The complexity of the Brazilian electricity system has evolved from a model based on hydroelectricity supplemented by thermoelectricity to a combination of diverse sources, without planning and with little control, whose excess intermittent generation threatens to cause blackouts. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Sep 25 2025 (IPS)

Wind and solar power sources, essential for the energy transition to mitigate the climate crisis, have become a risk of power outages in Brazil.

It is a remedy that, in excess, becomes poison. The rapid and unplanned growth of these alternatives has created operational difficulties for the Brazilian electricity system, which is nationally interconnected.“Brazil has one of the most complex electricity systems in the world. No other country has such a diversity of sources”–Luiz Barata.

A blackout on August 15, 2023, which affected 27% of the supply throughout most of the country, was a major wake-up call about insecurity. It began with the transmission of wind and solar power plants in the state of Ceará, in northeastern Brazil.

It almost happened again in April and August of this year due to excess generation, according to the  National System Operator (ONS), a private organization that represents consumers and all sectors involved, which coordinates and controls supply nationwide.

A functional electrical system requires surpluses; energy must be available at all outlets for eventual consumption. But “too much excess causes problems,” said Luiz Barata, former director general of the ONS and current president of the non-governmental National Front of Energy Consumers.

The proliferation of solar and wind power plants in Brazil has created imbalances between supply and consumption that caused operational difficulties in effective distribution, such as power outages in 25 of Brazil’s 26 states on August 15, 2023. Credit: Fotos Públicas

Renewables in question

The intermittent nature of wind and solar power, which have grown the most in the last decade, exacerbates the risks due to their uncontrollable origin. This type of energy depends on nature, on when there is wind and sun.

The plot thickens with distributed generation, also known as decentralized generation, which turns consumers into producers of their own electricity in 3.8 million residential micro-plants or groups of individuals or small businesses.

This dispersed generation already exceeds 43 gigawatts of power, according to data from the National Electric Energy Agency (Aneel), the sector’s regulatory body.

This amounts to 18% of the country’s total generating capacity, with solar photovoltaic power dominating the segment with a 95% share.

“In addition to being uncontrollable, because it depends on the sun, distributed generation cannot be interrupted, as it is beyond the control of the ONS,” warned Barata, an electrical engineer.

What the ONS does is curtail the contribution of some generating sources when excess supply threatens the system. In general, the interruption affects wind and solar generation, which are further away from the area of highest consumption.

The Northeast, favored by strong and regular winds and solar radiation, concentrates most of these sources, while the highest electricity consumption occurs in the Southeast, Brazil’s most populous and industrialized region.

Wind farms occupy hills and mountains throughout the Northeast region of Brazil, which has become a supplier of electricity for the entire country. The intermittency of this source, with generation concentrated at night, contributed to the risk of blackouts in the country. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

Uncertain future

The trend is for operational problems in the electricity system to worsen because distributed generation continues to expand, due to the legal incentives it enjoys, and without planning, as it is the result of individual decisions.

From January to August 2025, the ONS discarded 17.2% of the country’s potential wind and solar generation, which corresponds to 7% of the country’s monthly consumption. This tripled the cuts compared to the same period in 2024, according to an analysis by Volt Robotics, an energy consulting firm.

In August, the rejection reached 57% of new renewable generation due to excess supply.

“Brazil has one of the most complex electricity systems in the world. No other country has the diversity of sources that we have,” Barata told IPS by telephone from Brasilia.

Of a total of 236 gigawatts of installed capacity at the end of 2024, hydroelectricity continues to account for a majority, with 46.5% of the total, according to the state-owned Energy Research Company. But it is no longer as dominant as it was in 2000, when it accounted for 89%.

Solar energy, with 20.5%, wind energy with 12.5% and thermal energy, which consumes fossil fuels and biomass, with 18.6%, already exceeded hydroelectricity in 2024, with a trend towards further growth.

Necessary reform

There has been a change in the electricity matrix, which has shifted from hydrothermal, basically hydroelectric and supplemented by thermal power plants, to a growing incorporation of new renewable sources, given the lower cost of their implementation and distributed generation, Barata pointed out.

However, legislation and regulations have not kept pace with this transformation, said the expert, who believes the sector needs a comprehensive structural reform in order to reduce risks and restore better operating and planning conditions.

“It is a complex system that cannot be solved with simple measures,” he said.

Joilson Costa, coordinator of the non-governmental Front for a New Energy Policy for Brazil and also an electrical engineer, considers it “incorrect” to attribute systemic risks solely to excess wind and solar generation.

“Excess supply is only part of the problem, not the only one. Another cause is the deficiency of the transmission system, which makes it impossible to transport the energy generated in the Northeast to other regions at certain times. This then necessitates a cut in generation,” he argued.

Nor can it be said that distributed generation is outside the scope of planning. The Energy Research Company, part of the Ministry of Mines and Energy, does consider this modality in its plans because “its studies and simulations allow it to make estimates,” even though it cannot control the expansion of microplants, Costa noted.

Electricity distribution companies also monitor the evolution of distributed generation in their networks and can update their data monthly, he told IPS by telephone from São Luis, capital of the northeastern state of Maranhão.

Distributed generation, which is small-scale and generally consists of photovoltaic panels on residential or commercial roofs, already accounts for 43 gigawatts of installed capacity in Brazil. There are 3.8 million plants benefiting seven million consumer units, without the necessary control over the operation of the national electricity system. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

Daily asynchrony

The major risk factor, however, is the lack of synchrony between the generation and consumption of new sources of electricity in their daily cycles.

Solar generation occurs during the day, peaking around noon, when consumption is low. It declines just as consumption increases at the end of the day and beginning of the night, when lights and household appliances are turned on, especially electric showers, which are widely used in Brazil.

Wind farms, concentrated in the Northeast, generate electricity mainly late at night, when consumption drops again.

Pericles Pinheiro, director of New Business at CHP, a gas generation equipment and solutions company in Rio de Janeiro, identifies a trend toward crisis in the Brazilian electricity system in his ongoing analysis of the sector. “Every summer, new emotions,” he jokes.

In previous years, he identified a risk in the proliferation of diesel generators that many companies used to avoid the higher cost of electricity during peak consumption hours in the early evening.

But they abandoned this resource because they migrated to the free market, which has expanded in Brazil in recent years, lowering energy costs for large consumers by allowing them to choose their supplier.

Diesel generators, which helped reduce the upward curve of consumption during peak hours, disappeared or declined, exacerbating daily fluctuations in demand, in cycles opposite to those of wind and solar sources, Pinheiro told IPS.

Distributed generation reduces demand on the grid and the share of electricity managed by the system operator, in a trend that exacerbates insecurity, he added.

The ONS estimates that by 2029 it will control less than half of the country’s installed generation capacity, increasing the operational uncertainty of the national interconnected system.

The proliferation of digital data centers in Brazil, which the government is trying to promote, is seen as a way to balance electricity consumption and supply in the country.

But these huge energy sinks would consume the excess during the day but increase demand at night, as they operate 24 hours a day, warned Pinheiro, who identifies another risk in electric vehicles whose batteries consume the electricity of several homes when recharging.

Edilso Reguera, a researcher at the Center for Research in Applied Science and Advanced Technology (Cicata) of Mexico’s public National Polytechnic Institute, displays an X-ray diffractometer used to study the structure of materials for electric batteries designed to store and recharge energy. Credit: Emilio Godoy / IPS

By Emilio Godoy
MEXICO, May 27 2025 (IPS)

Researcher Edilso Reguera and his team began studying electric battery manufacturing in 2016, but in 2023, they ramped up efforts to develop a lithium-based prototype for motorcycles.

Commissioned by the Mexico City government in 2022, “we developed the battery from scratch. We are the most advanced research group in the country. We tested it on motorcycles, and it works well,” Reguera explained to IPS in his small office. He is an academic at the Center for Research in Applied Science and Advanced Technology Cicata, part of the National Polytechnic Institute, located in the northern part of the capital.

The research began with funding from the city government, and Cicata took charge of designing, producing, and testing the capacitor batteries."We developed the battery from scratch. We are the most advanced research group in the country. We tested it on motorcycles, and it works well." — Edilso Reguera

In the laboratory, where around 40 students and researchers collaborate, staff analyze materials and examine substances using equipment with near-unpronounceable names, collectively worth thousands of dollars.

The Mexican government plans to promote energy storage in renewable plants and electromobility, making projects like Cicata’s crucial.

“A battery is a storage device, so it works well for multiple applications,” said Reguera, who also heads the National Laboratory for Energy Conversion and Storage under the newly created Ministry of Science, Humanities, Technology, and Innovation.

But this vision remains aspirational in Mexico, where only two photovoltaic projects currently include storage systems. While the government has ambitious plans to boost the sector, details remain unclear.

Despite the state-owned Federal Electricity Commission (CFE) having storage goals since 2004, only two private projects currently have such systems.

One is the Aura Solar III photovoltaic plant, owned by Mexican company Gauss Energía, which has been operating since 2018 in La Paz, the capital of the northwestern state of Baja California Sur. It has a generation capacity of 32 megawatts (MW) and a storage capacity of 10.5 MW.

The other is the La Toba solar park, owned by U.S.-based Invenergy, operational since 2022, also in Baja California Sur, with 35 MW of generation and 20 MW of storage.

This approach allows for savings in energy consumption and costs, as well as backup for the power grid, which is currently under strain due to insufficient generation and maintenance.

Additionally, since wind doesn’t blow constantly and sunlight is only available during the day, renewable energy requires storage capacity to compensate for variability and ensure a stable supply.

Andrés Flores, energy policy director at the non-governmental Iniciativa Climática de México, highlighted the urgency of the issue.

“We are in a high-risk situation, heavily dependent on gas for generation. Due to climate factors, we are already experiencing blackouts,” the expert told IPS.

He explained that Mexico has limited generation capacity and low power reserves, meaning “there is a need to invest in storage to minimize these risks, improve operational flexibility, and integrate more renewables in the near future.”

Flores authored the study Energy Storage in Mexico: Analysis and Policy Proposals, published in January, which identified key challenges, including a 2-gigawatt deficit in operational reserves, limited capacity during peak consumption hours, and concentrated issues during evening and nighttime demand.

The study also found little clarity in energy planning regarding the deployment of storage systems.

The private photovoltaic plant Aura Solar III is one of only two facilities in Mexico equipped with a battery bank for energy storage. Credit: Gauss Energía

Ambitions

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, in office since October, presented the 2024-2030 National Electric Sector Strategy a month later, followed in February by the Plan for Strengthening and Expanding the National Electric System, which are interlinked.

The February plan aims to boost the electricity sector through measures such as adding 574 MW across five photovoltaic plants with capacitor batteries, representing a public investment of US$ 223 million. These plants are expected to come online by 2027.

In the same vein, the Federal Electricity Commission is advancing the bidding for phase II of the Puerto Peñasco photovoltaic plant, located in the namesake town in the northern state of Sonora. This phase will add 300 MW of capacity, backed by 10.3 MW in battery storage. The plant’s first phase (120 MW) has been operational since 2023. Once completed in 2026, the full project will deliver 1,000 MW at a cost of US$1.6 billion.

For Karina Cuentas, a researcher at the National Autonomous University of Mexico’s (UNAM) Center for Nanosciences and Nanotechnology, the lag in energy storage stems from a lack of government support.

“We’re behind because not enough funding is allocated to technological development. We have all the tools to make progress, but it’s very difficult due to a lack of resources. There’s enthusiasm because the plan has been presented, along with the roadmap and scenarios to achieve it,” she told IPS from Ensenada, in the northwestern state of Baja California.

“The optimal storage solution for renewables is batteries,” she emphasized.

As president of the non-governmental Mexican Energy Storage Network—a group of around 200 specialists in the field—Cuentas believes progress will depend on “the rules of the game.”

A regulatory framework for energy storage has been in effect since March, but its implementing regulations may take up to two years to finalize, potentially delaying project development.

Additionally, critics argue that the regulation classifies storage backup as part of power generation itself and imposes restrictive guidelines on its applications.

Mexico has an installed capacity of 89,000 MW, and during the first quarter of this year, nearly 61% of electricity generation depended on fossil gas, followed by conventional thermoelectric (6%), wind (nearly 6%), hydroelectric (4.6%), solar photovoltaic (4.2%), coal-fired (3.3%), nuclear (3.2%), gas turbine (3.1%), and geothermal (1.2%).

Renewable energy sources have an installed capacity of over 33,000 MW but contribute only 21% of the electricity. To the current mix, the government’s plan would add 21,893 MW to the national energy grid, aiming to increase clean energy from the current 22.5% to 37.8%.

The electricity sector has suffered from the fossil fuel dependency of former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador administration (2018-2024), who stalled the energy transition—a situation his ally and successor, Sheinbaum, seeks to correct.

The fishing community of San Juanico, in the municipality of Comondú, Baja California Sur, has a hybrid power plant since 1999 combining wind turbines, solar panels, batteries, and a diesel generator for electricity supply. Credit: CFE.

Forgotten Potential 

For over a decade, various studies have highlighted the potential of energy storage systems in this Latin American country, home to 129 million people and the region’s second-largest economy after Brazil.

The Federal Electricity Commission identified at least 169 sites in 2017 with potential for pumped-storage hydropower, but it never invested in this method, which is now difficult to implement due to current drought conditions and insufficient reservoir levels.

Civil society organizations estimate that storage capacity could reach 500 MW for industrial projects and 18 MW for residential photovoltaic systems by 2030.

The government’s National Electric System Development Program for 2024-2038 outlines the deployment of seven gigawatts (GW) of storage systems between in 2024-2028 and eight GW in 2028-2038, but without specifying concrete projects or operational mechanisms.

