Indonesia’s state-owned electric vehicle company is focusing on the more than 115 million motorbikes on the country’s roads as it pushes efforts to reduce emissions.
Indonesia’s state-owned electric vehicle company is focusing on the more than 115 million motorbikes on the country’s roads as it ramps up efforts to reduce emissions.
For starters, Battery Indonesia Group plans to produce 50,000 battery packs for two-wheelers next year, President and Chief Executive Officer Toto Nugroho said in an interview on the sidelines of the BloombergNEF Summit on Saturday. The prototype has been certified safe and the output is ready to go.
“It’s a very good market and it’s good for our environment to reduce emissions and cut fuel imports, so we’ll work on that first,” he said.
IBC was established in 2021 to realize President Joko Widodo’s ambition to have an electric vehicle supply chain end-to-end – from nickel ore to domestically produced electric cars. The government is under increasing pressure to cut oil imports after soaring global crude prices forced it to raise gasoline prices, a move that sparked protests and undermined support for the government. Jokowi, as the president is known.
Only 21,000 motorbikes in Indonesia are electric, which means many of their riders face higher fuel costs.
The government aims to increase the use of electric vehicles in the country to 2 million units by 2025 and plans to offer incentives of 7.5 million rupiah ($484) for consumers to swap gas-guzzling motorbikes for electric ones.
local minerals
Over the next five years, IBC will manufacture battery materials and cells and recycle used batteries in a project with Chinese partners LG Energy Solution and CATL, Nugroho said. The factory will use renewable energy and comply with global standards to be able to export products to the US and European markets.
Antam, one of IBC’s parent companies, will form a joint venture to mine battery materials on the eastern island of Halmahera. IBC is working on how to manufacture batteries using only local natural resources.
“We want to make sure that the batteries that we manufacture here will not depend on imported minerals like lithium, graphite and cobalt,” Nugroho said. “We wanted a battery that didn’t use those minerals.”
