A Letter Still Sitting in Jakarta
On June 14, 2026, Malaysian Deputy Prime Minister Fadillah Yusof told reporters in Kuching that the proposed Sarawak-Johor submarine power cable — intended to finally connect Borneo's hydropower surplus to Peninsular Malaysia's grid — remains stuck waiting on the Indonesian government. About 60 to 70 percent of the proposed route runs through Indonesian waters, and Malaysia has formally requested Jakarta's consent to begin seabed route surveys (Bernama; DayakDaily). "We have submitted a letter to the relevant authorities and, once approval is obtained, all parties involved will proceed with the seabed survey," Fadillah said. He gave no date for when — or whether — Jakarta might respond.
This is not an isolated hiccup. It is a pattern.
The Same Wait, Twice
A second, larger Malaysian interconnector is caught in the identical queue. Sarawak Energy's planned 720km cable from Tondong, Sarawak to Changi, Singapore — routed through Indonesia's Muri-Midai corridor — has roughly 80 percent of its length in Indonesian waters and is likewise awaiting Jakarta's approval before any seabed assessment can proceed (DayakDaily). Singapore's Energy Market Authority has already granted conditional approval on its end, and Sarawak Energy has cleared its domestic approvals. Two of the region's most commercially advanced power interconnectors — one to Malaysia's own peninsula, one to Singapore — are both parked at the same single desk in Jakarta.
Indonesia's Case, Fairly Stated
Indonesia's caution is not unreasonable on its face. As the world's largest archipelagic state, its exclusive economic zone overlaps dense fishing grounds, marine protected areas, existing telecom trunk cables and sensitive military approaches. In 2021 Jakarta issued Ministerial Decree No. 14/2021, confining new cables and pipelines to designated corridors, and folded seabed cable surveys into its PKKPRL marine-space-utilization permit system — the same mechanism used for ordinary domestic marine spatial planning (Submarine Networks). Indonesia also requires Indonesian-flagged, Indonesian-crewed vessels for survey work, a rule that protects a fragile domestic maritime survey industry as much as it controls who maps the nation's seabed. Given how often undersea infrastructure elsewhere has become entangled in state security disputes, wanting to know exactly who is surveying sovereign waters before consenting is ordinary practice, not obstruction — and it is a prerogative most coastal states, Malaysia included, assert over their own waters too.
Where the Proportionality Breaks Down
The problem is not that Indonesia reviews foreign cable requests. It is that the review has no clock. UNCLOS Article 58(1) affirms that all states enjoy the freedom to lay submarine cables through another state's EEZ, subject to "due regard" for the coastal state — a balance, not a veto (UNCLOS Part V). Indonesia's domestic regime complies with that language on paper, but in practice it functions as an undated, unreviewable hold: no statutory deadline, no published queue position, no appeal if a request sits for a year. Submarine cable industry analysts now treat roughly two years as a realistic planning baseline for Indonesian permits, and that estimate was borne out again this year when the unrelated Apricot telecommunications cable's completion slipped from 2026 to 2027 for the same reason — Indonesian permitting delay (Submarine Networks). Malaysia's two flagship power links are now waiting in that same undated queue, with no indication which, if either, comes first.
A Financing Push That Skips the Real Bottleneck
The ASEAN Power Grid's own masterplan identified 18 priority interconnection projects; as of mid-2026 only nine are built, concentrated in overland Greater Mekong routes, while the archipelagic links requiring subsea cable lag furthest behind (CSIS, "Plugging into Reality: The ASEAN Power Grid"). In October 2025, the Asian Development Bank, World Bank, ASEAN Secretariat and ASEAN Centre for Energy launched the ASEAN Power Grid Financing initiative to mobilize capital for exactly these cross-border interconnectors (ASEAN Centre for Energy). But capital was never the constraint on the Sarawak links — Sarawak Energy, Tenaga Nasional and Singapore's EMA have already cleared their side of the ledger. The unresolved variable is a predictable route to a permit in Jakarta, and no amount of concessional financing fixes that.
What Would Actually Fix It
- Attach a fixed statutory review window — six to twelve months — for foreign seabed-survey requests tied to projects the ASEAN Centre for Energy has already endorsed under the regional masterplan, rather than open-ended case-by-case discretion.
- Make ASEAN Power Grid Financing initiative disbursements conditional on a joint permitting fast-track understanding between sponsor states and Indonesia, mirroring the pre-cleared marine corridors Indonesia already operates domestically.
- Give the ASEAN Centre for Energy a formal facilitation mandate so requests move through a standing regional channel instead of bilateral ministerial letters that can sit indefinitely — the institutional gap CSIS's analysis flags as ASEAN's core weakness.
None of this requires Indonesia to surrender its permitting authority — only that discretion convert into a rule with a deadline. Until it does, every ASEAN Power Grid subsea link touching Indonesian waters, including two of Malaysia's most advanced projects, will keep depending not on whether Jakarta approves, but on when it gets around to answering the letter.