Tyler Harlan | Importing the Energy Transition: Emerging Powersheds in the Asia Pacific
Long reliant on coal, Asia’s megacities are poised to accelerate their energy transition in the coming decades, with national and urban governments committing to ambitious emissions reduction targets. Meeting these, however, will require a massive buildout of renewable energy that reduces fossil fuel use while keeping pace with rapidly rising urban power demand. Energy planners are thus looking to electricity imports – whether from outside the local grid, or from another country – that are cheaper and more feasible than constructing local sources. Much of this imported electricity is generated hundreds or thousands of kilometers away in rural areas rich in renewable energy resources, tying them to cities in a mutually dependent relationship. These long-distance flows will shape both rural resource economies and urban energy transitions in the Asia Pacific in ways that have received limited scholarly attention.
This project investigates the political economy of these emerging energy flows, with examples drawn from Beijing and Singapore. To do so, I develop a framework based on the “powershed,” defined as the material and socio-political infrastructure linking electricity supply and demand areas. This project has two aims. The first is to determine how and why long-distance power transfers are organized and maintained by cities and the rural regions that supply them with energy. The second is to assess the role of China - the world’s largest renewable energy generator - as both a model for and driver of these new powersheds.