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Energy Transition
218
Companies
19.0%
OF ASEAN-6
1,148
TOTAL COMPANIES IN ASEAN-6
Top Stories in 2026
The region’s energy transition is becoming a race between electricity demand and the system’s ability to serve it. Demand is already growing twice as fast as overall energy use and could more than double by 2050. The transition has shifted from a policy problem to a physical one, and increasingly, a resilience one. Significant groundwork has been put in motion, driven by the Enhanced ASEAN Power Grid (APG) MOU was signed in October 2025.
Progress is unevenly distributed. The operating rules needed to connect, balance, store and trade clean power still remain incomplete. Transition costs can be pushed onto smaller consumers. For example, a new consumer levy in the Philippines and the 2024 rollback of Indonesia's household rooftop scheme make this an equity issue as much as a cost one.
Every other sector's decarbonisation depends on how much redundancy and flexibility the energy system builds in, not just how fast clean power gets delivered.
1
Storage is becoming a fix for a grid that cannot be rebuilt fast enough.
Storage is the fastest fix for a strained grid, often buildable in as little as a year against the 5-15 years a transmission upgrade takes. Vietnam introduced the region's first two-part battery tariff, charging separately for capacity and power. PLN's 2025–2034 electricity plan (RUPTL) targets 10.3 GW of storage by 2034: 4.3 GW of batteries and 6 GW of pumped hydro. Thailand and Malaysia have moved into procurement: ADB and Gulf Energy signed a US$820 million loan for 649 MW of solar-plus- storage, and Malaysia's first utility-scale tender awarded 400 MW/1,600 MWh.
Deployment is expanding in diverse forms. Singapore's Sembcorp completed the world's first vertical expansion of an operating battery system on Jurong Island. The Philippines' SMC already runs about 1 GW of storage across 32 sites. Prime Infra closed US$4.6 billion in March 2026 for a 2 GW pumped-hydro portfolio. Indonesia has announced 320 GWh of village-level storage.
Climate★★★
Economic★★★
Social★★★
Standalone Storage Deployment and Regional Manufacturing
Storage now has a price in Vietnam via the Circular 62/2025 framework. The next gap is the supply chain and services behind them. Indonesia's Dragon Project, due to produce battery cells from end-2026, is the region's first attempt to build that chain at home, from RAW nickel mining to battery cell production.
- Mid-supply chain battery materials services, cathode and precursor materials, recycling, electrolyte production
- Engineering and construction services (civil works, ground surveys, or electrical systems) for pumped-hydro storage projects in Thailand and the Philippines
- Software that tracks battery health, predicts when batteries need upgrading
Distributed and Community-scale Storage for Resilience
Indonesia has announced 320 GWh of village-level battery storage. The plan, called Merah Putih, will have villages and cooperatives own the batteries themselves – a model nobody has tried at this scale before and could turn out to be the region's biggest storage opportunity. The Philippines already shows a smaller version working: battery storage that keeps communities powered when the grid is down.
- Software that manages small, village-scale power grids and lets households pay for stored power in small instalments
- Financing models built specifically for cooperative ownership (matched to how Indonesia's Merah Putih villages) and development bank-backed mini-grid models
- Distributed battery systems built to survive typhoons
- Repurposing of used EV batteries as backup power storage
2
Grid capacity, not policy, is now the constraint.
Grid capacity is a real, measurable constraint, and it is now creating new opportunities. In Vietnam, up to 99% of the wind power generated daily in Quang Tri in September 2025 had to be switched off, because the systems that predict and manage power flows could not keep up with how much was suddenly available. In the Philippines, sudden power outages caused the Visayas grid to spend time under a "yellow alert" in May 2026, the system's own warning that its available power reserves had fallen below safe levels. Indonesia's national electricity plan (RUPTL) calls for 47,758 km of new power lines by 2034, but grid investment has run about US$1 billion per year below what is needed since 2019.
Closing this gap takes two kinds of work. First, existing grids need better software: forecasting and demand management tools. Second, the physical grid itself needs significant expansion.
Climate★★★
Economic★★★
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Grid Intelligence, Forecasting, and Demand Management Software
Most of the software that predicts renewable output and manages electricity supply and demand still comes from global vendors. The state utility companies are trying to build this capability, forecasting supply, managing dispatch and responding to demand spikes.
What is actually holding this back is better data and more warning time. Bain treats hazard mapping, forecasting and early-warning systems as a market in its own right. CIIP's breakdown of solutions names flood and drought early-warning systems, and sensor-based pest and disease detection, as areas ready for private investment rather than something only governments should fund.