The International Energy Agency (IEA), which represents major energy consumers, recommends incorporating storage into long-term energy planning and incentivizing its deployment. To this end, it suggests continuing regulatory reviews, implementing policies to promote battery recycling, and adopting measures for the trade of used energy storage systems.

The uncertainty surrounding energy storage progress in Mexico is evident in places like Cicata, where experts have called for stronger support.

“Having domestic technological development brings strength, improves the economy, and creates Mexican industrial companies without relying on foreign technology. Technological development is a matter of national security,” said researcher Reguera.

This year, his priorities include developing a sodium-based battery—safer and cheaper than lithium but with lower energy storage capacity—and securing around three million dollars to build a pilot plant capable of assembling about 500 catalysts daily.

Meanwhile, Cuentas, an energy storage expert, expressed hope that “mechanisms will be put in place to foster technological development in the country. With a more modern grid, variability wouldn’t cause as much disruption—it should withstand renewable energy fluctuations. It’s crucial to have more renewable generation and a strengthened grid.”

Finally, Flores, an energy policy specialist, proposed drafting a dedicated storage program and roadmap.

“There needs to be clarity in their plans. There are complementary options, integrating storage with large-scale traditional and renewable generators. For solar and wind energy, having storage facilities would be ideal,” he suggested.

At the San Felipe School, in Coyhaique, Chile, the solar panels of a 30 kW plant will be installed which will be inaugurated in the first week of December

By Orlando Milesi
SANTIAGO, Nov 20 2024 (IPS)

Chile, a country rich in solar and wind energy and with huge photovoltaic power stations  and wind turbines in its elongated territory, managed to change its grid by incorporating renewable energies, which account for an installed capacity equivalent to 43.8 % of its electricity production.

However, it is woefully lacking in distributed generation projects, also known as decentralised generation, which are small scale, mostly dedicated to self-consumption and involving organised communities. This is so even though these initiatives would introduce the population to the advantages of clean energy.

Distributed generation would allow such a shift, but is currently in its infancy in this South American country of 19.8 million people. It lacks adequate legal impetus, access to financing and suffers from a cultural deficit among a population that knows little about it.“We are used to a centralised system and although there has been fossil energy replacement by renewable energy, it is still a large-scale, centralised model with negative impacts": Cristian Mires.

Successful projects belong to mega-companies that have installed parks and wind turbines in the northern Atacama Desert and in southern Patagonia, between the Andes and the Pacific Ocean, selling their generation to the National Electricity System (SEN).

This profitable business does not benefit Chilean consumers who are suffering a huge tariff increase that will reach up to 60% in 2025. It is a gradual increase that began to be charged in July and will culminate next January after five years of tariff freezes due to the covid pandemic.

Thus, the impact of distributed generation with its panels on the roofs of homes, schools and community or municipal buildings is small.

The leftist government of Gabriel Boric sought to promote this citizen energy and reach the goal of 500 megawatts (MW) of installed capacity by the end of his term, in March 2026.

However, 17 months away from reaching that goal, distributed generation is minimal and only 0.1% corresponds to joint generation, as distributed generation is also known, according to the state-run National Energy Commission.

The Ministry of Energy told IPS that as of November 2024, the total installed capacity of distributed generation projects for self-consumption reached only 290 MW.

“Statistics show an upward trend in this type of project. Several initiatives promoted by the Ministry of Energy seek to encourage the development of this segment, such as the Public Solar Roofs 2.0 programme, which is being implemented and aims to install photovoltaic projects in public institutions,” said the institution that directs the country’s energy policy.

In 2015-2019, this programme installed photovoltaic systems on 136 buildings in 13 regions of Chile for a total of 5.3 megawatt peak (MWp). A technical office was then created to support public institutions in their feasibility analyses of solar energy plans.

Chile has decided, as part of its international climate commitments to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions, that its non-conventional renewable energies will contribute 80% of electricity generation by 2030 and 100% by 2050, when it will reach net zero emissions.

Solar panels installed in the roof of the Industrial Secondary School of Valdivia, a city 850 kilometers south of Santiago. Credit: Courtesy of Sofía Alarcón

Barriers in Chile

Cristián Mires, lawyer and president of the NGO Energía Colectiva, says there are a number of barriers to developing jointly owned distributive energy.

“These projects are not cheap. Technical, legal and financial advice is required. A share is equivalent to at least US$530 per user. And if we want bigger savings, we are talking about up to US$2,100. And the majority of the population can’t afford that cost,” he told IPS.

There is no public or private funding for decentralised generation facilities, he claims.

This slows down the implementation of the 2014 Law on Distributed Generation for Self-consumption, which allows households, schools and businesses to self-supply their electricity use through their own generation and inject the surplus into the SEN. In practice, such generation has very restrictive rules for joint ownership.

“It needs to be modified, and as the Citizens‘ Energy Action Group we are participating in technical roundtables with the government and parliament to that end,” Mires said.

“We are used to a centralised system and although there has been fossil energy replacement by renewable energy, it is still a large-scale, centralised model with negative impacts,” he added.

In August, Energía Colectiva, based in Chile and present in other Latin American countries, launched the document Citizen energy in Chile, proposals for its promotion and implementation, where it claims there is potential to reach eight gigawatts (GW) of such citizen generation by 2040.

According to the document, Chile needs “a transition that conceives energy as a right, democratising its production and distribution. A transition focused on satisfying human needs, but which nevertheless understands the pressing need to reduce energy use. Such a transition can only be driven by citizens”.

Arrayán Wind Park, one of the 10 largest in Chile, located in the northern municipality of Ovalle. Credit: Ministry of Energy

Energy Communities, a key

So-called Energy Communities seek to encourage the participation of new groups in the production, management, use and marketing of energy.

They aim for a decentralised, local energy model with less environmental impact.

These communities seek to organise citizens to generate and manage their own energy, whether for social, economic and/or environmental purposes.

“These communities are considered a fundamental tool for carrying out just energy transitions, where people play a central role in the transformation towards more equitable systems of energy generation and use”, according to the specialised magazine Energía y Equidad.

Based on the use of renewable energy, the Communities offer access to affordable, clean and secure energy; enabling an active participation in response to the climate and ecological crisis by reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

In short, these Communities aim to promote local energy autonomy, strengthen social cohesion, reduce greenhouse gas emissions and decontaminate the local environment.

The 2014 law and its regulation five years later set standards for joint generation and joint ownership.

The Nueva Zelanda school in the municipality of Independencia, in the northern part of the capital, and Coopeumo, a farmers’ cooperative in the O Higgins region, bordering the Santiago metropolitan region, are community projects developed by municipalities and with citizen participation.

Both are connected to a grid into which they inject the energy generated and then receive discounts on their electricity bills.

Jorge Nauto, principal of the Industrial Secondary School of Valdivia, a city 850 kilometres south of Santiago, praised the experience of installing photovoltaic panels on the roof of his school.

“It is a 70 kilowatt peak (kWp) system determined according to the available surface area and the building’s annual consumption. It allows generating power for the premises and the injection of surpluses into the conventional electricity grid through the use of the Distributed Generation Act,” he told IPS from his location.

“Thanks to this generation, we achieved a significant reduction in electricity bills,” Nauto said, before emphasising the value, also educational, of using clean, renewable energy.

New business model

Antu Energía is a company based in Coyhaique, in the southern region of Aysén, which implements a new business model with photovoltaic energy.

It allows remote discounts, which means that a person can own or participate in a photovoltaic plant that injects energy in one place and discount that value in another place from the same distribution company.

We are calling for small companies or individuals to participate in Virtual Solar Panels by acquiring a minimum unit equivalent to generating 500 watts,” Manuel Matta, founding partner of Antu Energía, told IPS from Coyhaique.

The model lowers the investment to US$737 per kilowatt (kW) installed and compares favourably with a similar individually driven project that costs US$2,632 per kW.

This electrical engineer has already sold 28 of 60 minimum units of participation in the 30 kW plant installed on the roofs of the San Felipe high school in Coyhaique’s Plaza de Armas.

Daniela Zamorano, project coordinator for Energía Colectiva, told IPS from Joao Pessoa, in the northern Brazilian state of Paraíba, where she lives, that Chile lacks the political will to promote jointly-owned distributed generation.

“We are seeing problems today with rising rates, and the solutions proposed by the government always come from the logic of subsidising consumption. This is a snowball that reaches gigantic public spending amounts. But they do not visualise options for a long-term solution such as distributed generation,” she said.

Yunia Cancio and her husband and son stand next to the biodigester installed on their El Renacer farm, in the municipality of Cabaiguán, Sancti Spíritus province, thanks to the Biomass Cuba project financed by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation. CREDIT: Courtesy of Biomass Cuba

By Patricia Grogg
HAVANA, May 19 2021 (IPS)

Yunia Cancio cooked with firewood until a few years ago, when a biodigester was built on her family’s El Renacer farm in Cabaiguán, a municipality in the central Cuban province of Sancti Spíritus, under the Biomass Cuba project. That change meant a lot for her family’s quality of life, but it was not the only one.

“Life has improved a lot thanks to the biodigester, especially for me, because as the woman of the house I’m the one who cooks,” the 48-year-old farmer told IPS by phone from her family farm. “It’s a very clean fuel, more comfortable and safer, everything is more hygienic. Before I used to cook everything with firewood and my day-to-day workload was harder.”

She explained that using the biogas she normally cooks for 10 people a day and for 20 during the planting and harvest seasons, when the tobacco farm employs more workers.

Cancio and her family are among the residents of agricultural localities involved in Biomass Cuba, a project initiated in 2009 with funding from the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC), which is currently in its third stage and is to be completed in 2022.

According to Leidy Casimiro, a professor at the University of Sancti Spíritus and an expert with Biomass Cuba, in its different facets of renewable energy, training and agroecology, the initiative directly benefits more than 15,000 people, including 5,417 with biogas technologies.

The initiative is coordinated by the Indio Hatuey Experimental Station, a research centre attached to the University of Matanzas in western Cuba, and also involves related institutions in the eastern provinces of Guantánamo, Santiago de Cuba, Granma and Holguín, and the central provinces of Las Tunas and Sancti Spíritus.

The biodigester at the El Renacer farm began operating on Jul. 15, 2014. “It was built by my father-in-law and brother-in-law, with the help of my husband and children, who carried bricks and made the mixture. With a capacity of nine cubic metres, it was built under the supervision of Alexander López, an expert in biodigesters,” Cancio said.

She also explained that electricity savings have been significant on the 28-hectare farm where her family has long-term “usufruct rights” and where they raise pigs and a few head of cattle and grow tobacco, vegetables and fruit.

“Something really important was when we received a rice cooker that was powered by biogas, a wonderful thing that we hadn’t seen before; we enjoyed it very much,” she recalled when commenting on the changes brought by the biofuel.

The plant also created new routines. Since it is fed mainly by manure from the farm’s pigs, the biodigester is connected to the pigsties. From time to time, cow manure is added to make the biogas more potent, from the stables, which are farther away.

According to Giraldo Martín, national director of Biomass Cuba, “The results are very valuable because today we have farms that consume only 30-40 percent of the conventional energy they used before.”

Engineer Alexander López Savrán stands next to one of the standard fixed-dome biodigesters he has developed, installed on a farm in La Macuca, a village in the municipality of Cabaiguán, in the central province of Santi Spíritus, Cuba. CREDIT: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

In a telephone interview with IPS from the municipality of Perico, in the province of Matanzas, Martín explained that in all its stages, Biomass Cuba has provided technologies and created capacities so local residents could move towards the concept of agroenergy in rural areas.

He also mentioned the covered lagoon model, an industrial technology that treats large quantities of biological waste to provide high volumes of biogas on a daily basis, which may be used in the future to generate electricity for the national power grid.

“In social terms, Biomass has had a great impact in the communities where it has intervened, generating employment, producing food, and in Cabaiguán, receiving domestic fuel through the supply networks that conduct biogas from pig farming areas to homes, with social and environmental benefits,” Martín said.

“We have farms that use the solid and liquid waste from the biodigesters as an excellent fertiliser with abundant nutrients that also contributes to the recovery of degraded soils, which are widespread today in agricultural areas in Cuba,” he explained.

Cancio said these techniques are used on her family’s farm, where the effluent from the biodigester “is used to fertilise the farm’s organoponic crops, including varieties of vegetables, herbs and medicinal plants, and fruit trees.”

“We are diversifying and…we now have infrastructure to extract oils, add value to various products, obtain flour from our root vegetables (a staple of the Cuban diet), motivate us to improve consumption habits and create new recipes with things that we did not use before,” she said proudly.

However, the Biomass project has also had its setbacks.

Martín said that one of the barriers that Biomass has had to break down was the lack of understanding about the concept of treating animal waste and producing energy, something that has taken a great deal of explaining and “is still not completely worked out.”

Chavely Casimiro feeds a biodigester located at the Finca del Medio, a farm in the municipality of Taguasco, Sancti Spíritus province, central Cuba. CREDIT: Courtesy of Biomass Cuba

He also considered it a challenge to align the priorities in the bidding and purchasing system with the plans of companies and productive and service organisations, so that the equipment acquisition processes are efficient and allow the technologies and knowledge generated by the projects to be applied expeditiously.

The project director said the main impact of the initiative was the way it influenced public policies.

Biomass contributes to “understanding the importance of renewable energy sources in rural areas, the role of the contributions that farms can make with biodigesters, waste treatment systems on pig farms, the use of rice husks to produce electricity and steam to dry rice, as well as the use of residual wood from sawmills to generate energy,” Martín said.

Meanwhile, José Antonio Guardado, national coordinator of the Movement of Biogas Users (MUB), told IPS that there are between 4,500 and 5,000 biodigesters around the country. “A count is currently being carried out in order to have a more precise figure,” he said by e-mail from Santa Clara, capital of the province of Villa Clara.

