BENGKULU, Indonesia — Yesi held her daughter Helda tightly, but the little one still shivered for days in the tropical heat over Teluk Sepang, a bay on Sumatra’s west coast.

“Her cough hasn’t stopped for 10 days now,” Yesi told Mongabay Indonesia. “I feel so sorry for her.”

Many parents like Yesi say it’s a sanctioned coal power plant, majority-owned by a Chinese state enterprise, that’s to blame for sickening the children in Teluk Sepang, here on the southern fringe of the city of Bengkulu.

“Almost every child has had this acute respiratory infection,” said Mimi Elzakiah, a health worker who has served the Teluk Sepang community for the last seven years. “Sometimes they get better, but then they relapse.”

Data from the public health clinic in Teluk Sepang showed 53 children, including seven babies, received treatment for acute respiratory infection diagnoses during October last year. In December, the number of children diagnosed was 72.

That reflects a large share of young people in Teluk Sepang, a coastal enclave of just 3,549 people, where almost half of the population are children under 15.

The power plant faces the Indian Ocean on a thin hook of land sheltering a natural anchorage south of Bengkulu, which is today shared by a clutch of small fishing boats with chipped paint, and the bulkier traffic moored in a state-owned port.

Between 2020 and 2023 coal operator PT Tenaga Listrik Bengkulu (TLB) received three separate sanctions for noncompliance by Indonesia’s environment ministry.

In 2022, the company received a “red notice” from the ministry under its PROPER framework, a formal notice of unlawful environmental compliance. The company was found to have dumped fly ash and bottom ash in a protected marine area off the coast of Bengkulu.

“No firm penalties have been imposed,” said Ali Akbar, chair of Kanopi Hijau, a nonprofit that supported community advocacy in Teluk Sepang. “This demonstrates weak oversight, and it brings into question the accountability of various parties.”

Take or pay

The first of two 100-megawatt units at Teluk Sepang began burning coal in late 2019, after three years of construction by Sinohydro, a subsidiary of the Power Construction Corporation of China (PowerChina).

“The project site is located within a water catchment area and coastal boundary — it’s clear it will damage the coastal ecosystem,” Walhi, Indonesia’s largest environment pressure group, said two years earlier.

The project was financed by PowerChina in collaboration with Indonesia’s PT Intraco Penta Tbk (INTA). It’s operated by PT Tenaga Listrik Bengkulu, with ownership shares divided 70% to PowerChina and 30% to INTA.

The Teluk Sepang plant was constructed under a typical 25-year build-operate-transfer scheme, in which the private sector receives guaranteed revenue for the duration of the contract, after which the assets are nationalized.

Indonesia has leaned heavily on these “take-or-pay” energy contracts to reduce investor risks. The contracts in effect guarantee revenue for 25 years, regardless of any uncertainty around future electricity demand.

The Teluk Sepang unit was built as part of a strategic drive to install 35 gigawatts of new capacity nationwide to address frequent blackouts arresting development around much of the archipelago during previous decades.

A paper published in Jurnal Teknologi in 2014 showed Indonesia’s state-owned utility, PLN, routinely resorted to rolling blackouts of up to six hours in places like Bengkulu, disrupting industrial production and incurring higher costs to households.

A decade later, however, PLN faces an oversupply of energy for which it’s locked in to guaranteed contract terms. This has crowded out adoption of renewable energy in the world’s fourth-most-populous country.

Since 2015 the share of captive coal power plants increased from 8% to 31% of Indonesia’s coal capacity as Indonesia expanded nickel mining and required miners to refine mineral ores within Indonesia.

“This coal-fired power plant has been proven to be detrimental to the community and the environment,” said Kanopi’s Ali. “The transition to renewable energy cannot be postponed any longer.”

‘He used to be so healthy’

Gaska, a boy in Helda’s third-grade class, has skin trouble that his mother blames on the coal plant. At night, the condition is a blight on sleep. During the day, Gaska finds it hard to concentrate at school.

His mother, Eva, recalled happier times when they lived only a few miles away near a city park, a green space with swings and a basketball court.