- Forecasting, dispatch and demand response software
- Curtailment management software
- Aggregation and brokerage platforms that pool rooftop solar, batteries and flexible factory loads, then broker the resulting power deals
- Load management software for data centres in Singapore, timed to new capacity caps reopening for operators that meet green conditions
Transmission Delivery and Climate-hardened Infrastructure Services
Closing the grid gap is not just a financing problem, it is also a delivery and engineering one. Indonesia's plan to link its islands with high-voltage undersea cables, Malaysia's studies on connecting new data centres to the grid, and the Philippines' typhoon-exposed transmission network face specific execution challenges.
- High-voltage cable and substation engineering services for Indonesia's inter-island connections
- Grid connection studies and fast-track integration services to get Malaysia's data centres connected faster
- Climate resilience services for transmission networks (risk modelling, predictive maintenance, and vegetation management)
- Digital permitting and right-of-way software to help cut slow permitting cycles
- Settlement and metering software for direct power purchase deals, sold into Vietnam's growing corporate PPA market
3
The ASEAN Power Grid offers a route out of import dependence.
The ASEAN Power Grid is a government- and utility-led infrastructure project. Progress depends on countries agreeing to coordinate and fund shared infrastructure, more than on new technology.
The real movement is happening between pairs of countries: Malaysia's hydropower exports from Sarawak, and an October 2025 agreement to study a second power link between Malaysia and Singapore, are the two cross-border projects furthest along. Singapore is positioning itself as the region's anchor buyer of low-carbon electricity, a role set to strengthen in 2027 when it assumes ASEAN Chairmanship.
Where private companies can plausibly play a role is narrower: the systems needed to trade power across borders, certification proving imported power is genuinely clean, and the deal-structuring and rule-harmonising work now organised under the ASEAN Power Grid Financing Initiative, which aims to make cross-border projects bankable. The Asian Development Bank and World Bank are committing up to US$10 billion and US$2.5 billion respectively.
The Grid's near-term opportunity has less to do with new power generation, and more to do with the systems that let electricity actually be bought and sold across borders. Two mechanisms are moving now: Energy Exchange Malaysia (ENEGEM), which runs competitive auctions for exporting green electricity from Malaysia to Singapore; and Singapore's pipeline of 13 conditionally approved import projects from five countries.
The Financing Initiative also opens a separate opportunity: structuring and advising on these deals so they are viable to lenders, distinct from building the physical cables and substations.
Climate★★★
Economic★★★
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Cross-border Green Power Verification and Attribute Tracking
Right now, there is no shared regional system to prove that renewable power crossing the border, whether sold through ENEGEM or imported into Singapore, is genuinely green and has not been counted as clean twice. Early trades rely on certificates issued under different standards. This fragmentation affects the region's cross-border power deals that are now live.
- Verification software that checks power moving through ENEGEM or Singapore's import pipeline
- Digital renewable energy certificates (RECs), REC registries and trading platforms (similar to Asia-Pacific platforms like I-REC Foundation and AsiaREC Registry), built for Southeast Asia's own cross-border rules
- Reporting software that helps exporters and importers document their green claims to regulators and corporate buyers
4
The Iran conflict is accelerating the case for energy self-sufficiency.
The disruption at the Strait of Hormuz gave investors a second reason to back renewables, beyond fighting climate change: they reduce reliance on fuel shipping routes that can be cut off by international conflict.
Developers, lenders and big industrial buyers are starting to justify renewable projects on energy-security grounds, not just cost or emissions. As expected, the shock strengthened the case for renewables, storage, and power imports. But it also pushed Thailand, Vietnam and the Philippines to restart coal power plants, at the very moment those same governments were pushing ahead with their clean energy plans.
So the shock does not simply prove the region is becoming more resilient. The picture is mixed.
Climate★★★
Economic★★★
Social
★★★Renewable and Storage Deployment as Import Substitution
The fastest way to cut reliance on imported fuel is to build renewables and storage that are already approved and ready for funding. The region's more advanced markets already show how: businesses and households in the Philippines rushing to install rooftop solar since the shock, and Vietnam's rooftop solar base, now over 11GW.
- Rooftop solar installation and financing for businesses and factories
- Battery storage offered as a subscription service, pay-as-you-go, no upfront cost, to businesses and data centres
- Engineering and design of distributed battery systems and microgrids built to survive severe weather events
- Software that pools batteries, solar and flexible loads from many small sites into one larger virtual power plant
Import Risk, Settlement, and Fuel-substitute Infrastructure
Even where clean power cannot yet replace fossil fuel imports directly, the region still needs better ways to track, price and pay for the fuel and power it does import. Singapore’s plan to import electricity from five countries needs systems to verify the power is genuinely green and to handle payment and matching between buyers and sellers.
- Software that matches buyers and sellers and settles payments for cross-border power trades
- Certification software that verifies and tracks renewable power
- Platforms that collect and track used cooking oil, palm and coconut waste as feedstock for sustainable aviation fuel
- Dashboards that track fuel prices and import exposure for large energy buyers to see their risk in real time
Country Distribution
Where the 218 startups in this sector are headquartered across ASEAN-6.
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