RANGAN, Indonesia — Every night for three decades, Marwati would worry about snakes crawling out of the walls of her house near the east coast of Borneo. Today, a small rooftop solar panel powers a 3-watt bulb, illuminating the interior of her timber home in a reassuring glow. However, Marwati begins to worry again when the sky darkens in November as the rainy season grows in intensity. “If there is no sun, it’ll be too dim,” she says, pointing to a small array of small flashlights at her home in Paser district, in Indonesia’s East Kalimantan province. “So for the night, we add flashlights.” Sometimes Marwati prioritizes buying batteries for the constellation of flashlights in her home ahead of groceries. Marwati is not alone. Data from the provincial energy department of East Kalimantan showed that 10% of households in Paser district did not have a formal electricity connection in 2022. Many households here query why the prosperity promised by the construction of Indonesia’s new capital city, Nusantara, which is being built 140 kilometers (87 miles) up the road, has yet to trickle down to basic services like electricity. Moreover, Paser is among the highest-ranking districts for coal output in a country that produced 831 million metric tons of thermal coal in 2024, an all-time high. Last month, the Indonesian ministry for villages and remote communities told parliament that 3,264 villages across the archipelagic country had yet to receive electricity access. “If there’s no electricity,” Taufik Madjid, the ministry’s secretary-general, asked a parliamentary…This article was originally published on Mongabay