The MUB, which brings together producers who use the technology of anaerobic digestion by the action of microorganisms, emerged in Cuba in 1983 and has 3,000 members throughout this Caribbean island nation.

Guardado said the most urgent task of this movement was the promotion of the closed cycle system.

“In our assessment, in less than five percent of the installed biodigesters, closed-loop criteria and concepts are used, which means that the surplus end products are used in the processes that are generated in the chain on the farm, such as fish farming, irrigation or fertilisation,” he said.

Guardado said the MUB and all other actors working on the issue at the local level should defend this technology until all existing biodigesters in the country are closed-loop, including the distribution of surpluses among neighbouring producers.

According to the Ministry of Energy and Mines, 95 percent of the national energy mix is made up of fossil fuels, while this year the generation of energy from renewable sources is expected to grow to 6.3 percent of the total energy produced in the country.

Cuba’s goal is for 24 percent of energy to come from renewable sources by 2030.

A wind energy generation plant located in Loiyangalani in northwestern Kenya. The plant is set to be the biggest in Africa, generating 300 MW. This renewable energy project was supported by the African Development Bank. Credit: Isaiah Esipisu/IPS

By Nalisha Adams
BONN, Germany, Jan 13 2021 (IPS)

2021 is going to be critical, not only for curbing the rapidly spreading COVID-19 pandemic, but also for meeting the climate challenge.

But as Dr Fatih Birol, Executive Director of the International Energy Agency (IEA) was clear to point out, the climate challenge is essentially an energy challenge. And as large polluters continue to commit to targets of net zero emissions by 2050, the world could — in theory — potentially address the climate challenge.

“The energy that powers our daily lives our economies also alone produces about 80 percent of global emissions,” Birol noted while addressing the virtual COP26 Virtual Roundtable on Clean Power Transition earlier this week on Jan. 11.

And as the UN plans to focus on building a global coalition for carbon neutrality by the middle of this current century, there will be increased focus and a push towards providing clean, renewable energy to all by 2030.

Clean and renewable energy was the focus of discussion of this weeks COP26 Virtual Roundtable on Clean Power Transition.

Birol said the good news was that China, the European Union, UK and Japan have ambitious 2050 net zero emission targets. He said he was positive that once he took office, United States President Elect Joe Biden would make similar commitments and other major developing nations may join. The joint global emissions by the current countries committed to the net zero emission targets amount to 60 percent of the world’s emissions.

“The issue is how to transform these ambitions into real energy action,” Birol said. He said in light of this the IEA was going to introduce the world’s first roadmap to net zero emissions by 2030, scheduled to be released on May 18 so that it can be used for input for COP26.

The roadmap will outline how the world needs to transform the energy sector, how much investment is needed and what needs to be done to reach the target and “provide a concrete plan for all of us”.

United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres, also addressed theCOP26 Virtual Roundtable on Clean Power Transition, saying that to achieve net zero emissions by 2050, an urgent transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy was needed but also that developing countries needed to supported with this shift.

Noting the figures of some 789 million people across the globe without access to electricity — the majority of whom live in sub-Saharan Africa, Guterres said that while all nations need to be able to provide electricity to all, this energy needed to be “clean and renewable so it does not contribute to the dangerous heating of our planet”.

According to the IEA, while the number of people without access to electricity has decreased over past years — with some two-thirds of the world’s progress occurring in India “where the government announced that more than 99 percent of the population had access to electricity in 2019, thanks to the ambitious Saubhagya Scheme launched in October 2017” — reaching a low in 2019, the COVID-19 pandemic has reversed past gains particularly in sub-Saharan Africa.

“Sub-Saharan Africa, home to three-quarters of the global population without access to electricity, has been particularly hard hit, and recent progress achieved in the region is being reversed by the effects of the pandemic: our first estimates indicate that the population without access to electricity could increase in 2020 for the first time since 2013,” IEA states in its SDG7 Data and Projections report.

Damilola Ogunbiyi, CEO of Sustainable Energy for All, Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for Sustainable Energy for All, co-chair of UN-Energy, and co-chair of the COP Campaigns Energy Transition, said it would be impossible to achieve zero emissions without delivering sustainable energy to all.

“We have to make something clear. The energy transition story is also the energy access story, especially in Africa. We must recognise that we cannot achieve net zero emissions by 2050 without delivering sustainable energy for all by 2030,” she said.

Ogunbiyi, who was the first female Managing Director of the Nigerian Rural Electrification Agency, went on to say that 2021 was a pivotal year for Sustainable Development Goal 7 which focuses on access to affordable and clean energy for all.

She said with less than 10 years to go on the SDGs, the world must “now turn towards supporting bold and ambitious plans that will deliver impact at scale to help achieve SDG 7 by 2030”.

Dr Akinumi Adesina, president of the African Development Bank (AfDB), which is also a member of the COP26 energy transition council, outlined what the bank was doing in support of energy transition across the African continent.

Adesina acknowledge that Africa had the lowest levels of access to energy in the world with 570 million people without electricity.

“The challenge for Africa is simple. Africa has so little electricity. This presents a real opportunity to build reliable, affordable and sustainable energy systems for Africa,” Adesina said. He said this is one of the reasons why the bank had launched the Light Up and Power Africa project as one of its High 5 priorities for transforming the continent. Since 2015 the bank has provided electricity for 16 million people by focusing mainly on renewable energy, Adesina said.

Indeed, his comments comes as just last week the AfDB announced it would roll out a second giant electricity-generation project this time in the the Sahel. The first, largest solar power project in the world is funded by the bank and based in Morocco.

The bank stated that the Desert-to-Power project — which covers 11 countries from Senegal in the west to Djibouti in the east, and includes the Sahel countries of Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania and Niger — when completed, “will turn the Sahel into one of the largest solar-power-generating areas in the world”. The AfDB went on to state that the $20-billion programme “aims to produce 10 gigawatts of electricity by 2025, providing 250 million people with power, of whom at least 90 million will be connected to the electricity grid for the first time”.

“The bank has been at the forefront of transformative renewable energy projects in Africa, including large-scale concentrated solar power projects, in Morocco…which are the largest in the world, the wind to power project which is the largest in sub-Saharan Africa,” he said, adding that the AfDB would no longer support coal projects.

“Unlocking that renewable energy future will ensure that we have a clean Africa, however, there are some challenges,” he said, explaining that this included the intermittency of solar and wind, the need for baseload power for grid stability, and the prohibitive costs of energy storage with policy and regulatory environments for renewable energy.

Adesina said the bank expected to invest $10 billion over the next five years in the energy sector.

Meanwhile Ogunbiyi  highlighted the importance of commitments as well as their financing and technical support for successful transition to renewable energy.

“Both the COP26 campaign and the UN high-level dialogue on energy need to be mutually reinforcing, just as energy access and energy transition are support another,” Ogunbiyi said. She said that the UN energy compact — an outcome of the UN high-level dialogue on energy — would be where countries can pledge their new ambitious commitments on sustainable energy in writing.

As member states, organisations, countries and cities sign up to the UN energy compacts, Ogunbiyi said it was critical that the international community rally around these commitments and support them with financing and technical assistance.

Meanwhile, Birol said critical to achieving net zero emissions was bringing the world’s countries together and providing momentum within an international context.

COP26 will be hosted by the United Kingdom and held in Glasgow, Scotland Nov. 1 to 12 and could provide the impetus for this momentum.

The UK announced the Climate Compatible Growth (CCG) programme — a £38 million fund that will focus on supporting developing nations transition to green energy.

Dr Amani Abou-Zeid, Commissioner for Energy and Infrastructure at the African Union said the that 900 million people in Africa depended on charcoal and firewood for cooking.

“This is not only an economic problem but mainly a moral issue and cause,” Abou-Zeid said.

Indeed the access to energy is also about human rights.

Last September, Ogunbiyi led a panel at the UN Global Compact’s Uniting Business Live event, where Chebet Lesan, founder of renewable energy startup BrightGreen discussed how their work in providing renewable cooking energy to vulnerable communities across Kenya and East Africa was impacting on a basic human right.

BrightGreen recycles post harvest waste, waste left on farms after harvesting, and then processes the waste into fuel that is easily adaptable by customers.

“They don’t need much change in behaviour in switching cost because the customers we are dealing with are very risk adverse and very money tight,” Lesan explained.

She said in response to a question on how to accelerate energy services to Africa, she said a key indicator was how good energy access services improved the lives of people in Africa.

“We are beginning to understand that as much as we are in the cooking energy space, our work is directly impacting the most basic human rights, even outside energy,” Lesan had said.

In the background can be seen the gigantic Cauchari Solar Park and in the foreground are tolas, typical drought-resistant shrubs of the Puna highland plateau. The largest plant of its kind in operation in South America is in the middle of nowhere, a few kilometres from the Kolla community of Puesto Sey, where there are now 962,496 solar panels. CREDIT: Cauchari Solar

By Daniel Gutman
BUENOS AIRES, Dec 10 2020 (IPS)

The unprecedented growth of renewable energies in Argentina over the last three years has borne its greatest fruit: the Cauchari solar park, with nearly one million photovoltaic panels and 300 MW of installed power, which was connected to the national power grid on Sept. 26.

The solar park is located in the extreme northwest province of Jujuy some 1,700 km from Buenos Aires, near the borders with Chile and Bolivia, with whom it shares the Puna ecoregion of high Andean plains covered by grasses and shrubs.

The initiative cost 390 million dollars and is the latest reflection of China’s involvement in the Latin American economy: not only the two construction companies but also most of the financing came from the Asian giant."It is the largest operating solar park in South America and we consider it a great boost for changing the energy mix in the entire region…It is still too early to say, because we are in a stage of adjustment and depend on natural phenomena, but it is likely to be one of the most efficient solar parks in the world." -- Guillermo Hoerth

An indigenous shepherd tending his llamas or a herd of wild vicuñas that flee as soon as they see a vehicle approaching are the only sights that attract the visitor’s attention – as IPS found on a recent visit to the area – in the solitude of the arid Cauchari environment, which covers some 800 hectares in the Argentine Puna, at an altitude of more than 4,000 metres.

Between September 2018 and October 2019, 2,664 trucks with containers loaded with Chinese components and technology arrived at this remote spot so far from the large centres of electricity consumption, where water is scarce and it is hard to breathe because of the altitude.

Previously they had disembarked in the Chilean port of Antofagasta, on the Pacific Ocean, or in the Argentinean port of Zarate, on the Atlantic.

“It is the largest operating solar park in South America and we consider it a great boost for changing the energy mix in the entire region,” Guillermo Hoerth, president of Cauchari Solar, a company owned by Jujuy province, told IPS by phone.

“It is still too early to say, because we are in a stage of adjustment and depend on natural phenomena, but it is likely to be one of the most efficient solar parks in the world,” Hoerth added.

The president of the plant explained that the intense solar radiation throughout the year is combined with low temperatures, which help the panels retain heat and make the Puna an extraordinary place for this type of renewable energy.

Cauchari is the greatest success story of the Law of National Promotion of the use of Renewable Energies for the Production of Electric Power, passed by Congress in September 2015.

The new law modified the electric mix of this Southern Cone country, which is the third-largest economy in Latin America, built until then almost exclusively by oil, natural gas, large hydroelectric dams and, to a much lesser extent, nuclear energy.

According to official data, 135 new renewable energy projects, mostly solar and wind, have been launched in Argentina since 2016. The ones already in operation and those that are still under construction represent a combined total of 4,776 MW of installed power, with an estimated investment of close to 7.2 billion dollars.

The entrance to Cauchari Solar Park is reached by a desolate dirt road about 40 kilometres long that connects to paved highway 52, which in the northern province of Jujuy leads to the Chilean border. Technically there are three solar parks, to get around the 100 MW limit set by the tender. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

The most graphic reflection of the rise in renewable sources, which under the law have priority over conventional sources, is that they accounted for 9.1 percent of the electricity consumed in Argentina in the first 10 months of 2020 and climbed to a record 11.9 percent in October. Although it must be kept in mind that this occurred in a context of falling electricity consumption due to the drop in economic activity as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Thus, renewable sources, which until three years ago represented less than two percent of electricity generation in Argentina, reached – with a slight delay – the goal of contributing eight percent of electric power, which Law 27191 of 2015 had set for Dec. 31, 2017.

The law outlines a second stage of the plan, with a goal of reaching 20 percent by 2025. But experts believe this will be virtually impossible to achieve.

The global economic crisis and Argentina’s financing problems – this year the country restructured almost 66 billion dollars of debt with private creditors and still owes some 52 billion dollars to the IMF – are major obstacles.

But they are not the only ones.

“Argentina is a large country, with great potential for solar energy in the north and wind energy in the south,” economist Julián Rojo of the General Mosconi Argentine Institute of Energy, a non-governmental research organisation, told IPS.

But “the problem is that for transporting electricity to the centres of consumption there is a lack of high voltage lines, which today are close to saturation. And there is no intention of investing in new ones,” he said in a telephone conversation.

An engineer oversees the installation of the panels during the construction of the solar park, which involved the arrival of more than 2,600 trucks carrying Chinese technology to a remote area in the Puna high mountain plateau in the northwest of Argentina. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

In Rojo’s view, Argentina does not currently need additional electricity generation, because peak demand was reached in 2017 and, if necessary, the country has an important gas pipeline network that makes it more convenient to build thermal power plants near the centres of consumption.

Making an offering to Pacha Mama for the expansion of the solar park

Marcelo Nieder, director of renewable energy in Jujuy province, told IPS that such a remote location was chosen to build the Cauchari solar park not only because of the excellent solar radiation in the Puna ecoregion, but also because a high-voltage line built in 1999 to export electricity to Chile passes through the area.

