Resettlement for China s Three Gorges Dam: socio-economic impact and institutional tensions, Communist Post-Communist Stud., vol. 33, no. 2, pp , Jun

6 Kammen Sustainability scores a victory Page 6 the first of a series of dams being built in the transboundary Lower Mekong Basin 12. The island of Borneo, too, has abundant natural resources, immense global ecological importance, exotic megfauna of orangutans and dwarf rhino and pygmy elephants, and hornbills (Figure 4) and a largely rural human population some former headhunters -- and an agrarian economy that is also on the cusp of major industrial dislocation due to hydropower development. Figure 4: LEFT - dominant male orangutan at the Semaggoh orangutan preserve, a tiny 6 ha facility housing over 30 displaced individuals; MIDDLE [NAME], a young female critically endangered pygmy rhino captured in a rainforest bordering an expanding palm oil plantation. RIGHT - a hornbill sits in one of the fruiting trees. Photos: DM Kammen In 2006, the Federal Government of Malaysia embarked on a number of initiatives to promote balanced regional development and accelerate growth in designated geographic areas through the Tenth Malaysia Plan 13. The Plan describes a philosophy of development focused on decentralizing economic growth away from the federal capital through the establishment of economic corridors in different states. The Sarawak Corridor of Renewable Energy (SCORE) is a corridor in central Sarawak, an East Malaysian state on the island of Borneo. SCORE differs fundamentally from the other Malaysian economic corridor projects in its predominant emphasis on hydropower 14. Sarawak (Figure 5), is the poorest and most rural state in Malaysia, and thus a perfect playground for both big, undisciplined projects, and for profiteering. An increased focus on cheap electricity to attract manufacturing and industry became the state s approach to achieving high income economy status. The current peak annual energy demand in Sarawak is 1250 MW, met by a mix of diesel, coal and natural gas generation either operated or purchased by the state utility company. At least 12 large hydroelectric dams and two coal power plants, together constituting 12 E. Goh, Developing the Mekong: Regionalism and Regional Security in China-Southeast Asian Relations, 1 edition. London: Routledge, 2007; F. Molle, T. Foran, and Flock, P, Introduction: Changing Waterscapes in the Mekong Region Historical Background and Context, in Contested Waterscapes in the Mekong Region: Hydropower, Livelihoods and Governance, 1 edition., F. Molle, T. Foran, and M. Kakonen, Eds. Routledge, Official Website of Economic Planning Unit - Tenth Malaysia Plan (10th MP), Economic Planning Unit, 12-Sep [Online]. Available: [Accessed: 16-Dec-2014]. 14 What is SCORE?, Regional Corridor Development Authority (RECODA), [Online]. Available: [Accessed: 01-May-2014]. 6

7 Kammen Sustainability scores a victory Page MW of capacity, are scheduled to be built before Six dams are scheduled to be completed by 2020 with three major dams already under different stages of development (see Fig 1) 16. In 2012 the 2400 MW Bakun dam became operational 17. At 205 meters high it is Asia s largest dam outside China. The dam's reservoir submerged 700 km 2 of land and displaced about 10,000 people. In 2013 the 944 MW Murum Dam was completed and the 1,200 MW Baram Dam was scheduled for construction. = Figure 5: Map of northern Borneo showing Sarawak, the dam sites, with Sabah at top right, and Indonesian Borneo Kalimantan below. These projects -- SCORE sum to a targeted nine-fold increase in energy output between 2010 and 2020, or from 5,921GWh to 54,947GWh, which represents a 16% annual growth rate. In terms of installed capacity this translates to an expansion from 1,300MW in 2010 to between 7,000MW and 8,500MW in No extant demand exists for this power, yet the ecological and community damage would be extreme. 15 B. K. Sovacool and L. C. Bulan, Energy security and hydropower development in Malaysia: The drivers and challenges facing the Sarawak Corridor of Renewable Energy (SCORE), Renew. Energy, vol. 40, no. 1, pp , Apr. 2012; P. G. Harris and G. Lang, Routledge Handbook of Environment and Society in Asia. Routledge, M. S. Umar, P. Jennings, and T. Urmee, Strengthening the palm oil biomass Renewable Energy industry in Malaysia, Renew. Energy, vol. 60, pp , Dec T. H. Oh, S. C. Chua, and W. W. Goh, Bakun Where should all the power go?, Renew. Sustain. Energy Rev., vol. 15, no. 2, pp , Feb Sarawak Energy, Sarawak Energy Annual Report, 2010, Sarawak Energy Berhad,

