The chokepoint is a jetty in Bali

Energy-supply and power-grid risk for the Travel and Tourism sector in Indonesia, with Bali and the Riau Islands in focus, assessed as at 16 October 2026.

Energy trouble in Indonesia rarely arrives as a national shortage. It arrives as a queue. On Sunday 11 October 2026 petrol stations on Bali, the country's premier tourism island, began running dry. By mid-week vehicles were queuing for up to 200 metres near I Gusti Ngurah Rai Airport and on the road to Mount Batur, where jeep drivers waited for petrol to keep visitor tours running. On Thursday 15 October hundreds of people protested in Denpasar, the provincial capital.

A second island went dark the next day. Early on 12 October a near-total blackout struck Batam, Bintan and Tanjungpinang in the Riau Islands, a tourism and business corridor a short ferry ride from Singapore. At Hang Nadim International Airport the air-conditioning, baggage belts, internet and boarding gates failed, though runway lights and X-ray screening stayed on.

The natural reading is that the war in the Middle East had finally reached Indonesia's fuel tanks. The country consumes around a million barrels of oil a day more than it produces. Officials say it has lost about a quarter of its fuel import sources since the war began, and shipping now makes up more than 40 per cent of the delivered price of oil, against about 7 per cent a year earlier. A country on that footing looks like one running out of fuel.

It was not. National stocks held at 16 to 18 days throughout, and the energy minister called Bali's problem a distribution fault, not a shortage. Bali's pumps emptied because a tanker had trouble discharging: a problem with its anchor kept it from berthing until about 10pm on 12 October, and rough seas and panic-buying did the rest. The Riau Islands went dark because of a fault at one substation on a small island grid. For tourism, Indonesia's binding chokepoint is as likely to be a jetty in east Bali as a strait in the Gulf.

Five energy risks for Indonesian tourism, ranked by how hard they bite

1. Island fuel that arrives one tanker at a time. Bali's roughly 214 petrol stations draw on two coastal terminals, Manggis in Karangasem and Sanggaran in Denpasar, supplied by coastal tanker. Depot cover for petrol was put at about ten days. A missed delivery shows at the pump within 48 to 72 hours, and a second one inside that window turns queues into dry stations.

2. Small island grids hanging on single cables. The Riau Islands run their own small grid, separate from the main Java-Bali system, and Bintan draws its power from Batam through one 150-kilovolt submarine circuit about 17.9 kilometres long. A fault on that link does not degrade service; it removes it. Bali is better connected, but its imported power runs through four cables from Java that tripped together in May 2025.

3. A national fuel buffer of 16 to 18 days. That sits below Indonesia's own working standard of 20 to 23 days, against a physical storage ceiling of about 25 days and a government target of 90. The thin national tank is not what emptied Bali's pumps, but it sets how fast a second shock compounds the first. A full closure of the Strait of Hormuz, the Gulf passage that carries a fifth to a quarter of Indonesia's imported crude, ranks lower in likelihood than another late tanker.

4. A pump-price freeze with an end date. Prices of subsidised petrol and diesel are frozen to the end of 2026, with the state energy company Pertamina and the treasury absorbing the gap as import and freight costs rise. A decision to let them reset in early 2027 would raise the cost of every transfer, tour vehicle and hotel generator at once.

5. Anger at the pump, and the pictures it makes. Fuel is Indonesia's most politically charged commodity, and the country is barely a year past its worst unrest in a generation. This risk is lower than the photographs suggest: the Denpasar protest was peaceful and the shortage was easing within days. Its cost to a destination arrives through images and forward bookings, well before any physical shortage.

How one tanker emptied Bali's petrol stations

Bali takes almost all of its road fuel by sea. Coastal tankers discharge at the two terminals, and road tankers carry the fuel on to the island's petrol stations. There is no pipeline from Java and no large reserve on the island itself, so terminal stocks of a few days are all that stands between a late ship and a dry pump.

On 12 October a problem with a tanker's anchor delayed its berthing from the early morning until about 10pm. Rough seas and panic-buying compounded the shortfall, at a moment when daily consumption of Pertalite, the subsidised petrol that most scooters and taxis run on, had risen to about 2,200 kilolitres. Pumps ran dry across Denpasar, Badung, Tabanan and Jembrana.

The recovery shows how much effort one missed ship demands. Pertamina's distribution arm mobilised 108 road tankers, 99 on standby and nine hired on spot charter, with 465 crew. It ran both terminals around the clock, kept 66 stations in Denpasar and Badung open 24 hours and scheduled 57.9 million litres of petrol for Bali through 17 October. The governor ordered government offices, state enterprises and schools to work from home from 15 to 17 October to take traffic off the roads.

The reinforcement trucks had to be ferried across from Banyuwangi in East Java, so the back-up for a maritime failure was itself a sea crossing. I Wayan Sudirta, a member of the House of Representatives, urged Pertamina to review Bali's maritime supply chain, because tanker and weather delays at the two terminals keep producing the same outcome.