“Chile used it to supply its mining industry, but since 2006 Argentina stopped selling to Chile, so there was a possibility to take advantage of the power line,” he explained by phone from Jujuy, also the name of the provincial capital.

Because this high voltage line still has transport capacity the governor of Jujuy, Gerardo Morales, visited Cauchari in October to make an offering to the Pacha Mama – Mother Earth for the indigenous people of the Andean region – and to ask for an expansion of the solar park, up to 500 MW of power.

“We have already designed the expansion and we are betting that China will finance it, as in the case of the park that was already inaugurated,” Felipe Albornoz, president of Jujuy Energía y Minería Sociedad del Estado (JEMSE), the state-run energy and mining company that manages Cauchari, told IPS by phone from the provincial capital.

China’s state-owned Eximbank financed most of the construction, with a 330 million dollar loan that the province of Jujuy must pay back over 30 years, at an annual interest rate of 2.9 percent.

The remaining 60 million dollars were obtained through a green bond issued in the United States, for which the province of Jujuy is trying to postpone the maturity date, according to Albornoz.

Signs in Spanish and Chinese are an unexpected sight in the middle of the untamed landscape of Argentina’s Puna high mountain plateau and are a reflection of China’s heavy involvement in the development of solar power in Latin America. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

The president of JEMSE explained that Jujuy expects to sell power to the national electricity market for about 25 million dollars a year. The company projects that Cauchari will produce 840,000 MW/hour per year, which would save the emission of 325,000 tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) equivalent into the atmosphere, thanks to the reduction in the use of fossil fuels.

Two percent of the net profits will go to Puesto Sey, a Kolla indigenous community that has collective rights over the land where there is now an endless expanse of solar panels.

The irony is that Puesto Sey, like the other communities in the area, do not receive electricity from Cauchari because they are not connected to the national grid.

Most of the villages and small towns in the Puna, mainly inhabited by Kolla indigenous people, are supplied with electricity from diesel-fueled generators, although in recent years some small local solar parks have been built.

Nor does Cauchari make a difference today in terms of local employment, because although the two-year construction process employed more than 1,500 people, the plant itself only needs 60 to 70 highly specialised technicians.

And perhaps the most difficult question to answer is whether Argentina or any other Latin American country will ever be able to supply such large renewable energy projects with local technology.

Hoerth told IPS that the construction process brought about 100 million dollars to Jujuy’s domestic market, since 22.7 percent of the plant’s electromechanical components were domestically made.

However, the president of Cauchari said the local manufacture of technology for renewable energy sources is still a distant dream.

“I wish we could develop a national industry. But it is very complicated because China has reached such cheap costs that it has flooded the European market,” he said.

Oil pump jack pumping crude out of the ground in Neuquen, Argentina (Image Alamy/Diálogo Chino)

By Fermín Koop
BUENOS AIRES, Nov 26 2020 (IPS)

As the world’s leading economies direct trillions of dollars towards Covid-19 recovery packages, a significant proportion is going to fossil fuel industries without climate stipulations, according to the 2020 edition of the Climate Transparency Report – which has assessed the climate performance of G20 countries.

Up until the middle of October, the G20 spent US$393 billion on support to the energy sector, with 53.5% going to fossil fuels ($175 billion to oil and gas, and $16.2 billion to coal). Of this, 86% has been provided without conditions for improved environmental action or performance.

The report shows that at least 19 of the G20 countries have provided financial support to their domestic oil, coal and gas sectors, including Argentina, Brazil and Mexico. If they continue along this path, governments risk reversing, instead of locking in, positive pre-Covid trends such as a stable expansion of renewable energy.

At least 19 of the G20 countries have provided financial support to their domestic oil, coal and gas sectors, including Argentina, Brazil and Mexico

“The recovery packages can solve the climate crisis or make it worse,” says Charlene Watson of the Overseas Development Institute. “Some G20 members like the EU, France, or Germany are setting mostly a good example. Others direct too much support to fossil fuels, putting at risk positive recent developments.”

G20 economies represent more than 80% of global GDP and three-quarters of global trade. The group is also responsible for 75% of global emissions and therefore has a major role in fulfilling the goal of the Paris Agreement to avoid a temperature increase of more than 2C, or ideally 1.5C, above the pre-industrial norm.

However, existing G20 commitments are insufficient to accomplish that goal, and would lead the world to a temperature 2.7C higher by the end of the century, according to the report. Countries are expected to update their climate pledges in 2020 and 2021 ahead of the COP26 climate summit.

Challenging previous progress

Before the Covid-19 pandemic, the results of climate action in G20 countries were becoming visible in key areas. Energy-related CO2 emissions decreased by 0.1% in 2019 – a remarkable departure from the 1.9% increase in 2018 and a longer-term annual average growth rate of 1.4% between 2005 and 2017.

This was largely due to the expansion of renewable energy. The share of renewables in power generation increased in 19 of the G20 countries last year, accounting for 27% of power generation in the group. It’s projected to continue increasing in all G20 countries and to make up almost 28% of the power generation this year.

“Before the pandemic hit, results of climate action were coming to fruition in some energy-related sectors and the crisis consolidated those trends in the majority of the G20 countries,” said Jorge Villarreal of Iniciativa Climática de México. “But without further climate action, these effects will be temporary.”

Looking back on 2019, the report notes that despite a decrease in coal consumption, fossil fuels still accounted for 81.5% of primary energy supply, because of increases in oil (+1%) and gas (+3%) consumption. Also in 2019, countries provided US$130 billion in subsidies to fossil fuels, up from US$117 billion in 2018, despite their goal to eliminate them.

Progress in the transport, building and industrial sectors is also lagging and many G20 members are still losing tree cover, diminishing critical carbon sinks. CO2 emissions from the transport sector grew by 1.5%, followed by a 1.2% increase in the industry sector and a 0.9% growth in the building sector.

No G20 countries have targets for reaching zero deforestation in the 2020s, which would be needed to meet the Paris Agreement 1.5C goal. Although China, the EU and Mexico have targets for net-zero deforestation for further down the line. This is especially worrying in Latin America, considering the forest fires and illegal logging in Argentina and Brazil.

The scenario for Latin America

G20 members Brazil, Argentina and Mexico were found to be off-track to meet the 1.5C goal. Argentina is the only one of the three to emit more than the G20 average, having increased its emissions 35% since 1990.

Amid the pandemic, Brazil has provided economic support to the industrial and transport sectors without attaching any environmental conditions. Meanwhile, deregulation in land use in the Amazon is likely to increase logging, mining, agriculture and forestry activities, leading to further deforestation.

The Bolsonaro administration cut the budget for key forest protection monitoring and enforcement and has rolled back numerous environmental protection policies. Rates of illegal deforestation are continuing to rise, with over a third of deforestation in 2019 taking place on public lands.

“From 2012 to 2019 the level of deforestation in Brazil grew by 122%. If deforestation gets out of control, NDC goals won’t be met. The country should urgently reinstate and strengthen policies on monitoring and preventing illegal deforestation,” said William Willis, from CentroClima NGO in Brazil.

In Mexico, a large proportion of the stimulus package has been directed towards infrastructure investments, including a flagship oil refinery and airport expansion, plus tax breaks for Pemex, Mexico’s state-owned oil company. Furthermore, barriers were placed to the wind and solar energy dispatch, prioritising oil-fired power plants.

The country called oil a strategic resource and seeks to increase its use for electricity generation, increasing investment in fossil fuel exploration and extraction. Instead it should reopen further renewable energy auctioning rounds, the report argued.

There is a similar scenario in Argentina. During the pandemic, the Fernández administration introduced measures to increase commodity exports and fossil fuels. The government artificially fixed the domestic oil barrel price to offset the sharp fall in international oil prices.

Fossil fuels still make up 86% of Argentina’s energy mix. Despite the increase in renewable energy over the last two decades, the carbon intensity of the energy mix has barely changed. The share of fossil fuels in the global primary 1.5C energy mix needs to fall to 67% by 2030 and to 33% by 2050.

“The government didn’t introduce any ‘green’ measures in its recovery stimulus plans. On the contrary, it continues to strongly subsidise fossil fuels, such as gas. In order to ensure a sustainable recovery, the focus needs to be put on green energy infrastructure,” said Enrique Maurtua Konstantinidis, senior adviser on climate change at FARN, an Argentine NGO.

Looking ahead

There is growing recognition that a fundamental, structural shift is required among G20 countries, the report argued. As such, in 2019 and 2020 many countries have started to set net-zero emissions goals to decarbonize their economies by mid-century, with likely more to come over the next few months.

In June 2019, France and the UK set net-zero targets for 2050, and by the end of the year, the EU and Germany had made similar announcements. In 2020, Canada, China, South Africa, South Korea, and Japan joined in, with China aiming to be carbon-neutral before 2060. Cities and companies in G20 countries have announced similar goals.

Representatives from G20 countries met virtually on Friday and Saturday, November 20-21 for the bloc’s annual summit under the presidency of Saudi Arabia. It will be largely focused on addressing the implications of the coronavirus pandemic, future health care plans and steps for reviving the global economy.

“We urgently need more ambition and leadership from the world’s biggest economies – and emitters – at the upcoming G20 Summit and next year’s UN Climate Conference” said Catrina Godinho from the Humboldt-Viadrina Governance Platform. “The US election result offers some hope for international climate politics.”

This article was originally published by Dialogo Chino

Onergia, one of the two energy cooperatives operating in Mexico today, installs photovoltaic systems, such as this one at the Tosepan Titataniske Union of Cooperatives in the municipality of Cuetzalan, in the southern state of Puebla. CREDIT: Courtesy of Onergia

By Emilio Godoy
MEXICO CITY, Aug 31 2020 (IPS)

A Mexican solar energy cooperative, Onergia, seeks to promote decent employment, apply technological knowledge and promote alternatives that are less polluting than fossil fuels, in one of the alternative initiatives with which Mexico is seeking to move towards an energy transition.

“We organised ourselves in a cooperative for an energy transition that will rethink the forms of production, distribution and consumption to build a healthier and fairer world,” Onergia founding partner and project director Antonio Castillo told IPS. “In this sector, it has been more difficult; we have to invest in training and go against the logic of the market.”

The eight-member cooperative, created in 2017, has so far installed some 50 photovoltaic systems, mainly in the south-central state of Puebla."A public policy is needed that would allow us to move towards the transition. Getting people to adopt alternatives depends on public policy. It is fundamental for people to have the freedom to choose how to consume. It is our job to organise as consumers." --
Antonio Castillo

Castillo explained by phone that the cooperative works with middle- and upper-class households that can finance the cost of the installation as well as with local communities keen on reducing their energy bill, offering more services and expanding access to energy.

In the case of local communities, the provision of solar energy is part of broader social projects in which the beneficiary organisations’ savings and loan cooperatives design the financial structure to carry out the work. A basic household system can cost more than 2,200 dollars and a larger one, over 22,000.

“The communities are motivated to adopt renewable energy as a strategy to defend the land against threats from mining or hydroelectric companies,” said Castillo. “They don’t need to be large-scale energy generators, because they already have the local supply covered. The objective is to provide the communities with alternatives.”

Onergia, a non-profit organisation, promotes distributed or decentralised generation.

In Mexico, energy cooperatives are a rarity. In fact, there are only two, due to legal, technical and financial barriers, even though the laws governing cooperatives recognise their potential role in energy among other diverse sectors. The other, Cooperativa LF del Centro, provides services in several states but is not a generator of electricity.

The Electricity Industry Law, in effect since 2014, allows the deployment of local projects smaller than one megawatt, but practically excludes them from the electricity auctions that the government had been organising since 2016 and that the administration of leftwing President Andrés Manuel López Obrador put a stop to after he took office in December 2018.

Since then, López Obrador has opted to fortify the state monopolies of the Federal Electricity Commission (CFE) and the Petróleos Mexicanos (Pemex) oil giant, which translates into favouring fossil fuels over renewable sources.

The National Electric System Development Programme 2018-2032 projects that fossil fuels will represent 67 percent of the energy mix in 2022; wind energy, 10 percent; hydroelectric, nine percent; solar, four percent; nuclear, three percent, and geothermal and bioenergy, four percent.

In 2032, the energy outlook will not vary much, as fossil fuels will account for 60 percent; wind, nuclear and geothermal energy will rise to 13, eight and three percent, respectively; hydroelectric power will drop to eight percent; while solar and bioenergy will remain the same.

In Mexico, rural communities are guaranteeing their electricity supply by using clean sources, thus furthering the energy transition to micro and mini-scale generation. The photo shows the “Laatzi-Duu” ecotourism site (the name means “standing plain” in the Zapotec indigenous language) which is self-sufficient thanks to a solar panel installed on its roof, in the municipality of San Juan Evangelista Analco in the southern state of Oaxaca. CREDIT: Emilio Godoy/IPS

The government cancelled the call for long-term electric auctions that allowed private companies to build wind and solar plants and sell the energy to CFE. But these tenders privileged private Mexican and foreign capital and large-scale generation.

In a dialogue with IPS, independent researcher Carlos Tornel questioned the predominant energy design promoted by the 2013 reform that opened up the hydrocarbon and electricity markets to private capital, and the form of energy production based on passive consumers.

“We don’t have an effective legal framework to promote that kind of energy transition,” said the expert via WhatsApp from the northeast English city of Durham. “A free market model was pursued, which allowed the entry of megaprojects through auctions and allowed access to those who could offer a very low cost of generation, which could only be obtained on a large scale.”

With that strategy, he added, “small projects were left out. And the government did not put in place economic incentives to foment cooperative schemes.”

“We need a more active model focused on the collective good,” added Tornel, who is earning a PhD in Human Geography at Durham University in the UK.

Mexico, the second largest economy in Latin America with a population of 129 million, depends heavily on hydrocarbons and will continue to do so in the medium term if it does not accelerate the energy transition.

