Wood Mackenzie Cuts Southeast Asia Gas-Power Outlook to One Third of Targets as Turbine Shortage Bites
Only 14.9 GW of Southeast Asia's planned gas-power pipeline will enter service by 2030, Wood Mackenzie said on Thursday, with Indonesia securing turbines for less than 3% of its target capacity.
Wood Mackenzie on Thursday (2026-08-06) estimated that Southeast Asia will add just 14.9 GW of gas-fired power capacity by the end of the decade — roughly one third of what the region's governments have planned — as a global shortage of gas turbines stalls projects before ground is broken. The forecast lands as Asian LNG benchmark JKM was priced at $21.14 per million British thermal units as of 2026-08-07, keeping fuel costs elevated for buyers already struggling to make new gas plants pencil out.6,4
Vietnam's situation is the starkest. The government set a target of 29.4 GW of new gas power capacity by 2030; Wood Mackenzie sees 3.7 GW of that entering service in time, less than 13% of the stated goal. The shortfall is not a planning failure alone. It is a consequence of equipment queues and spot fuel costs that make project financing difficult to close.6
Across Southeast Asia, only 11 GW of the entire planned gas-to-power pipeline has secured gas turbines, according to Wood Mackenzie, with the global shortage acting as a hard constraint on what can move forward regardless of how much capital or political will is behind a project. "The challenge on 2026-08-06 is not planning power projects but executing them," Alvin Tan, Southeast Asia power and renewables research analyst at Wood Mackenzie, said. "A bottleneck in any one of these areas can delay an entire project."6
Indonesia illustrates the gap between ambition and execution. Southeast Asia's largest economy has locked in turbine supply for just 200 MW of a planned 8.4 GW gas capacity pipeline — less than 3% of its target. In response, Wood Mackenzie said Indonesia is placing greater emphasis on accelerating solar deployment while limiting new gas commitments to selective projects, a meaningful shift for a country that had positioned gas as a coal-transition fuel.6
The urgency behind the buildout comes from what electricity demand is expected to do. Wood Mackenzie's base-case projections show compound annual power demand growth above 5% in China, India and Southeast Asia combined through 2050, driven by electrification and an AI-driven data centre expansion. Gas-fired generation was meant to backstop intermittent renewables and provide reliable supply as that load accumulates. The execution gap leaves that backstop role unfilled.2
The supply side of the fuel equation compounds the difficulty. In Wood Mackenzie's base case, Asian gas demand is set to nearly double to around 140 billion cubic feet per day by 2050. Local production is falling across most of the region, China being the near-term exception. Disruption to Gulf transit routes following the Iran conflict has tightened spot supply further, with roughly 20% of global LNG historically flowing through those lanes.1,4
Wei Han Tan, Southeast Asia power and renewables research analyst at Wood Mackenzie, said the scale of project delays is forcing governments to reconsider how much gas can realistically contribute to both near-term and long-term transition plans. The reassessment is happening under pressure: electricity demand is not waiting for infrastructure timelines to catch up.6
The solar alternative is gaining traction but carries its own limits. Chinese solar exports to the Philippines roughly tripled in the first quarter of 2026 compared with a year earlier, making it one of the faster-growing rooftop markets in the region, as households sought cheaper, self-sufficient power amid elevated LNG prices. Solar does not dispatch on demand, and without storage or dispatchable backup, evening and peak-period reliability gaps persist regardless of installed capacity.5
The Asian Development Bank has a $70 billion program targeting energy and digital infrastructure, including a pan-Asia power grid initiative designed to connect national and subregional power systems. Cross-border interconnection could allow the region to balance intermittent renewables across a wider area. Physical grid construction runs on multi-year timelines, though, and the data centre demand that governments are racing to capture is on a considerably shorter one.3
Wood Mackenzie has noted the Asian region needs incentives and investments in domestic gas supply if it is to avoid repeating the current supply squeeze. With local production declining in most markets and LNG spot exposure high, the fuel availability problem that is stalling gas-power projects is unlikely to resolve on its own. Indonesia's stated shift toward solar over selective gas development will be the clearest near-term test of whether an alternative buildout path can deliver the firm capacity that AI-driven electricity loads require before the gap between demand and supply becomes structurally entrenched.1,6