The Infrastructure Forum That Became an Energy Forum

The Asia Infrastructure Forum was not convened as an energy conference. Its remit ran across the whole built environment - transport, water, digital networks, cities, and the capital that has to be raised to deliver them. Yet by the close of the second day, anyone keeping a tally would have noticed something telling: better than four in every five minutes of discussion had been spent on a single subject - Power.

That was not a failure of programming. It was the most honest signal from the room. When you put ministers, development banks, commercial lenders and developers in one room and let the conversation find its own level, it runs downhill to energy, because energy is now the precondition for everything else on the agenda.

Makhtar Diop, Managing Director of the IFC, put it most plainly: electricity is the defining constraint of our time. It is difficult to argue otherwise. Artificial intelligence is, at its core, a demand for electricity. So is the electrification of transport, and the digitalisation of industry that every government in the region is chasing. Each of these lands at the same placel; the meter. You cannot sustain growth in Asia without resolving the electricity challenge, and it is not a problem for the next decade. It is here, now.

Asia’s challenge is not scarcity. The region is unusually rich in renewable resources: sun, wind, hydro, and geothermal. The problem is architecture: the resource and the demand are misaligned geographically, and the connective tissue between them, physical and institutional, has not been built.

The physical side dominated more of the room than I expected. Cross-border high-voltage interconnections, the long-discussed ambition of a more integrated regional grid, moved from footnote to centrepiece. Lines that let surplus generation in one country serve unmet demand in another are no longer a tidy diagram; they are starting to look like the spine of the regional system.

The institutional side is harder: harmonised regulation, credible policy frameworks, and offtake arrangements that survive a change of government. The figure for what this requires in Southeast Asia alone, in the order of USD 800 billion, is less striking for its size than for what it implies about the gap between ambition and the supporting infrastructure actually in place. As Minister Indranee Rajah noted, existing networks are simply not adaptable enough for the generation mix we aspire to deliver.

The genuine and pleasing surprise of the forum was how much focus went to energy from waste, biogas and biofuels. I had expected solar and storage to crowd everything else out. Instead, waste-to-energy earned serious airtime, with Farchad Kaviani of Suez and Lim Wee Seng of DBS among those who kept returning to it.

The appeal is obvious. It solves two problems at once, a waste problem and a power problem and, unlike solar and wind, it is firm. In a system increasingly desperate for dispatchable capacity to balance intermittent renewables, a plant that runs when you need it is worth a premium. That is also why the targets are moving: a renewables-and-biogas share of around 14 per cent in 2023 is meant to reach 30 per cent by 2030, with something like USD 300 billion of value to be captured from the broader green transition.

But waste is a difficult feedstock. Feedstock varies in both volume and calorific content; offtake has to be locked down; and the contract structures that allocate those risks are anything but standard. This is precisely where good intentions meet the balance sheet and where most of these projects are quietly won or lost.

Strip away the sector details; the forum was, overwhelmingly, a conversation about bankability. Not whether a project is technically possible but whether it can be financed at a cost and risk that a lender will actually accept.

Minister Rajah's prescription was the clearest articulation of it. Bankable projects need four things: an enabling legal framework; scale, achieved by moving away from bespoke, one-off deals toward standardised pipelines and platforms; insurance and guarantees to absorb the residual risks that neither sponsor nor lender will hold; and functioning carbon markets. Lim Wee Seng of DBS offered the sharpest image of how capital actually thinks about this. A lender assesses a renewables portfolio rather as a bank assesses its credit-card book; it does not need every account to perform, only the portfolio to hold. That is a quietly radical point, because it reframes scale not as a nice-to-have but as the mechanism that makes the financing work at all. It also explains the drift toward firm, dispatchable renewables. India's procurement of exactly that being the obvious example, because firmness is what lenders are willing to pay for.

The most interesting tension of the two days went largely unresolved, and I think it deserves to be named. The same forces pushing the region toward integration are also pushing it toward fragmentation.

The instinct for resilience and energy sovereignty, understandable after recent supply shocks, drives overbuilding and local-content requirements that are, on any efficiency measure, wasteful, and that can create their own bottlenecks. Yet the efficiency case points the other way: toward interconnection, open supply chains and shared capacity.

Both arguments are right. Nobody in the room reconciled them, and I am not sure they can be fully reconciled but the projects that get financed over the next five years will, in effect, be casting votes.

That, ultimately, is the space where real work lies: between the ambition and the balance sheet, where projects become credible enough to finance and robust enough to deliver.

If electricity is the binding constraint on Asia's next decade, then the discipline of making energy projects bankable is not one item on the infrastructure agenda. It is the key that unlocks the rest. Which may be the simplest explanation for why a forum about everything could only talk about one thing.