In the first quarter of 2019, gross generation totaled 80,225 gigawatt hours (Gwh), up from 78,167 in the same period last year. Gas-fired combined cycle plants (with two consecutive cycles, conventional turbine and steam) contributed 40,094, conventional thermoelectric 9,306, and coal-fired 6,265.

Hydroelectric power plants contributed 5,137 Gwh; wind fields 4,285; nuclear power plants 2,382; and solar stations 1,037.

The Energy Transition Law of 2015 stipulates that clean energy must meet 30 percent of demand by 2021 and 35 percent by 2024. By including hydropower and nuclear energy, the country will have no problem reaching these goals.

Residents of the small rural community of Amatlán, in the municipality of Zoquiapan in the state of Puebla, oversee the operation of photovoltaic panels installed by the Mexican cooperative Onergia. This type of cooperative can help rural communities in Mexico access clean energy, particularly solar power. CREDIT: Courtesy of Onergia

By early August, the government’s Energy Regulatory Commission (CRE) had granted 310 permits for solar generation, small-scale production and self-supply, totaling almost 22,000 Mw.

The 2017 report Renewable Energy Auctions and Participatory Citizen Projects, produced by the international non-governmental Renewable Energy Policy Network for the 21st Century (REN21), cites, with respect to Mexico, the obligation for investors to form self-sufficient companies, which complicates attempts to develop local ventures.

Onergia’s Castillo stressed the need for a clear and stable regulatory framework.

“A public policy is needed that would allow us to move towards the transition,” he said. “Getting people to adopt alternatives depends on public policy. It is fundamental for people to have the freedom to choose how to consume. It is our job to organise as consumers.”

Affected by the coronavirus pandemic, Onergia is reviewing the way it works and its financial needs to generate its own power supply. It also works with the Renewable Energies Institute of the National Autonomous University of Mexico in the design and installation of solar power systems.

In March, the government’s National Council for Science and Technology launched a strategic national programme on energy transition that will promote sustainable rural energy projects and community solar energy, to be implemented starting in 2021.

In addition, the energy ministry is set to announce the Special Energy Transition Programme 2019-2024.

But to protect the CFE, the CRE is blocking approval of the development of collective distributed generation schemes, which would allow citizens to sell surplus energy to other consumers, and the installation of storage systems in solar parks.

Tornel criticised the lack of real promotion of renewable sources.

“The Mexican government has been inconsistent in its handling of this issue,” he maintained. “They talk about guaranteeing energy security through hydrocarbons. There is no plan for an energy transition based on renewables or on supporting community projects. We have no indication that they support renewable, and that’s very worrying.”

The REN21 report recommends reserving a quota for participatory citizen projects and facilitating access to energy purchase agreements, which ensures the efficiency of tenders and the effectiveness of guaranteed tariffs for these undertakings.

In addition, it proposes the establishment of an authority for citizen projects, capacity building, promotion of community energy and specific national energy targets for these initiatives.

Teddy Cotella stands in front of the solar panels he installed in 2018 on his farm in an area of scarce infrastructure and far from the power grid, in the Argentine province of Santiago del Estero. To get electricity, he used to use generators that consumed about 20,000 litres of diesel fuel annually. CREDIT: Courtesy of Teddy Cotella

By Daniel Gutman
BUENOS AIRES, Jun 10 2020 (IPS)

Rice farmers in the Argentine province of Entre Rios often look like mechanics. “They’re always full of grease, because they haul diesel fuel around all the time, for their water pumps,” says local farmer Arturo Deymonnaz. He, however, doesn’t have that problem, because he uses solar energy to grow his rice.

Deymonnaz’s farm is located outside the town of Villa Elisa, in east-central Argentina, near one of the bridges that crosses into Uruguay. He’s a lifelong livestock producer – like his father and grandfather – but in 2018 he ventured into rice production, tempted by an agronomist who assured him it could be grown using clean energy.

“This is traditionally a rice-producing area, but many have stopped growing it because so much money is spent on fuel that it is no longer profitable. Here, rice is planted in November and harvested in April. That’s 100 days with the pumps running 24 hours a day to draw water from the wells for the rice,” he tells IPS.

But Deymonnaz says it’s profitable for him to grow rice, thanks to the fact that he draws water from a 48-metre-deep well using two pumps fueled by 36 solar panels on his 300-hectare farm, 10 of which he now dedicates to planting rice.

“I call it my solar rice farm. I don’t spend money on fuel and I don’t have to put up with the noise or the steam produced by the motor,” says the farmer, who also installed a system of plastic sleeves with sluices to reduce the high water consumption of his rice crop. He estimates that with this system he uses at least 30 percent less water.

Deymonnaz is representative of a phenomenon that is growing in this Southern Cone country of 44 million people, which is the third largest economy in Latin America and where agriculture accounts for 13 percent of GDP.

According to the latest National Agricultural Census conducted here in 2018, of the 162,650 rural establishments that use some type of energy, 25,850 have solar panels.

The water pumps used in rice farming are very powerful, which means they cannot rely on conventional electrical connections. Even farms connected to the grid have to use generators that run on diesel fuel.

Arturo Deymonnaz is the third generation of his family dedicated to livestock farming. But two years ago he began growing rice, which he produces solely with solar energy, in northern Argentina. Rice growers in the area use high-powered pumps to extract from wells the enormous amount of water required to grow the crop, which previously were fueled by huge amounts of diesel fuel. CREDIT: Courtesy of Héctor Pirchi

“In Entre Rios, the cost of fuel is driving small-scale farmers out of business. We used to have about 100,000 hectares of rice, but last year only half of that was planted. That’s why solar energy is a solution,” Héctor Pirchi, an expert on rice at the National Institute of Agricultural Technology (INTA), told IPS.

But the use of solar energy is not limited to Entre Ríos: it is spreading through rural areas all around the country.

Due to the lockdown in place in Argentina since March because of the COVID-19 pandemic, IPS interviewed several farmers, solar energy entrepreneurs and experts in different provinces by phone from Buenos Aires.

Teddy Cotella, who grows soybeans, corn, wheat and chickpeas in northern Argentina, is fascinated by solar energy. His 3,000-hectare farm in the province of Santiago del Estero is 12 km from the power grid, so for almost 20 years he used generators.

“I used to use about 20,000 litres of diesel a year for electricity generation alone. To people who complain about their power company bill, I tell them ‘try not having electric service at all’,” he says.

In 2018 Cotella installed solar panels along with lithium batteries, which store electricity for the nighttime or rainy days. These provide electric power for all three houses and for production on the farm.

“People whose farms are located far from the grid shouldn’t hesitate. I would also put solar panels on a house in the city,” says Cotella, who adds that the investment in solar panels is recovered in just three years.

Agritur is a 9,000-hectare agricultural establishment in the central Argentine province of San Luis where 1,800 solar panels were installed in 2019, producing 600 kilowatts of energy and providing half of the farm’s electricity. All the crops are grown using an irrigation system, because rainfall amounts to just 500 mm a year. CREDIT: MWh Solar

Northern Argentina mainly falls within the Chaco ecosystem, a vast semi-arid plain covered in shrubs and hardwood forest that extends into Bolivia and Paraguay. This region is home to Argentina’s poorest provinces and infrastructure is scarce, so small solar parks change lives.

Ariel Ludueña owns Ener One, a renewable energy company that since 2017 has installed some 2,500 solar panels in northern Argentina.

“I am sure that solar energy will continue to grow, especially in that area, because it gives farmers independence. There are farms that are 80 km from the grid, along bad roads over which it is not easy to transport fuel,” says Ludueña from the western province of Córdoba.

One of Ludueña’s customers is Ignacio Pisani, an agricultural production engineer who moved from Buenos Aires to the northwestern province of Salta 30 years ago to devote himself to farming.

Pisani’s farm is 15 km from the grid, and when he asked the provincial authorities to extend it, they said he had to pay the cost, which was a disproportionate investment for a small farmer.

So Pisani used a generator not only to provide electricity for his house and his workers’ houses, but also to pump water for his cows and for the drip irrigation system he uses to grow onions, watermelon and alfalfa on his 1,500-hectare farm. In this part of the Chaco, rain is scarce and is concentrated in the southern hemisphere summer months.

The solar panels seen in the background power the pump that extracts water from this well to grow rice on the Colonia Mabragaña farm in the Argentine province of Entre Ríos. Rice consumes enormous quantities of water, but on this farm a system of plastic sleeves with sluices reduces the crop’s water consumption by at least 30 percent. CREDIT: Courtesy of Héctor Pirchi

“The generator was giving me a lot of problems: high fuel consumption, noise, the need to buy spare parts… And I could see that the power grid was never going to arrive. That’s why I decided in 2018 to install a solar park with 50 panels that would cover all my needs,” says Pisani.

The farmer financed the project with his own capital, after realising that in Argentina the politically correct rhetoric in favour of renewable energy rarely translates into concrete financial support.

“I turned to all the public and private entities in search of support, but nobody helped me,” says Pisani, who along with the panels has 16 batteries that allow him to guarantee electric supply for up to three days in case the weather is rainy or cloudy.

The outlook seems even more uncertain for large agricultural establishments, which are key players in Argentina’s foreign trade. According to official figures, agribusiness products accounted for 42.6 percent of Argentina’s total exports in 2019.

“Solar technology is constantly evolving and cost reduction makes it one of the most competitive, clean and efficient technologies for agribusiness establishments,” says renewable energy economist Matías Irigoyen from Buenos Aires.

“Although its implementation at the national level will depend on the energy policies that are adopted, it is already the most convenient solution in several provinces,” adds Irigoyen, who is also a partner the MWh Solar company.

In 2019, the company installed 1,800 solar panels on a 9,000-hectare farm in the province of San Luis, in central Argentina.

The farm is a large consumer of electricity that buys energy directly from the wholesale market, and since last year has been covering half of its demand with solar energy.

“In addition to the fact that agribusiness companies can benefit economically from renewable energies, the interesting thing is that they can also access new international markets, due to the growing demand for products with a smaller carbon footprint,” says Irigoyen.

Kenya’s Lake Turkana Wind Power project opened in July is generates 300 MW of wind power. Credit: Isaiah Esipisu/IPS

By Nalisha Adams
JOHANNESBURG, South Africa, Nov 11 2019 (IPS)

Africa, where close to half of its 1.2 billion people have access to electricity, is set to become a world leader in renewable energy. As global business and development leaders met in Johannesburg, South Africa, to attend the Africa Investment Forum (AIF), held Nov. 11 to 13, one of the key focuses of the deals being discussed was around sustainable, renewable energy.

Organised by the African Development Bank (AfDB) and its various partners, the forum is expected to see $67 billion in deals closed over the next few days.

Leaders are doing all they can to encourage investment

In attendance where heads of state from South Africa, Ghana, Rwanda and Mozambique. At an invitation-only discussion among the leaders, Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame said there was a lot of progress in Africa as a whole.

“I have always thought it was Africa’s time. We African’s have let ourselves down, we are now realising it has always been our time. And we are now seize every opportunity and be where we should be by now,” Kagame said.

• Kagame was the driver of the African Continental Free Trade Agreement (AfCFTA) during his time as chair of the African Union in 2018. The agreement had not been in existence during the first AIF last year.
• Established in March 2019, the AfCFTA has now been signed by 54 of the 55 African member states.

Alain Ebobisse, CEO of Africa 50, the Pan-African infrastructure investment platform capitalised by the AfDB, said that there was a consensus from African leaders that they needed to do whatever they could to attract more private investment. He said that the AIF attendance showed that there was a changing narrative for investment on the continent.

• Earlier figures had been revealed by the South African premier of Gauteng Province, David Makhura, that over 2,000 delegates were in attendance from 109 countries. Of this, only 40 percent where from Africa with the majority of investors attending from Asia, Europe and the Americas.
• Gauteng is South Africa’s wealthiest province and includes the financial centres of Johannesburg and Sandton, as well as the seat of government in Pretoria. 

Renewable energy on a positive trajectory   

Ebobisse said that a lot was already happening on the continent and while the media focused on the challenges there were huge success stories too — like the 1.5 GW Benban Solar Park in Egypt, which is the world’s largest solar photovoltaic plant.

“I’m sure that people are not talking enough about this major achievement which is the Benban Solar Programmer, 1.5 GW of solar that was invested mostly by the private sector in a record time,” he said.

• Africa 50 invested in 400 MW in that project and completed it from design to commercial operations in two and a half years.

Ebobisse went on to highlight Kenya’s opening this July of the Lake Turkana Wind Power project, which at a generation capacity of 300 MW makes it the largest wind power project on the continent.

“It was funded by the private sector,” Ebobisse told the media. He also looked towards Senegal which was implementing many independent power producers or IPPs in the solar sector.

“So there is a lot that is happening. We need to also widely understand the challenges and understand what is happening on the ground. And people are actually making good money in this investment. And there is nothing wrong about that. Let’s celebrate those successes,” he said.

African Development Bank President Akinwumi Adesina said today the bank had doubled its investment in climate finance from $12 billion to $25 billion by 2020. Credit: Nalisha Adams/IPS

Making Africa a world leader in renewables

A few weeks ago, the Governors of the AfDB met in Cote d’Ivoire’s capital Abidjan, approving a historic $115 billion increase to the bank’s authorised capital base to $208 billion. “This is the highest capital increase in the history of the bank since its establishment in 1964,” AfDB president Akinwumi Adesina said today.

During the October announcement Adesina had said that a significant portion of funding would be invested in climate change.

Today, in response to a question from IPS, Adesina further explained that the bank had doubled its investment in climate finance from $12 billion to $25 billion by 2020.

“Almost 50 percent of our finance will be going to climate adaptation as opposed to climate mitigation. So we are the first multilateral development bank to actually reach that balance in terms of adaptation and mitigation,” he said.

