Renewables group to lever 25-fold in funding

VIENNA, Austria, 2004-07-07 (Refocus Weekly)

A global partnership hopes to lever Euro 20 million into Euro 500 million of support for renewable energies around the world.

The Renewable Energy & Energy Efficiency Partnership was launched in 2002 to promote market growth for renewables, and has released a draft of its three-year program of work for comment by countries which support the initiative.

“A transformation of unprecedented scale and urgency is required to harness the potential of REES (renewable and energy efficiency systems) on poverty, security and climate,” it notes. It will be impossible to meet national and international climate goals without much faster REES market growth than will result from the UN climate process or from any existing combination of national and international programmes.”

“Many developing countries are making energy investments now that will, if continued on a business as usual basis, lock them onto a fossil energy pathway for a generation,” it adds. “The critical obstacle, identified in many assessments including the G8 Renewable Energy Task Force, is a widespread lack of human and institutional capacity necessary to create receptive markets with a commercially attractive balance of risk and reward for private capital.”

The goal of REEEP is to overcome that obstacle, and says it is the only systematic attempt to build human and institutional capacity for market growth and innovation in renewables from the bottom up on a global basis. It is “breaking new ground” in its activities to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of collaboration among stakeholders and “experimenting with and catalysing support for new financing approaches and funding facilities” that use public funds to leverage in private sector funds and local capital.

The proposed budget of Euro 20 million to March 2008 will allow REEEP to make “a decisive contribution over the next decade,” and its program of work must “evolve over time to meet the needs and expectations” of partners. The draft document will accept comments until July 31.

The impact and value of REEEP will be evaluated on its success in providing partnership services and in its ability in accelerating the market development of renewables, and donor partners will contribute 10% of project costs to support the Euro 2 million secretariat in Austria as the British Foreign & Commonwealth Office reduces its initial support. The budget for research will be 1.5 million over three years, 2 million for a policy & regulation toolkit, 2 million for a finance toolkit, and 12.5 million for catalysing funds.

In the first year, REEEP expects to lever 120 million, of which 50 million will be in India, 50 million in China and 20 million in Brazil from multilateral and bilateral sources, increasing to 160 million in the second year and 200 million in the third year, for a total of Euro 500 million.

It estimates that its efforts will add 50 MW of additional renewable energy capacity in the first, increasing to 1,000 MW in the second and 2,000 MW in the third.


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