8 Kammen Sustainability scores a victory Page 8 To battle against such an over-reach of projects is difficult because little else will offer as much apparent gain gigawatts (10 9 ) of new power. Malaysia has little need for this power. Unless, that is, one also presumes further mega-project such as a huge transmission cable to export power to peninsular Malaysia (and then to China?) or a huge bauxite to aluminum refining project (which probably could not compete with Brazil s bauxite wealth and massive and already installed hydropower. This raises the specter of the true motivation for SCORE: a mean to attract billion of foreign, likely largely Chinese investment. $100 billion is the number often floated. In face of this, the tiny story of the 300 MW coal plant and relatively orderly Sabah pales by comparison. The story is further complicated because with so many proposed dams, and even less quantitative analysis of the energy options or cost and benefit trade-offs in the literature or the public discussion over this conflict, it is very hard for opposition to develop a clear narrative. A doctoral student of mine, co-author, and now Senior Research Director for several international organizations energy access and environmental, Dr. Rebekah Shirley from Trinidad and Jamaica, set out to scale up and make far more sophisticated the modeling packages we built for the Sabah study. With such a modeling tool, we could then address the question: What are feasible alternative energy futures for East Malaysia that meet future energy demand for the local population given priorities of (a) cost, (b) reliability and (c) environmental impact? While I won t describe that model in technical detail here; the interested reader is directed to our papers that detail the analytic tool itself, the data sets, and many of the specific results 19. Our results appeared locally in 2015, and we immediately began to hold open meetings to present these models, and our findings (Figure 6). Figure 6: LEFT activist team dinner with Dr. Rebekah Shirley, second from left and Prof. Kammen, middle, flanked by community activist leaders from across Sabah and Sarawak. Peter Kallang (L) Peter Kallang, Chairman of SAVE Rivers, Gabe Wynn (second from Left), a clean energy activist and technical trainer at Green Empowermetn. Kammen (second from Right, and Lawyer and Sarawak Assemblyman See Hee Chow is at far right. 19 These are available on our project website for this work: as well as in the paper: R. Shirley and D. Kammen, Energy planning and development in Malaysian Borneo: Assessing the benefits of distributed technologies versus large scale energy mega-projects, Energy Strategy Rev., vol. 8, pp , Jul

9 Kammen Sustainability scores a victory Page 9 Our findings were stark and robust: Sarawak s current installed capacity including Bakun already exceeds expected demand in 2030 demand under the BAU growth assumption. So, there is no additional need to build out more capacity under the government s own BAU growth forecast. The Bakun Dam itself can provide more than 10,000 GWh per annum. Under a 7% electricity demand growth assumption, this represents half of expected demand by Even under the more aggressive 10% growth assumption, Bakun alone will satisfy a third of demand in Completion of the two additional dams currently under construction (Murum and Baram) would oversupply 2030 demand under 7% growth, leading to a large excess capacity, and would require a marginal amount of additional generation under 10% growth. The already well-established blockade against the dams used our results immediately. Not only were there now blockades and protests, but also teach-ins, op-pieces, and international commentary. In one of the most peculiar twists, the Norwegian hired gun Minister of Energy took to combating the coverage our work received with statements to press that Sarawak would not listen to flippant analysis by foreigners. Press coverage was extensive (Figure 7), with pieces detailing our press conferences often taking the form of articles like this one from the 11 August edition of The Borneo Post: KUCHING: Chief Minister Datuk Patinggi Tan Sri Adenan Satem may just scrap the state s plan to build more mega hydroelectric dams in the state after listening to experts on alternative energy sources on Saturday. A delegation comprising Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory (RAEL) director Prof Dr. Daniel M Kammen, Green Empowerment Borneo Programme manager Gabriel Wynn, Save Sarawak Rivers Network chairman Peter Kallang and Batu Lintang assemblyman See Chee How briefed the chief minister at his residence here. After the one-hour meeting, which included a presentation by Kammen on the benefits of using renewable energy such as solar, wind, sustainable biomass and micro-hydro in place of mega hydro-dams, the delegation had a feeling the Adenan administration would seriously rethink its policy to build more mega dams. See Chee How said the briefing had enabled Adenan to hear the other side of the story, rather than just depending on what Sarawak Energy Bhd (SEB) had to say. We gave him (Adenan) the authority to reconsider since he has heard from SEB with all their energy projections. We gave him an alternative, with studies showing him that the state does not need that kind of energy. You have Bakun HEP (hydroelectricity project) that is there for so long, but you re only using half of its capacity. 9