• Climate mitigation is the actions taken to reduce or curb greenhouse gases, thereby addressing the causes of climate change to prevent future warming. However, climate adaptation addresses how to live with the impacts of climate change.

“I believe that coal is the past. I believe that renewable energy is the future and we as a bank are investing in not in the past, but in the future in making sure that we are investing in solar energy, in hydro energy, in wind, all types of renewable energy that Africa needs,” Adesina said.

“We want Africa to lead in renewable energy.”

He said one of the projects was the AfDB’s Green Baseload Facility, which according to the bank, aims “to accelerate the transition towards more sustainable baseload power generation options and prevent countries from locking themselves into environmentally damaging and potentially economically costly technologies”.

“It’s a $500-million facility that we have set up to support countries that want to shift out of fuel-based energy into renewable energy and providing access to finance at a cheaper rate to be able to make that transition,” Adesina said.

• The bank’s biggest investment is the Desert to Power project, which was announced in December at the United Nations’ Climate Conference in Katowice, Poland.
• The initiative plans to supply 10 GW of solar energy by 2025 to 250 million people across 11 Sahelian countries. 

“That would make it the largest solar zone in the world,” Adesina stated. The bank will work in partnership with various investors to also establish plants on the continent that will manufacture the solar panels for the project.

• The AfDB has always stated “a lack of energy remains a significant impediment to Africa’s economic and social development“.
• According to AfDB, energy poverty in Africa is estimated to cost the continent 2 to 4  percent  GDP annually.

Africa’s climate crisis

The continent is facing climate change impact with rising temperatures and reduced rainfall.

The Sahel, which lies between The Sahara and the Sudanian Savanna, offers a blaze of sunlight with little rain as it is the region where temperatures are rising faster than anywhere else on Earth, according to the Great Green Wall initiative, a project that aims to reverse desertification and land degradation in the area.   

Last month, IPS reported that as The Sahara desert continues to expand, it tears apart families, forces migration from rural areas to cities and has contributed to conflict for precious resources of water, land and food.  

In July, IPS reported that the parts of Kenya had already warmed to above 1.5˚C — a figure deemed acceptable by global leaders during the 2015 Paris Agreement. But at such high temperatures a study found that over the last four decades livestock some Kenyan counties had decline by almost a quarter because of the temperature increase over time.

• During the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change in Paris in 2015, all countries committed under the Paris Agreement to “holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C”.
• But last year the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a special report warning that the world would face the risk of extreme heat, drought, floods and poverty at a temperature rise of 1.5°C.

Siby Diabira, regional head for Southern Africa and the Indian Ocean for PROPARCO, a subsidiary of Agence Française de Développement (AFD) focused on private sector development, told IPS that last year the group did $1.76 billion in investment deals, half of which was in Africa. Credit: Nalisha Adams/IPS

However, the forum showed that there remain a number of investors looking to provide funding for renewables and other development project on the continent. 

Siby Diabira, regional head for Southern Africa and the Indian Ocean for PROPARCO, a subsidiary of Agence Française de Développement (AFD) focused on private sector development, told IPS that last year the group did $1.76 billion in investment deals, half of which was in Africa. The AIF was still in its early stages to make a pronouncement on the success of the deals, Diabira said, but “so far so good”.

Diabira said the French development agencies aimed to be 100 percent compliant with the Paris Agreement and hence were investing heavily in renewable energy.

• She explained that PROPARCO was involved in “all types of renewable energy from hydro to solar to wind”, adding that there was a need for a mix of both traditional and renewable energy generation.

“I have been attending some of the boardroom [discussions]. It is a quite interesting gathering to have for the second year and to have so many different types of investors and projects that are raising funds for these types of events,” she said.

“We have been present in financing the first few rounds of renewable energy projects in South Africa and our idea is also as a [Development Financial Institution] DFI to be able to contribute to create this market for the commercial banks to come with us on those types of projects,” Diabira said.

Admassu Tadesse, President of the Trade and Development Bank, also pointed out that partnership agreements among the various banks and partners had strengthen their position in deals.

“If you have smart partnerships you can scale up collectively. With the African Development Bank we have signed a risk participation agreement to the tune of $300 million, which will allow us to move speedily into fields and have partners coming into deals alongside us.”

He said they expected to soon sign a deal with the European Investment Bank (EIB) that will again strengthen their position.

EIB vice president Ambroise Fayolle said they were attending this year with great intentions to develop transactions. He said it came on the back of their 2018 record year of investments in the continent, which amounted to some $3.6 billion — more than 50 percent of which was in the private sector. The bank signed 3 partnerships already, he said, none of which would have been possible without the AIF.

And as Adesina stated in a video message at the start of the forum, “Let the deals begin”.

Romário Schaefer, 65, stands between the biodigester buried in the ground on the right and the blue tank holding whey that is mixed with the manure of the pigs he fattens in a row of pig pens (top left) to produce biogas, in the southern Brazilian municipality of Entre Rios do Oeste. In the background is his brick factory, which saves about 6,500 dollars a month in electricity by using biogas. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

By Mario Osava
ENTRE RIOS DO OESTE, Brazil, Aug 16 2019 (IPS)

Romário Schaefer is fattening up 3,300 pigs that he receives when they weigh around 22 kg and returns when they reach 130 to 160 kg – a huge increase in meat and profits for their owner, a local meat-processing plant in this city in Brazil.

Schaefer is not interested in the pork meat business. What he wants is the manure, which he uses to produce biogas and electricity that fuel his brick-making factory.

“I’m not a farmer,” he says as he shows us around his Stein Ceramics company in the middle of a 38-hectare rural property on the outskirts of Entre Rios do Oeste, a farming town of 4,400 people in western Paraná, one of three states in Brazil’s southern region, on the border with Paraguay.

He is explaining the difference between himself and neighbouring pig farmers who produce biogas and sell it to the Mini-Thermoelectric Plant inaugurated on Jul. 24 to generate energy that serves the Entre Rios municipal government and all of its facilities in the town itself and the rest of the municipality.

For them it is a new agricultural product, and has been recognised as such in Paraná for commercial and tax purposes. But for Schaefer it’s an input for his factory, which makes bricks.

Animal waste, which pollutes the soil and rivers, is becoming an important by-product in southwestern Brazil, where pig and poultry farming has expanded widely in recent decades.

The Haacke farm, in the municipality of Santa Helena, south of Entre Rios, uses the waste produced by its tens of thousands of hens and hundreds of cattle to produce biogas, electricity and biomethane.

Its biomethane, a fuel derived from the refining of biogas which is employed as a substitute for natural gas, is used in vehicles at the giant Itaipú hydroelectric plant shared by Brazil and Paraguay on the Paraná River, which forms part of the border between the two countries.

In Mariscal Cándido Rondon, a few kilometres to the north, the Kohler family, pioneers in the use of biogas on their large farm, took on another role in the chain of this energy which is more than just clean – it actually cleans the environment.

Part of Stein Ceramics, whose prosperity and ecological production were made possible by the biogas produced from the manure of 3,300 pigs. The factory produces enough bricks monthly to build 200 60-square-metre homes in the state of Paraná, on Brazil’s border with Paraguay. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

They created a biodigester company, BioKohler, which is present in many projects spreading throughout Paraná and other Brazilian states, not only selling equipment but also sharing know-how brought from other countries.

The new family initiative that can guide new projects is a biogas-fired power plant with an installed capacity of 75 kilowatts, built on the farm in partnership with the German company Mele, with many “tropicalised” technological innovations.

“Such a unit is only viable above 150 kilowatts of power, a scale that allows the cost of the investment to be recovered,” Pedro Kohler, who leads the family’s industrial branch, told IPS.

Schaefer looks at the question from the angle of the consumer who generates his own energy. “Without biogas my factory would not be viable, I would not be able to compete and survive in the market,” he said.

In recent years, many ceramic products factories, including brick-makers, went bankrupt in Brazil, something that also happened in the west of the state of Paraná, after the national economic recession of 2015 and 2016, which especially affected the construction industry and aggravated the rise in energy costs.

The pig fattening contract with the slaughterhouse allowed him to avoid bankruptcy, the businessman said.

Pedro Kohler, who heads a biodigester company in the western Brazilian state of Paraná, stands between a biodigester and deposits of biogas and biofertilisers from the thermoelectric plant he installed on his family’s farm in the municipality of Cándido Rondon. Innovative technologies and equipment, provided by their German partner Mele, will modernise the biogas sector in Brazil. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

“The meat-packing plant supplies everything: food, medicine and technical assistance. What I provide is the installations and the workforce; a couple of workers is enough because everything is automatic, and I keep the manure,” he told IPS on his rural property.

That makes it possible for him to deposit 1.8 million litres of pig waste in the biodigester, a large closed ball of black canvas, half buried in a pit measuring about 10 metres in diameter, where it ferments thanks to anaerobic bacteria.

The biodigester is the source of the biogas that feeds a generator which produces 23,000 megawatts/hour per month, enough to save 25,000 reais (6,500 dollars at the current exchange rate) – almost half of his electricity bill.

Actually, his mini-plant operates only four to five hours a day. It does so during peak evening consumption hours, when the electricity supplied by the distribution company is most expensive.

In the next few months, Schaefer hopes to put an additional 2,000 piglets in his fattening shed, where he is building new pigsties. He would thus expand biogas production, both to generate more electricity and to feed the kilns, replacing the burning of briquettes and wood waste.

The businessman has 19 years of experience with biogas, initially focused on burning it as a substitute for firewood, which was scarce, and on preventing pollution. As he explains, he proudly points to his “smokeless” fireplace.

In 2013, rising costs forced him to expand the biodigester and install the electric generator.

He also had to automate his factory to survive. “In the past we employed up to 90 workers, today there are only 20 and production has risen threefold,” he said.

Long sheds where thousands of pigs are fattened are becoming a familiar part of the landscape in rural areas of Entre Rios del Oeste, in southwestern Brazil, where a Mini Thermoelectric Plant was inaugurated on Jul. 24. The plant runs on biogas produced by a network of 18 pig farms and supplies the city government facilities. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

Behind the progress made was great persistence, the ironing out of numerous problems and third party assistance. Sometimes he almost gave up, he confessed. Some solutions came to him by chance, like the biodigestion mixer recommended by a German embassy official, during a visit to his company.

Similarly, he learned about the advantages of incorporating waste whey into cheese production. This offers the dairy industry a sure way to dispose of it, while preventing pollution.

The main source of learning, technical support and drive for the various projects in western Paraná is the International Center for Renewable Energy-Biogas (CIBiogas), which operates in the Itaipu Technology Park.

Founded in 2013 as a non-profit association of 27 national, local and international institutions, CIBIogas has a specialised laboratory and implemented 11 biogas projects on farms and in agribusiness enterprises.

It is an energy source with varied uses and inputs that requires a lengthy learning process and depends on business models and markets that have yet to be defined and are not yet consolidated, said Rafael González, director of Technological Development at CIBiogás.

Each project has its unique characteristics. Changes in animal feed, which primarily seek to improve the production of meat or eggs, for example, can negatively affect the production of biogas.

“The hormones in pigs change their waste and biogas,” González told IPS.

There are also differences between animal manures, said Daiana Martinez, information analyst at CIBiogas. Cattle manure, for example, is more productive, but contains a high level of hydrogen sulfide (H2S) that causes corrosion, requiring more refining.

González said biomethane is the fuel currently used by 82 Itaipu cars and has already been approved in tests with tractors, buses and other large vehicles. It is best to produce it from bird droppings, which facilitate the removal of hydrogen sulfide and carbon dioxide, he explained.

Biogas can meet up to 36 percent of the electricity consumption of this South American country, which is the size of a continent and is home to 210 million people, CIBiogas estimates.

This potential is basically divided between agricultural waste, which includes livestock and sugarcane vinasse, and urban waste, including sewage and garbage dumps.

In addition to avoiding pollution and the emission of greenhouse gases, biogas has been shown by local experience to promote local development, through energy projects and a chain of businesses, such as equipment industries, services and productive arrangements, González said.

Milagros Sánchez, coordinator of the urban biosystem that operates in a community soup kitchen in Ciudad Oculta, a poor neighbourhood on the south side of the Argentine capital, shows the vegetables and mushrooms grown using waste products in crates and drawers on the roof. Credit: Daniel Gutman/IPS

By Daniel Gutman
BUENOS AIRES, Jul 29 2019 (IPS)

On the outer edges of Buenos Aires proper, where the paved streets end and the narrow alleyways of one of Argentina’s largest shantytowns begin, visitors can find the En Haccore soup kitchen.

The community endeavor is using renewable energy and the circular economy in an effort to improve quality of life for local residents.

“We were overrun by trash, because the garbage trucks don’t always come. Thanks to a biodigester we are now converting that waste into biogas, which enables us to spend less on energy for cooking. It’s a dream come true,” Bilma Acuña, the founder and head of the soup kitchen, told IPS."In our view, the main environmental problem is the exclusion of the poor, and we can help take care of the environment by improving people's quality of life and facilitating their access to energy and healthy food.” -- Gonzalo del Castillo

She explained that she started the soup kitchen in 1993, after losing her job at a meatpacking plant, at a time that many others in the neighbourhood also became unemployed during the government of neoliberal president Carlos Menem (1989-1999), when the unemployment rate climbed to almost 20 percent.

She named it En Haccore (En-hakkore), the Aramaic name of a spring in the biblical story of Samson and Delilah. The soup kitchen is on the southern edge of the Argentine capital, a 15-minute drive from downtown, at the entrance to the overcrowded shantytown of 25,000 people known as Ciudad Oculta (Hidden City).

Today, in a country of 44 million people where 2.65 million have fallen into poverty since last year, according to official data, Acuña says there are more unmet needs than ever in her neighbourhood.