Visitors felt the crisis on the ground, not in the air. Jet fuel at Ngurah Rai comes through a separate aviation fuel terminal, and commercial flights ran normally. What stalled was the surface journey: airport transfers, ride-hailing, scooter hire and the Mount Batur jeep tours, with independent travellers stranded at dry pumps.

One week, two islands

	Bali: fuel	Riau Islands: power
What failed	A tanker's anchor fault delayed berthing on 12 October until about 10pm	One substation, Sungai Harapan, on 12 October; officials cite lightning and wildlife contact
What it reached	Pumps across Denpasar, Badung, Tabanan and Jembrana from 11 October	More than 400,000 customers in Batam, Bintan and Tanjungpinang
Tourism hit	Transfers, ride-hailing, scooter hire, Mount Batur jeep tours; flights normal	Hang Nadim airport air-conditioning, baggage belts and gates; water treatment at 30 per cent
Recovery	108 road tankers and 465 crew; 57.9 million litres scheduled through 17 October	About 21.5 hours to restore 406,083 of 411,219 customers

Note. Two failures in one week, neither of them a national shortage of fuel or power.

A substation, a cable and an airport: the Riau Islands blackout

Indonesia does not run one national power grid. It runs a set of regional networks with limited links between them, dominated by the Java-Bali system, which carries more than 70 per cent of national demand. The Riau Islands sit on a far smaller system centred on Batam, and Bintan, including the provincial capital Tanjungpinang, draws its power from Batam across the strait.

The 12 October outage began at about 06:30 local time. Officials attributed it to lightning strikes and wildlife contact at the Sungai Harapan substation. It took about 21.5 hours to restore power to nearly all affected customers, 406,083 of 411,219, with the state utility PLN putting airports, hospitals and ports first. Tanjungpinang then endured rolling blackouts of about six hours while PLN leaned on two local diesel plants.

The damage reached well beyond lighting. Water treatment ran at about 30 per cent of capacity for want of backup generators. Hotels in Tanjungpinang filled as residents sought air-conditioning and an internet connection, and one, Hotel Halim, reported all 92 of its rooms taken. The demand came from residents seeking refuge, not from tourists.

Bali's grid is better connected but not invulnerable. About 400 megawatts reaches the island from Java through four 150-kilovolt submarine cables, and the largest local unit is the 380-megawatt Celukan Bawang coal station. Peak demand is around 950 megawatts against about 1,349 available, a margin thin enough that in May 2025 a fault on one line in East Java tripped all four cables at once. A higher-capacity 500-kilovolt crossing is still a plan, and new gas generation on the island is not expected before 2027 to 2029.

The national figures look comfortable by comparison, and they mislead. The Java-Bali grid is formally oversupplied, yet PLN's spare-capacity margin on it shrank from just over 50 per cent in 2019 to about 18 per cent by 2024, below the utility's own 30 per cent floor. A national blackout remains unlikely. A multi-hour blackout on a tourism island is now a demonstrated event.

Note. Most of Bali's capacity sits in one cable bundle and one coal plant, against a peak of about 950 MW.

A national fuel tank measured in days

Behind the island failures sits a thin national position. Indonesia has been a net oil importer since it left OPEC, and domestic crude output of roughly 570,000 to 610,000 barrels a day now meets less than half of consumption of 1.4 to 1.7 million. Singapore alone supplies about 60 per cent of refined-fuel imports, which makes one neighbour's trading hub a chokepoint. LPG, the bottled gas that hotel and restaurant kitchens cook on, is about 78 per cent imported: 7.8 million of roughly 10 million tonnes.

The supplier base is shrinking. Since the Middle East war Indonesia has lost about a quarter of its import sources, and Pertamina's procurement auctions have drawn too few bidders, forcing it to chase replacement cargoes from Nigeria, Brazil and Kazakhstan at higher freight cost. Shipping, about 7 per cent of the delivered price of oil a year ago, now exceeds 40 per cent.

Stocks are thin against Indonesia's own yardsticks. National cover of 16 to 18 days sits below the working standard of 20 to 23 days and close to the physical storage ceiling of about 25. The government's 90-day target and a proposed storage hub near Singapore, which officials say could add 30 to 40 days, are not yet built. The energy minister has described a reserve of about 20 days as enough to ride out a closure of the Strait of Hormuz, but that is a national average. As Bali showed, a national average does not keep an island's pumps full.

Note. The national tank is thin, and the island depot is thinner.

Calm pump prices, paid for elsewhere

Visitors to Bali saw queues, not price rises, because Indonesia has chosen to absorb the oil shock in its budget. President Prabowo Subianto has held subsidised petrol and diesel prices firm to the end of 2026, at Rp10,000 a litre for Pertalite, and PLN's electricity tariffs have been frozen for a third consecutive quarter.

The bill is growing fast. Indonesia paid out Rp331.4 trillion, about USD 18.7 billion, in energy subsidies and compensation to PLN and Pertamina in the first eight months of 2026, up 52.1 per cent on a year earlier. The finance ministry has committed a further Rp100 trillion, largely for LPG. The budget assumed oil near USD 82 a barrel and a rupiah around 15,300 to the dollar. By mid-year the tariff review was using about USD 96, and Bank Indonesia's reference rate reached about Rp17,948 on 15 October.