10 Kammen Sustainability scores a victory Page 10 Figure 7: Protesters citing (and holding) copies of the Shirley and Kammen study add ammunition to the wider social dialog around the need for mega-dams, and the dubious possibility of billions of foreign investment (from the 11 August article in The Borneo Post). A breakthrough In response to the new study, press coverage, indigenous protests, and a meeting I had with the Chief Minister something remarkable and unexpected happened. On 30th July 2015, a moratorium on further work for the Baram dam was announced by the Chief Minister. Then, on March 21, 2016 a legal decision to solidify this position was announced (Figure 8): the Government of Sarawak revoked the classification of the land that dam developers has used to extinguishing the native rights of ownership for the contested dam site. This remarkable turnaround victory was a demonstration of local community activism and the importance of science communication, as research published by the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory identifying financially viable commercial power production alternatives for the state, played a major role in the developments. It is hard quite how to understand such a victory. It resulted from the years of community organizing needed to staff a blockade, and endless community and press outreach, but it also would not have been possible without the analytical hammer that our study brought, and was then used so effectively by the community. To have all this effort distilled into a single, clear, unequivocal edict is a rare, sweet, and shockingly sudden outcome. No environmental victory is ever final, of course. One moment s victory then demands constant vigilance, as anything can be overturned, by a change in political party, a shocking election result, or by illegal land grabs and invasions. In the case of the Baram dam, the paper is clear, but shortly thereafter the Chief Minister passed away. While the law stands, what was once final is never quite so final with the inevitable change of officials. For now, however, things are in a good place. 10

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12 Kammen Sustainability scores a victory Page 12 Figure 8: Edict from the Chief Minister of Sarawak cancelling the permit to build the next, the Baram, dam. 12

13 Kammen Sustainability scores a victory Page 13 Acknowledgements This research was conducted in partnership with Dr. Rebekah Shirley, and in further collaboration with Green Empowerment and Tonibung both NGO organizations involved in rural energy access in South East Asia. We wish to acknowledge their role in facilitating surveying and data collection, and in providing information on past projects. Save Sarawak Rivers Network (SAVE Rivers) was the central, coordinating group that brought together community leaders, researchers, public officials, and ensured the continued attention and efforts over the years of work, and blockades, of the dams. SAVE Rivers was the group that proposed for the study to be carried out and then involved Bruno Manser Fund. This research was funded by the Bruno Manser Fonds, the Rainforest Foundation Norway, the Karsten Family Foundation, and the Zaffaroni Family. About the Author Dr. Daniel M. Kammen is a Professor of Energy at the University of California, Berkeley, with parallel appointments in the Energy and Resources Group, the Goldman School of Public Policy, and the department of Nuclear Engineering. He was appointed by then Secretary of State Hilary Clinton in April 2010 as the first energy fellow of the new Environment and Climate Partnership for the Americas (ECPA) initiative. In 2016 he began service as the Science Envoy for U. S. Secretary of State John Kerry. Kammen is the founding director of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory (RAEL; and was Director of the Transportation Sustainability Research Center from has served the State of California and US federal government in expert and advisory capacities, including time at the US Environmental Protection Agency, US Department of Energy, the Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Office of Science and Technology Policy Dr. Kammen was educated in physics at Cornell (BA 1984) and Harvard (MA 1986; PhD 1988), and held postdoctoral positions at the California Institute of Technology and Harvard. He was an Assistant Professor and Chair of the Science, Technology and Environmental Policy Program at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University before moving to the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Kammen has served as a contributing or coordinating lead author on various reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change since The IPCC shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. Kammen helped found over 10 companies, including Enphase that went public in 2012, Renewable Funding (Renew Financial) a Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE) implementing company that went public in 2014, and Lion Energy, a startup launched with funds form the venture capital community and ARPA-e. Several of Kammen s students are currently working at ARPA-e directing the energy storage as well as the rare-earth elements efforts. Kammen played a central role in developing the successful bid for the $500 million energy biosciences institute funded by BP. During Kammen served as the World Bank Group s first Chief Technical Specialist for Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency. While there Kammen worked on the Kenya-Ethiopia green corridor transmission project, Morocco s green transformation, the 10-year energy strategy for the World Bank, and on investing in household energy and gender equity. He was appointed to this newly-created position in October 2010, in which he provided strategic leadership on policy, technical, and operational fronts. The aim is to enhance the operational impact of the 13

14 Kammen Sustainability scores a victory Page 14 Bank s renewable energy and energy efficiency activities while expanding the institution s role as an enabler of global dialogue on moving energy development to a cleaner and more sustainable pathway. Kammen s work at the World Bank included funding electrified personal and municipal vehicles in China, and the $1.24 billion transmission project linking renewable energy assets in Kenya and Ethiopia. He has authored or co-authored 12 books, written more than 300 peer-reviewed journal publications, and has testified more than 40 times to U.S. state and federal congressional briefings, and has provided various governments with more than 50 technical reports. For details see http;//rael.berkeley.edu/publications. Dr. Kammen also served for many years on the Technical Review Board of the Global Environment Facility. He is the Specialty Chief Editor for Understanding Earth and Its Resources for Frontiers for Young Minds. Kammen is a frequent contributor to or commentator in international news media, including Newsweek, Time, The New York Times, The Guardian, and The Financial Times. Kammen has appeared on 60 Minutes (twice), NOVA, Frontline, and hosted the six-part Discovery Channel series Ecopolis. Dr. Kammen is a Permanent Fellow of the African Academy of Sciences, a fellow of the American Academy for the Advancement of Science, and the American Physical Society. In the US, has served on several National Academy of Sciences boards and panels. 14