That becomes clear after walking with her for just a few minutes: local residents come up to her and ask for milk, rice, noodles or any food that they can take home. The soup kitchen serves lunch and a tea-time snack to 300 people Monday to Friday, but every day new people show up, asking for a meal.

Since 2017, an “urban biosystem” has been operating in En Haccore, whose aim is to replicate in an urban setting the workings of nature, where everything that is consumed is generated within the system itself and all waste is reused, as part of a circular economy.

Thus, the biodigester, which is an airtight container where the lack of oxygen leads to the appearance of bacteria that decompose organic matter, is not only used to produce biogas from the peels of dozens of kilos of potatoes or carrots that are consumed every day in En Haccore.

View of the biodigester that produces biogas, used for cooking in the En Haccore community soup kitchen in a Buenos Aires shantytown. The leftover waste is used as fertiliser and compost in the urban garden on the facility’s rooftop. Credit: Courtesy of CeSus

The waste is also used to produce compost and fertiliser for the urban garden growing on the rooftop of the soup kitchen.

In addition, there is a solar collector that heats water using thermal energy, making it possible to purchase less bottled gas, since in this poor part of the city there is no connection to natural gas pipes.

“In our view, the main environmental problem is the exclusion of the poor, and we can help take care of the environment by improving people’s quality of life and facilitating their access to energy and healthy food,” Gonzalo del Castillo, who is ultimately responsible for the initiative, told IPS.

“We want to debunk the idea that only those who already have their basic needs met can take care of the environment. On the contrary, we believe that increasing environmental quality helps people who face greater obstacles to develop their resilience, which is the ability to adapt to the problems of the environment,” he adds.

Del Castillo is the director of the Argentine Chapter of the Club of Rome, an international organisation founded in Italy in 1968 that brings together people from different backgrounds and areas and was one of the first voices to raise the challenges to human welfare caused by the destruction of the environment.

In Argentina, the local branch of the Club of Rome created the Centre for Sustainability for Local Governments (CeSus), which provides technical assistance to municipalities on environmental and social issues and was invited by the Buenos Aires city government to work in Ciudad Oculta.

Bilma Acuña is the founder and director of the En Haccore soup kitchen, located on the border between the city of Buenos Aires and the shantytown of Ciudad Oculta. The facility also has a network of mothers who fight drug use among young people. Credit: Daniel Gutman/IPS

The project seeks to counter the system by which food and fuel produced in rural areas are consumed in urban areas, while the resulting waste is often dumped back in the countryside.

Del Castillo explains that the idea in En Haccore was to build “an integrated system, where solar energy reduces the consumption of gas for cooking, while the waste produced in the soup kitchen feeds the bidiogester and this generates new energy in the form of biogas, while leaving other waste that is used to fertilise the organic garden and the machine that makes compost.”

The garden is simply crates and drawers filled with soil on the cement roof, where vegetables and mushrooms are grown using waste like coffee grounds, as well as hydroponic crops, which do not use soil but depend on the efficient use of water.

There is also a collection point for used vegetable oil, which is periodically picked up by a foundation that uses it to make biodiesel.

“Cooking oil was a very serious problem here, because it was often dumped into pipes or wells and altered the entire system, due to the precariousness of the sanitation infrastructure, which is informal,” the coordinator of the project in Ciudad Oculta, Milagros Sánchez, told IPS.

View of the entrance to the Ciudad Oculta shantytown, within the larger informal neighbourhood of Villa Lugano on the south side of the Argentine capital, a 15-minute drive from downtown Buenos Aires. Credit: Daniel Gutman/IPS

The experimental project includes key participation by the community through training workshops, because the aim is for it to continue when CeSus pulls out.

“Now I dream of having a biodigester and a solar collector to produce my own energy in my house,” said Alejandra Pugliese, a local resident who told IPS that her participation in workshops where she learned about urban gardening changed the way she sees life.

“I became aware that if you connect with the cycles of nature it is possible to improve quality of life even with few resources,” added Pugliese, who works caring for children and the elderly and has recently seen a drop in her income due to the recession that began in Argentina in 2018.

The urban biosystem is also being developed in another soup kitchen in Ciudad Oculta and in another shantytown in the south of Buenos Aires, Villa 21.

Some three million people live in more than 4,000 shantytowns or slums, known as “villas”, in this Southern Cone country, according to a survey carried out last year by the government in conjunction with social organisations.

CeSus is seeking support from the public sector to demonstrate that it is possible for urban communities, not only in “villas”, to apply the circular logic of natural ecosystems in order to become self-sustainable.

The circular economy consists, precisely, of replacing a model based on producing-consuming-disposing with one based on producing-consuming-recycling, and includes a transition to clean energy, with the aim of coexistence with the environment.

The Central Combined Cycle Plant, located in the Nahua indigenous farming community of Huexca, in central Mexico, is practically ready to operate, but local inhabitants managed to block its completion because of the pollution it could cause, and they want to use the facility to open a solar panel factory. Credit: Emilio Godoy/IPS

By Emilio Godoy
YECAPIXTLA, Mexico, Feb 1 2019 (IPS)

Social organisations in the central Mexican municipality of Yecapixtla managed to halt the construction of a large thermoelectric plant in the town and are now designing a project to convert the installation into a solar panel factory, which would bring the area socioeconomic and environmental dividends.

Antonio Sarmiento, from the Institute of Mathematics of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, outlined the idea when the state-run Federal Electricity Commission (CFE) launched the construction of the Morelos Integral Project (PIM), which consists of a gas and steam generating plant, a gas pipeline that crosses the states of Morelos, Puebla and Tlaxcala, and an aqueduct.

“The plant can be reconverted. There are alternative uses. It can generate significant economic development in the region and make energy change possible,” the expert told IPS, estimating that an investment of some 260 million dollars would be needed."We don't want the thermoelectric plant to operate, because it's going to cause irreparable damage. If the solar plant is viable, go ahead. Or they could turn it into a university, so our children don't have to travel long distances to study and be exposed to violent crime. Something worthwhile should be installed.” -- Teresa Castellanos

Sarmiento calculates that the use of half of the area of the Central Combined Cycle Power Plant, which covers 49 hectares in the community of Huexca and has a capacity of 620 megawatts (MW), would permit the installation of solar panels, the planting of crops under the panels, and a factory to produce them.

“Agrophotovoltaic technology” takes advantage of the water that condenses on the panels, which drips onto the crops below, before it can evaporate – technology that is already used in Germany and other nations. In addition, farmers can use solar-powered irrigation pumps to access water from wells.

For this area of solar cells, with a useful life of 25 years, the generation would total 359 MW-hour per day, which would meet the consumption needs of 34,278 households. The electricity generated would supply the municipality and replace energy from fossil fuel-powered plants, the academic explained.

Huexca, home to the thermoelectric plant that is no longer being built, about 100 kilometers south of Mexico City, has some 1,000 inhabitants, mostly Nahua Indians, part of the total 52,000 people living in Yecapixtla.

The transformation would reduce gas consumption, methane leakage, massive use of water, the generation of liquid waste and the release into the atmosphere of nitrous oxide, which causes acid rain that contaminates the soil and destroys crops.

The local struggle

By means of several judicial injunctions, the People’s Front in Defence of Land and Water in Morelos, Puebla and Tlaxcala and its ally, the Permanent Assembly of the Peoples of Morelos (APPM), have blocked the completion of the power plant and 12-kilometer aqueduct, as well as the start of operations of the 171-kilometer gas pipeline.

Huexca and other Nahua peasant communities, through legal action brought at the start of the construction of the power plant in 2012, managed to stop construction of the pipeline in 2017 for violating indigenous rights.

In addition, groups of “ejidatarios” – people who live on “ejidos” or rural property held communally under a system of land tenure that combines communal ownership with individual use – blocked the extraction of water from the nearby Cuautla River to cool the turbines of the plant in 2015, and the People’s Front secured, early this year, the suspension of the discharge of treated water into the river.

On Jan. 28, a group of demonstrators blocked the entrance to the Central Combined Cycle Power Plant in Huexca, a village in the municipality of Yecapixtla, Morelos state in central Mexico. Their signs call for President Andrés Manuel López Obrador not to betray his people, and to keep the plant from opening. Credit: Emilio Godoy/IPS

Opponents of the power plant also resorted to protests and roadblocks to bring to a halt a project that affects more than 900,000 people, including 50,000 indigenous people from 37 indigenous tribes, according to a 2018 estimate by the autonomous governmental National Human Rights Commission.

Now, they want leftist President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who took office on Dec. 1, to cancel the Morelos Integral Project and reach an agreement with the local population on the fate of the plant.

“We don’t want the thermoelectric plant to operate, because it’s going to cause irreparable damage. If the solar plant is viable, go ahead. Or they could turn it into a university, so our children don’t have to travel long distances to study and expose themselves to violent crime. Something worthwhile should be installed,” activist Teresa Castellanos told IPS.

Castellanos, a member of the APPM, has been involved in the battle against the plant from the beginning, which has earned her persecution and threats. For her activism, she won the Prize for Women’s Creativity in Rural Life 2018, awarded by the Geneva-based non-governmental Women’s World Summit Foundation.

The opposition to the plant by the affected communities, who make a living growing corn, beans, squash and tomatoes and raising cattle and pigs, focuses on the lack of consultation, the threat to their crops due to the extraction of water from the rivers, and the dumping of liquid waste.

Mexico’s energy outlook

In the first half of 2018, Mexico had a total installed capacity of 75,918 MW, of which 23,874 MW come from clean technologies. The capacity of clean sources grew almost 12 percent with respect to the first half of the previous year.

Mexico assumed a clean electricity generation goal of 25 percent by 2018, including gas flaring and large hydroelectric dams; 30 percent by 2021; and 35 percent by 2024.

But the reality is that the renewable matrix is only around seven percent, although it could reach 21 percent by 2030 with policies aimed at fomenting it, according to data from the International Renewable Energy Agency (Irena).

By 2021, more than 200 clean energy generators are to come into operation, generating 19,500 MW. Of these 200, 136 are solar and 44 depend on wind power, according to the Energy Regulatory Commission.

As López Obrador reiterated during the election campaign, his energy plan consists of the construction of a refinery in the southeastern state of Tabasco, the upgrading of the National Refinery System’s six processing plants and of 60 hydroelectric plants, as well as investment in solar energy.

The president continues to refuse to close plants of the state generator CFE, due to the need to meet the growing energy demand of this Latin American nation of 129 million people, the second largest economy in Latin America.

According to government investment projects for 2019, state-owned oil giant Pemex would have at its disposal about 24 billion dollars for oil exploration and extraction, the overhaul of six refineries and the start of construction of another.

For its part, the CFE will be able to spend some 23 billion dollars on projects such as the renovation of 60 hydroelectric plants and the development of solar energy.

The solar panel factory that is proposed as an alternative for Huexca, could, in fact, cover a significant deficit in technology and inputs in the solar energy sector in Mexico, say experts.

Hopes for change

López Obrador plans to visit the area on Feb. 11 and has requested that a file be put together on the generator in order to decide the future of a construction project which so far has cost around one billion dollars.

The local population does not want to see seven years of struggle against the plant go to waste. “We need alternatives. We voted for López Obrador, he can’t let us down. We are only demanding respect for our right to life,” said Castellanos, the activist.

For Sarmiento, the academic, the environmental and health damages would be greater if the plant goes into operation. “The maintenance of the plant will be more expensive than solar generation. And what will happen when it reaches the end of its useful life? It will be useless,” he said.

Meanwhile, the inactive smokestacks of the unfinished plant are waiting for a signal to belch out smoke and the electric pylons are rusting with no power to transport. Perhaps they never will, if the local residents have their say.

Alexander López Savrán, a 32-year-old engineer who innovated the standard fixed-dome biodigester to make it possible to create distribution networks from materials readily available in Cuba, stands next to one of these systems in the rural town of La Macuca, in Cabaiguán, Cuba. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

By Ivet González
HAVANA, Jan 8 2019 (IPS)

Black plastic pipes, readily available on the mainly empty shelves of Cuba’s shops, distribute biogas to homes in the rural town of La Macuca, buried under the ground or running through the grass and stones in people’s yards.

The strong blue flame in the kitchens of the eight homes supplied by producer Yuniel Pons is thanks to engineer Alexander López Savran, who innovated the standard fixed-dome biodigester to create distribution networks with the few basic materials available in this Caribbean island nation.

“A new biodigester has been designed to obtain pressure, which means that biogas can be distributed more than five kilometers away without the need for a compressor or blower. That is where the innovation lies,” the engineer, who lives in the city of Cabaiguán, capital of the municipality of the same name, where La Macuca is located, in the central province of Santi Spíritus, told IPS."Three years ago I had a big mess with animal waste, until I sought advice and began to make biogas…We are working on expanding the corrals so that another biodigester can benefit 15 more families, who have already been selected.” -- Yuniel Pons

López, 32, made headlines in 2017 when he received the Green Latin America Award in Ecuador, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology included him among the 35 young Latin Americans whose innovations improved the lives of their communities.

With a long-standing movement of biogas promoters and current regulations for private pork production favorable to its expansion, Cuba faces the challenge of creating efficient distribution networks to further exploit this ecological resource and raise the quality of life of rural localities, amidst an anemic economy.

“We started by taking a close look at the problem,” López recalled. “We had pork-raising centers that needed biodigesters, but the volume they were going to produce would be much greater than the consumption of those state facilities. On the other hand, we didn’t have the equipment to be able to distribute it.”

This fuel arises from the decomposition of organic matter, especially cattle manure and human feces. But on many farms with biodigesters there is a surplus of methane gas which, if not used, puts pressure on the equipment and is often released into the atmosphere, contributing to pollution.

In addition, biogas is most efficient for cooking because up to 70 percent of the energy is lost when it is used to generate electricity or fuel a vehicle.

