PADARINCANG, Indonesia — On a white-hot afternoon in June, people from Padarincang subdistrict gathered near a mountain lake to recite an istighosah, an Islamic prayer blended with Indigenous context here in Indonesia’s Banten province. “We aren’t asking anything from the government,” Eha Suhaeni, a mother from Padarincang, told Mongabay Indonesia. “We want to live in peace: What’s important is that we are left alone.” For 15 years, the community has resisted efforts to drill beneath the land here, around 80 kilometers (50 miles) west of Jakarta, Indonesia’s capital. “We were sound asleep when we were woken up at 3:30 a.m. by heavy equipment,” Eha recalled. The target of the demonstration is not a mine or a plantation. Instead, it is a form of renewable energy that emits virtually zero greenhouse gas emissions and produces reliable, cheap electricity. For more than 15 years, the Padarincang community has rejected the construction of a 110-megawatt-capacity geothermal station on the slope of Mount Parakasak here on the island of Java. Developer PT Sintesa Banten Geothermal began work in 2015, six years after Indonesia’s Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources zoned the area for renewables. However, the company downed tools in 2018 following active objections by the community. The firm is a subsidiary of the Sintesa Group, a sprawling conglomerate founded by the late Indonesian oligarch Eka Tjipta Widjaja and run today by his granddaughter Shinta Widjaja Kamdani. The Padarincang community stages a protest against the geothermal project. Image by Irfan Maulana/Mongabay Indonesia. Steam punk An abundance…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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