The fiscal room is real but finite. The 2026 deficit target is 2.68 per cent of GDP against a legal ceiling of 3 per cent. Some economists warn that high crude, high freight and a weak rupiah could push the subsidy line on its own, before the compensation paid to PLN and Pertamina, to Rp300 trillion or more. At that point the choice narrows to breaching the ceiling or raising pump prices. Either ends the shelter that tourists and operators enjoy now.

The weak rupiah cuts both ways for tourism. A visitor paying in dollars, euros or pounds gets more rupiah than a year ago, so Bali is cheaper against competing destinations. The operator squarely exposed is the one with dollar costs and rupiah revenue, and the villa or premium-transfer business already paying unsubsidised rates: Rp15,950 a litre for Pertamax petrol and about USD 1.42 a litre for generator diesel.

Why tourism breaks before heavy industry

Indonesia's most energy-hungry industry is among its best protected. The nickel smelters that anchor the economy run on about 15.4 gigawatts of their own coal plants, built inside industrial parks such as Morowali in Central Sulawesi, outside the public grid. A Bali-style fuel shortage barely touches a ferronickel line.

Tourism sits at the opposite extreme. A resort's main load is air-conditioning, bought at the commercial tariff of about Rp1,352 to Rp1,699 per kilowatt-hour. Its guests move on petrol, its generators and coaches burn diesel, and its kitchens run on LPG. Every one of those inputs arrives just in time. The fallbacks are shallow: generators burn the same diesel that a fuel crisis makes scarce, rooftop solar does nothing for night-time air-conditioning, and nothing replaces petrol in a scooter.

The sector degrades in stages. Mobility goes first, within days: Bali reached that point within 48 hours of the delayed tanker. Depot cover is the next line, at about ten days. Power fails in hours when a cable trips. Reputation can go at any point, because protests and queues on the news reach forward bookings before any supply runs out. Fuel protests carry history here: a 71 per cent petrol price rise in 1998 fed the unrest that ended Suharto's 32-year rule, and the protests of August and September 2025 drew crowds of up to 100,000.

The stakes are large. Bali draws on the order of 686,000 international visitors a month; Ngurah Rai handled about 750,262 departing international passengers in August 2026, with star-hotel occupancy near 68 per cent. Tourism earns foreign currency at the moment costlier fuel imports are pressing on the rupiah. Ranked by exposure to a short, sharp fuel or power interruption, island tourism comes second in Indonesia, behind only the small-scale fisheries cold chain.

The next test of Bali's fuel supply arrives in December

The danger window is the nearest one. The December-to-February monsoon raises the odds of exactly the rough-seas berthing delays that started this episode, just as the December-January holiday peak lifts road and jet-fuel demand on Bali. Nyepi, Bali's day of silence in March 2027, brings pre-holiday stockpiling, and the Ramadan homecoming exodus and the July-August arrivals peak follow.

Smaller destinations are more exposed still. Lombok and the Gili islands, Labuan Bajo on Flores, the gateway to Komodo, and Raja Ampat in Papua run on even smaller diesel-reliant grids with thinner tanker schedules. A comparable delivery slip there would bite faster and clear more slowly than on Bali.

The structural fixes are years away: the storage hub, the 500-kilovolt Bali crossing, on-island gas generation and the 90-day reserve. Stress is front-loaded and resilience is back-loaded.

Costly, mostly local and predictable

The likeliest outcomes are the milder ones. Managed stability, with shipping pressure easing and island faults cleared within days, carries 40 per cent. Moderate stress, with freight staying high and tanker delays recurring on more than one island at a time, carries 34 per cent. Together they hold about three-quarters of the probability. Severe disruption, with national cover falling toward single digits for key products and island tourism transport curtailed for weeks, carries 18 per cent. A systemic crisis carries 6 per cent and outright failure 2. That tail is driven almost entirely by external shipping and the Middle East, not by domestic collapse.

The signals to watch are close and dated: whether Bali's queues clear for good after the 17 October deliveries, whether a second island runs short, whether national cover slips below 15 days, and what the 2027 budget does with the price freeze.

For a hotel group, a tour operator or an investor in Indonesian tourism, the national days-of-cover figure is the wrong number to watch. The right questions are smaller and harder: how many days of fuel and power a business holds on its own island, which single jetty or cable it depends on, and what happens when a ship is late in December.

Note. About three-quarters of the probability sits on costly but supplied paths. The tail is driven by shipping and the Middle East.

Figures drawn from TheRiskAgent's country energy risk report on Indonesia, with a Travel and Tourism focus (October 2026): Pertamina, PLN and energy ministry statements, Bank Indonesia and finance ministry data, parliamentary statements, and specialist energy and regional reporting. Produced with AI research tools and reviewed before release. Reference material, not advice. The full analysis is at theriskagent.com.