Everybody needs energy, and everybody must know about it.
Energy is the things that we depend on the most, they have thrived the civilization in human history. We need it for everyday use, for instance, cooking to make food, transporting to every place, and playing a game on mobile phones. Just like how this thing thrived human civilization, energy itself has been withstood many developments since humans discover it. All started when cave human grinded two stone and it sparked. Human curiosity made that two grinded stone thriving until we can now transport from Singapore to Manila in just 4 hours using a plane that fueled with avtur. We can find various kinds of energy on this earth, just say Gas, Electricity, heat, and many others but not all of them are intact for human life. To make those things clear, the united nations make a program called “Sustainable Development goals” to solve problems of human life including but not limited to clean and development energy. On the way to make energy clean, there are steps to get through called “Energy transition” where every sector of life is moving from fossils fuels to zero-carbon in order to make energy are clean and affordable.
The transition from fossil-based energy to renewable one seems to be a problem in some countries, especially in ASEAN. There is some denial from people that think renewable energy is not safe and just part of silly government agenda. Conversely from what most folks think, clean energy is come to change the consuetude of fossil-based energy that mostly came from mining activity where there is a lack of safety condition. In advance, we can look at many accidents that happened with mining activity as the culprit, just say Indonesia lapindo catastrophic in 2006, Thailand Rayong oil spill in 2013 and many others. That’s why we need something called “Energy security” where we can enjoy our energy with no worry indeed.
Not just need to be safe, energy is needed to be accessible to anyone in the whole area of the globe. About 70 million people in ASEAN now still have lack access to energy, and also there is 4,7% of energy need growth in 2030 prior to the increase in population. Energy is right for anyone, regardless of who and where you come from. If energy can be accessible to anyone, all of the people can enjoy the same opportunity to thriving in society and together we can carve something better for human history. But the question is how can we get there? or it is just a utopian notion that appears in just some occasional time like an election?. All of the hesitations can be answered by one solution, Renewable energy!. This thing has the answer to all we need in society.
Let’s get deep into renewable sustainable energy, and one of the examples is the solar panel. Solar panel sometimes called photovoltaic cell that means light-electric in literal, and it means a board of cells that can change light energy (light from the sun) into electricity that almost all of the people need. In fact, a 1 m X 1,5 m board of solar panel can produce about 1,5 Kwh energy with the progress of charging in 6 hours, it means that board can produce energy equivalent to the energy needed to cook 16 omelets, playing with high-end PC in 23 hours, or playing PS4 in 9 hours straight. With light sun potential in ASEAN because of its location that lies near the equator, ASEAN has developed a gigantic solar panel plant in Dau Tieng, Vietnam and the other development is still ongoing until solar panel based power in South East Asia can reach 55GW in total to electrocute the whole sub-continent.
The wind power plant also can be considered to be sustainable and clean energy, because its process where none of fossils fuels involves. With just around 6 m/s speed to move the turbine to generate energy, it has huge potential to be applied in ASEAN that have a high amount of wind. In South-East Asia, Wind flowing approximately 0–20 m/s and it can be higher in some places in ASEAN for instance Upper Vietnam, Upper Philippines, and Lesser Sunda Island. What this method of generating energy it seems promising because it can generate about 6 GW in the 2025 projection.
All of the potentials that ASEAN has in sustainable and clean energy are giving hope to our future as citizens of ASEAN, but there is still the question, How to engage people to understand and know about sustainable energy?. There are two solutions that I can offer, we can educate and solving problems with real condition-based. Education is the main key success of something that we want to promote. To promote idea more efficient and can reach many people in one time are we using something that most people use it, The internet and social media. With the internet and social media, we can persuade people to get involved in renewable and clean energy with something we can use in social media that is challenges and viral conditions.
We can use real condition-based problem solving with solving problems in real condition and fix it with what we want, for example, we can use the faces that overload in most of the village to make it as biogas to give energy to village people and we can generate electricity using the local river and this technique is trustily effective because it was used in my village in it can work to enlighten the whole village.
In conclusion, we must move forward together to make renewable and clean energy can be reached for most people in ASEAN, also we can support it by starting it from a low level for example village, and this is must be our consequence to save future generations.