“Gaska was very healthy,” she told Mongabay. “He never had a skin condition like this.”

In 2015, Greenpeace and Harvard University’s Atmospheric Chemistry Modeling Group assessed that every new 1,000 megawatt coal plant “is expected to result, on average, in the death of 600 Indonesians every year.”

Eva said she worries the dearth of a healthy environment created by the coal power station threatens to impact her son’s confidence, and maybe even restrict his development.

A study of a coal-fired power plant in the Sumatran province of Riau, published in the March 2023 issue of Geography and Sustainability, found that accounting for social costs raised the true cost of coal-generated electricity to the point of a negative net present value, a fundamental measure of financial viability.

Eva said she blames the fly ash blending with breathable air and the liquid waste discharged into the Indian Ocean, polluting the bay where children play.

In the house next door, Nayumi wheezed as she explained the job she took at the local coal stockpile.

“I depend on this medication every day just to breathe,” she told Mongabay Indonesia.

Around 90 workers alternate loading up 8-ton trucks with lumps of coal on a tarpaulin from the Teluk Sepang stockpile. A worker receives 5,000 rupiah (about 30 U.S. cents) per full tarp, meaning workers like Suci and Leni are required to work late into the night if they want to earn 50,000 rupiah, around $3 per day.

“The important thing is to be able to eat,” Suci said. There are too few alternatives for work, she added.

Around 90% of the workers who perform this hazardous work are women.

“The job is difficult, to put it mildly,” Nayumi said. “It’s only for desperate people, who have no other options.”

Blue skies

Community advocacy for clean air started in 2015 leading up to the creation of the Blue Sky organization in 2018. The community unsuccessfully sued provincial authorities in 2019 for permitting the plant, amid allegations of turtle die-offs and mangrove loss.

However, that voluntary organization, which was established with nonprofit Kanopi, disbanded after only a few years under pressure from local authorities and the coal plant management.

“They tried to silence the activism of local communities who rejected it, and suppressed their efforts to protect the environment — the community was made to be afraid and submissive,” said Nukila Evanty, chair of the Indigenous Peoples’ Initiative (IMA), an organization that has worked on the ground in Teluk Sepang.

Membership of the successor organization known, as Lentera, has dwindled from 25 to fewer than 10.

Helda’s mother, Yesi, is the only woman volunteer with the Lentera organization today. Subtle reprisals for this advocacy work have ensued, she said, including the revocation of a scholarship for her child.

Nevertheless, the mothers are pressing ahead with calls for compensation, environmental restoration, and health insurance for their children from the coal plant operator.

PT Tenaga Listrik Bengkulu spokesperson Soraya listed areas in which the company has complied with environmental regulations, including chimney height in excess of 2-2.5 meters (6-8 feet) and the use of low-sulfur coal.

“They must be held responsible for our health,” Yesi said, as her daughter rubbed at reddened, streaming eyes.

The company has initiated corporate social responsibility efforts, Soraya added, including providing support to the local primary school, orphanage and mosque, and planting 1,000 tree seedlings with the Bengkulu city environmental department.

“We want our children to be healthy,” said Eva, Gaska’s mother. “We want a better future for them.”

Banner image: Dust on the floors of residents’ houses in Teluk Sepang, Bengkulu. Image by Elviza Diana/Mongabay Indonesia

This story was first published here and here in Indonesian on July 2 and 16, 2025.

As Indonesia phases out coal, what happens to people & environments left behind?

Citations:

Syadli, H., Abdullah, M. P., Hassan, M. Y., & Hussin, F. (2014). Demand side management for reducing rolling blackouts due to power supply deficit in Sumatra. Jurnal Teknologi–Sciences & Engineering, 69(5). doi:10.11113/jt.v69.3202

Rokhmawati, A., Sugiyono, A., Efni, Y., & Wasnury, R. (2023). Quantifying social costs of coal-fired power plant generation. Geography and Sustainability, 4(1), 39-48. doi:10.1016/j.geosus.2022.12.004