Why Renewable Energy?

Clean, renewable energy resources include solar thermal energy, solar photovoltaic systems, wind energy, hydro power, biomass, etc. As costs of these technologies continue to decrease, their deployment is becoming increasingly competitive with conventional energy resources. There is tremendous growth potential in renewable energy development. The fundamental drivers of renewable energy growth are:

• Emerging policies supporting renewables
• Expanding investor interest
• Advancing technologies that increase the value of renewable to the grid, owners, and customers

Renewable energy provides many benefits with respect to lower energy costs, reduced energy shortages, decreased local environmental impacts, sustainability, and contribution to global climate change mitigation.

Renewable energy resources can be deployed as grid-connected or as off-grid systems. Both types of systems face many technical, financial and regulatory challenges and barriers to their deployment and scaling up. While governments and international financial institutions have implemented a number of approaches to address these challenges and barriers, there is a need for innovative regulatory and financial solutions to scale up the deployment of renewable energy.

• Assessment of potential for renewable energy
• Development of national legislation and regulatory initiatives for renewable energy
• Development of national and regional renewable energy strategies and action plans
• Identification of major barriers to renewable energy deployment and development of approaches to overcome these
• Development of innovative financing mechanisms to scale up renewable energy implementation
• Assistance to project developers in preparing bankable project proposals
• Assistance to banks and financial institutions to scale up renewable energy lending
• Development of risk management strategies
• Training and capacity building of project developers, regulatory agencies, and banks/FIs with respect to renewable energy technologies and implementation business models