Intan TeoChief Technology Officer

Executive summary / Personal profile

Keeping small island grids steady after sunset

Portrait of Intan Teo

Chief Technology Officer Singapore / Southeast Asia

Island power is only as dependable as the battery, the controller and the remote link behind it.

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01 / Leadership approach

An island plant has no neighbour to lean on. If our battery, controller or remote link misbehaves, the cooperative's diesel sets and its customers absorb the difference, often hours before a technician can arrive. I therefore treat safety margins, supplier access and controller behaviour as engineering decisions with named owners, and I tell the people who depend on our plants what we changed and what it cost them.

02 / Areas of responsibility

  • Battery storage safety and derating decisions
  • Monitoring dispersed island plants
  • Security for inverters and plant controllers
  • Interconnection behaviour and commissioning evidence
  • Build-or-buy choices for fleet control software
Plants in the fleet
52
38 island solar-and-battery plants and 14 factory battery installations
Island battery storage
412 MWh
Alongside 186 MWp of solar on Philippine and Indonesian island grids
Company revenue, 2025
US$118m
Lautaneri Energy as a whole; not a technology budget
Technology team
86
Control systems, battery safety, security, platform and operations

Evidence from practice

Derating twenty-three battery containers after one overheated on a Visayas island
At 15:40 on a dry-season afternoon in April 2024, the cooling unit on one battery container at our plant on a Visayas island failed, and its hottest cells reached 52°C before the battery management system took the container offline.
Removing an inverter manufacturer's standing access to our fleet
In September 2022, while mapping every network connection into our island plants, my security lead found that the manufacturer of our main inverter model had kept its own cellular link to 410 inverters at thirty-one sites since commissioning.
Replacing our own site controller with an independently tested product
By early 2023 the software that decided, every few seconds, how solar, batteries and the cooperative's diesel sets shared the load at each island plant was eight years old and still largely the work of one person, our founding engineer Edwin Kusumarta.
The complete case record ↗

I judge the technology in a scattered island power fleet by whether a small grid stays steady after sunset when a battery, a remote link or a supplier lets us down.

I am chief technology officer of Lautaneri Energy, a privately held Singapore company that builds, owns and runs solar-and-battery plants on small island grids in the Philippines and eastern Indonesia, together with battery installations at factories in Cebu and Calabarzon. Our thirty-eight island plants sit beside diesel sets owned by electric cooperatives or by the Indonesian state utility, and between them hold 186 megawatts-peak of solar and 412 megawatt-hours of storage. Fourteen factory installations add 96 megawatt-hours. We reported US$118 million of revenue in 2025 and employ 640 people. I lead 86 engineers and technologists across control systems, battery safety, operational-technology security and our fleet platform.

I came to this work through substation automation, battery rooms and almost five years running power at remote mobile-tower sites. The towers taught me what distance does to technology choices. A fault that takes an hour to diagnose in a city can take two days and a ferry crossing on an island. That changes how I think about monitoring, about which supplier may reach into our equipment and about how much a site controller must decide alone when its satellite link drops.

Each of the three decisions described here cost us something. I derated twenty-three battery containers for fourteen weeks after one overheated, and we paid cooperatives availability credits for it. I removed an inverter manufacturer's standing remote access to our fleet, which slowed some repairs. I replaced controller software our founding engineer had written with a supported commercial product and wrote off its capitalised value. In each case a cooperative's dispatcher and the households on the island would have carried the consequence of a wrong call, so they were my first test.

A fleet derated before a second container could overheat

After a cooling failure took one container's cells to 52°C, I derated all twenty-three containers of that design to 60 per cent of rated power. Retrofit and availability credits cost US$3.4 million; cooling-related trips fell from eleven in 2023 to one in 2025.

Supplier access that passes through a gateway we control

Manufacturer connections to 410 inverters at thirty-one sites now run through approved, recorded sessions that expire after four hours. A firmware release held on our Cebu test bench in 2024 would otherwise have reset reactive-power settings at sixteen sites.

Commissioning shortened by buying a tested controller

Moving site-level control to an independently tested commercial controller cut interconnection testing at a new island plant from nineteen days to eight. We wrote off US$1.9 million of in-house development to make that change.

Current focus

I am completing the controller migration at our last twelve island plants and drafting, with three cooperatives, a joint procedure for what each side does when a plant loses its link to our Cebu control room during a typhoon.

Conversations I welcome

I would consider one non-executive seat on the board of an infrastructure, utility or industrial company in Southeast Asia, at about twenty days a year, once Lautaneri's chief executive and shareholders have reviewed the relationships involved.

The leadership record

Trusted with consequential decisions.

Formation

  • Bachelor of Engineering (Electrical and Electronic)Kerandai Institute of Technology · 2001
  • Master of Science in power engineering (part-time, distance learning)Pennacott University · 2011
When Intan cut the battery output on our island, my members ran on diesel for weeks and I was not pleased. She told us why before we found out ourselves, and the schedule she gave us held.
Corazon VillabrenaGeneral manager, Maranlaya Electric Cooperative
The full record ↗

Contact

I would consider one non-executive seat on the board of an infrastructure, utility or industrial company in Southeast Asia, at about twenty days a year, once Lautaneri's chief executive and shareholders have reviewed the relationships involved.

  • Board appointments
Write to Intan Contact page