From Market Tug-of-War to Grid Supply Trap: Electric Motorcycles Adoption and Distribution Grid Readiness in Indonesia

Monday, July 20, 2026, 11:00 AM

Session: SOC Poster Session (In-person)

The rapid growth of battery electric vehicle (BEV) adoption is driving transport electrification as a key direction in the global energy transition. This transition is framed as a market tug-of-war between ICE and BEV, following a chicken-and-egg adoption problem. However, this transition presents challenges where local grid capacity for charging infrastructure is limited. These challenges emerge from dynamic interactions among multiple stakeholders within this complex sociotechnical system. This research applies a systems-thinking lens to dynamically couple two subsystems that existing models treat in isolation: BEV adoption and grid infrastructure. We make the local grid endogenous, treating it as the supply constraint underpinning charging infrastructure. The dynamic hypothesis is that readiness is a race between adoption speed and grid reinforcement lead time. We select Indonesia as the case study: it has the world's third-largest motorcycle market, an archipelagic and unevenly developed distribution grid, and strong policy-driven adoption. A causal loop diagram maps the transition in two phases. In Phase 1, the Market Tug-of-War, a Success-to-the-Successful loop lets BEV out-compete ICE. That success then triggers Phase 2, the Grid Supply Trap: rising charging load eats into available grid headroom (Limits-to-Growth), while grid investment lags behind demand (Growth-and-Underinvestment). As headroom collapses, the binding constraint shifts from the market to the grid. This causal structure, together with ongoing semi-structured expert interviews to validate and refine it, forms the basis for the stock-and-flow simulation model we will build next. This work supports long-term, grid-aware planning for electric motorcycles in Indonesia