“Two factors were considered: we had too much energy and there are difficulties in cooking food in the communities due to deficits in access to energy or electricity costs,” López said, referring to the dependence of most Cuban households on electric appliances.

After two years of study and design, López came up with the first prototype, which over time “has changed structurally to gain in efficiency, durability and performance,” he said, when interviewed by IPS in Pons’ home, where Pons lives with his wife Sandra Díaz and their son.

Sandra Díaz regulates the flame in her kitchen, which uses biogas from the innovative biodigester installed on her family’s land, in La Macuca, Cabaiguán, in the province of Santi Spíritus, in central Cuba. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

Most of the biodigesters designed by López have been built as part of the Biomás Cuba project, which is coordinated by the state-run Indio Hatuey Experimental Pasture and Forage Station, located in the province of Matanzas, with support from the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation.

This initiative, which seeks to bring about energy sustainability in the Cuban countryside, provides part of the inputs, while the producer provides another part, to build the biodigester, which with fixed-dome technology is expensive because it requires a large volume of building materials but is compensated with distribution and 40 years of durability.

López estimated that his 10-cubic-meter biodigester costs the equivalent of 1,000 dollars in Cuba, but with an efficiency equal to that of a standard 15-cubic-meter biodigester. Less profitable are the polyethylene biodigesters, which cost about 800 dollars, serve just one home and have a useful life of up to 10 years.

So far, 10 biodigesters have been built with this local innovation in four localities of Cabaiguán: El Colorado (two), Ojo de Agua (one), Juan González (six) and La Macuca (one), which supply 102 homes and improved the lives of 600 people, saving 65 percent of electricity consumption per household.

And the technology was also replicated in Matanzas, although the engineer lamented the lukewarm reception by decision-makers with respect to the biodigester, which could contribute to the national plan for renewable energies to provide 24 percent of electric power by 2030, compared to just four percent today.

In well-equipped corrals, Pons keeps between 100 and 150 pigs behind his house as part of an agreement between state companies and private producers that in 2017 produced a record 194,976 tons, which did not, however, meet the demand of the country’s 11.2 million inhabitants. And that total was apparently not surpassed in 2018.

“Three years ago I had a big mess with animal waste, until I sought advice and began to make biogas,” recalled the producer, who is supported by Biomás. “We are working on expanding the corrals so that another biodigester can benefit 15 more families, who have already been selected.”

Farmer Yuniel Pons and his wife Sandra Díaz stand next to the biodigester installed by their house, which with its innovative system supplies energy to the kitchens of eight homes in La Macuca, a rural settlement in the municipality of Cabaiguán, in central Cuba. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

After lighting the gas stove in his kitchen, Diaz, a homemaker, explained that “cooking food like this is faster, it’s wonderful… I used to cook with an electric hotplate and pressure cooker, but they were almost always broken,” she said.

The network reaches the modest home of Denia Santos and her family, who live next door to Pons. “Now I cook with biogas and I also use it to boil (disinfect) towels and bedding, something I did with firewood that I would chop up myself,” said Santos, who takes care of her mentally disabled son.

Other benefits described by families who have biogas are that it is a better way to cook food for their animals and boil water for human consumption, and that it generates a strongersense of community as everyone is responsible for maintaining the biodigester.

José Antonio Guardado, national coordinator of the Movement of Biogas Users, which emerged in 1983 and today has more than 3,000 members spread throughout almost all of Cuba’s provinces, said he was happy with the trend in Cuban agriculture to create solidarity biogas networks.

Guardado told IPS that there is “greater awareness, political support and participative activities in the context of local development,” although obstacles to distribution persist because “materials in the market are not optimal, sufficient or affordable” and “there is a lack of institutional infrastructure to provide this service in an integrated manner.”

Meanwhile, in El Cano, outside of Havana, the solidarity plans of farmer Hortensia Martínez have come to a halt despite the fact that she used her own resources to build a biodigester with a traditional fixed 22-cubic-meter dome on her La China farm, to supply the farm itself and share with five neighboring homes.

“Now I plan to give it a boost, but we haven’t been able to implement it because we don’t have the connections to the community’s houses and it has valves, special faucets and a type of hose that makes it possible to bury the network underground,” the farmer, who is well-known for her community projects, especially targeting children, told IPS.

A night market in South Korea. The country plans to ensure that 20 percent of all electricity generated is renewable by 2030. Credit: Yeong-Nam/CC BY 2.0

By Ahn Mi Young
SEOUL , Nov 1 2018 (IPS)

While major countries have pledged to be powered entirely by renewable energies in order to stop greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, there are a number of states that are investigating ways to implement this transition quickly in order to achieve their goals ahead of this deadline.

At the Global Green Growth Institute (GGGI) Energy Forum held in South Korea’s capital, Seoul, on Oct. 30, GGGI council members, leading energy experts, and policy makers from both the private and public sectors asked precisely that question.

They gathered to share their energy transformation experiences from the United Kingdom, Norway, Japan, Denmark, and Mongolia and discussed how South Korea can emulate them as it transitions from a coal and nuclear-centric energy dependence to renewables.

How to accelerate the transition to Renewable Energy?

“As there is a big global shift towards renewable energy (RE), we may ask questions: How can we accelerate the clean energy transition? Is the Korean target ambitious? How fast can it be transitional?” said Frank Rijsberman, director-general of GGGI in his keynote speech.

Although global decarbonisation on its own isn’t adequate to meet the ambitions of the Paris Agreement, the forum shared renewable transition cases and experiences of how they have accelerated the transition to RE.

The UK is leading the low-carbon transition and has implemented a drastic cut of emissions in the past 18 years while also continuing its rapid economic growth. Norway built the world’s electric car capital, and made the transition from oil to a renewable model. In Denmark, Copenhagen has become the world’s green city, as it uses district heating pipelines to heat houses and aims to become the world’s first carbon neutral city by 2025.

The most drastic turnaround comes from South Korea and Japan, which have been among the world’s major producers of nuclear power in the past. But both countries have joined the global renewable energy transition club in recent years.

100 Percent Renewables South Korea

The forum heard from Hans-Josef Fell, president of Energy Watch Group, an independent global network of scientists and parliamentarians that was founded in 2006 under the direction of Fell while he was still a member of the German parliament. “It is possible to be 100 percent renewable and we can work together with South Korea to reach the 100 percent goal,” he told participants.

Fell forecast that Solar photovoltaic (PV) and wind power will be the cheapest energy in G20 states by 2030, noting that RE has created 10.3 million jobs worldwide in 2017, with most jobs being in Asia.

The renewable breakdown of the global energy system in 2050 is forecast as:
• Solar PV: 69 percent,
• Wind power: 18 percent,
• Hydro: 8 percent,
• and bioenergy: 20 percent.

Fell also noted political will should be strong enough to fully embrace the RE transition, as he suggested the need for direct private investment in RE and zero-emission technology, for tenders to be granted only for capacity above 40MW, and the need to phase out all state subsidies on fossil fuels.

Hans-Josef Fell, president of Energy Watch Group delivers paper at the 2018 GGGI Energy Forum in Seoul. Credit: Ahn Mi Young/IPS

Japan transitions to PV

Japan is one of the countries that has shown the will to embrace RE. After committing to reducing its dependence on nuclear energy by 2030, Japan has set targets for becoming an economically independent and carbon-free mainstream power by 2050. Japan has reduced its nuclear power generation following the Fukushima nuclear power plant explosion in 2011.

Izumi Kaizuka, Director of RTS Corporation, a PV consulting company, who presented on the RE policy transition in Japan and the current status and outlook of the country’s PV market, said: “There has been an explosive growth of approved PV projects.”

But Japan has concerns about the future burden of surcharges, installation quality, environmental damage from natural disasters, and the lack of hosting capacity.

“There is a significant cost gap of the PV system between domestic and overseas [prices]. Prices are further decreasing due to global competition. Some emphasise the importance of how installation costs in Japan (not under global competition) will be further reduced,” Kaizuka said.

Japan has tried to address these concerns and introduced a new approval system to deal with delayed or unrealistic projects, to increase transparency for grid connections with disclosure of connection capacity and the price of work, as well as the exemption of surcharge for energy sufficiency efforts.

With these actions taken, Kaizuka had a strong growth forecast for PV-installed capacity in Japan. “Despite these concerns, PV is growing, since PV is stable and affordable,” Kaizuka said.

South Korea to move from coal-nuclear to renewables

Under its Renewable Energy 2030 Implementation Plan to achieve a 20 percent goal of renewable share of total electricity generation by 2030, South Korea is investing in clean energy.

This is a drastic reversal of the country’s previous nuclear-centric energy policy. In 2016, 25 reactors generated one-third of the country’s electricity and made South Korea the world’s fifth-largest producer of nuclear energy, according to the World Nuclear Association.

To reverse its energy mix, Seoul is driving a renewable boom under a private-public partnership.

“Active private investment is supporting the renewable energy transition. More than 95 percent of new capacity is PV and wind, which creates the largest number of jobs,” said Kyong-Ho Lee, Director of the New and Renewable Energy Policy Division, at South Korea’s Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy (MOTIE).

The local government-led, large-scale projects, where local governments play a key role in selecting sites and choosing business operators, are cited as a major driving force of the on-going RE transition in South Korea.

“To encourage citizen participation, the government gives monetary incentives for both urban and rural renewable energy installed, as well as state loans for rural RE installed. Thus farmers can make a double income from both farming and PV power installed,” said Lee from MOTIE.

Seoul has said that by 2030, out of a forecast total 63.8GW to be installed, its RE mix will be:
• 57 percent PV,
• 17.7 percent wind power,
• 5 percent bio, and
• 6 percent waste.

“It is a transitional moment as we continue to improve conditions through deregulation of RE, installing and collecting PV modules,” Lee said.

In Norway, financial incentive was strong enough to drive the electric car boom. About 45 percent of new cars sold in Norway in recent months were all-electric cars. People who buy electric cars pay no import taxes, tolls, parking or ferry costs, and are exempt from a 25 percent sales tax at purchase.

“Nationwide infrastructure is necessary to spread the EV [electric vehicle] boom from cities to rural areas,” said Atle Hamar, Vice Minister, Ministry of Climate and Environment, Norway. “In cities, there are enough charging stations but in rural areas, we need public support [to build more].”

District heating in Denmark

Denmark offers the best conditions for using geothermal heat because of the country’s well-developed district heating. In Denmark, boilers provide heat for entire districts through a network of heating pipes.

“We will be testing new technology to find a cost efficient and easier way of heating houses. For example, we are replacing biomass with geothermal heat pumps, which is easier to heat houses,” Jacob Rasmussen, counsellor, energy & environment, Embassy of Denmark.

How fast can it go from nuclear to renewable?

These countries offer great examples for South Korea. And while the forum generally saw a consensus formed on the country’s need to transition to renewables, it debated how fast the transition should be.

South Korea’s transition may be too fast, according to some experts.

“We must respect the role of the nuclear power source [that has driven our economy as the cheapest energy source],” said Sang-hyup Kim, visiting professor from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology and chairman of the Coalition for Our Common Future.

“In fact, nuclear is a reality [in South Korea] based on its [60 years of] science and technology. Why should we give it up so rapidly?”

To others, the transition may be a bit slow.

“Some would say the 20 percent goal is not ambitious enough. But we should manage our satisfaction by setting a reasonable target,” said Sun-Jin Yun, professor of environmental and energy policy at the Graduate School of Environmental Studies, Seoul National University (SNU).

Panelists agreed on the need to increase inter-Korean energy cooperation to bring peace to Northeast Asia. “Increasing energy interdependence is a way to secure peace for the whole of Northeast Asia. For example, a renewable energy-based grid connecting Mongolia and both Koreas and others can be the way to increase interdependence,” said YangYi Won Young, executive director, Energy Transition Forum, a private energy think-tank.

Forested hills in Guinea’s Kintampo area. Barely a quarter of the population has access to electricity. Credit: CC by 3.0

By Issa Sikiti da Silva
KINSHASA, Democratic Republic of Congo, Jun 26 2018 (IPS)

The West African nation of Guinea may be a signatory of the Paris Agreement, a global undertaking by countries around the world to reduce climate change, but as it tries to provide electricity to some three quarters of its 12 million people who are without, the commitment is proving a struggle.

Mamadou Bangoura, head of planning and energy management at Guinea’s Ministry of Energy, told IPS that his country faced a major challenge implementing its programme for the development and provision of energy resources to all citizens at a lower cost. According to the United Nations Environment Programme, only 26 percent of the population has access to electricity. “Our main concern is to find a balance between the implementation of this programme and the protection of biodiversity." --Mamadou Bangoura of Guinea’s Ministry of Energy

“Our main concern is to find a balance between the implementation of this programme and the protection of biodiversity. This is further compounded by a requirement to take into rigorous account the environmental and social aspects in the framework of the realisation of any infrastructure project,” Bangoura explained.

According to conservation organisation Fauna and Flora International, Guinea’s wildlife is already under threat. “Conservation solutions need to be found that enable people to make a living while protecting their natural assets into the future,” the organisation reports.

Unlike other African nations that are heavily reliant on fossil fuels, only 43 percent of Guinea’s electricity is generated from this as more than half (55 percent) is produced by hydropower.

The country’s potential for hydropower is significant. Guinea is regarded as West Africa’s water tower because 22 of the region’s rivers originate there, including Africa’s third-longest river, the Niger.

Bangoura added that despite the challenges, his country was making progress and several hydropower projects were being constructed. The Kaléta project, which will produce 204MW, is already completed. However, the Souapiti (459MW) and Amaria (300MW) hydropower plants “are still work in progress.”

He said negotiations were also underway for the construction of a 40MW solar power and a 40MW power plant. “Concession and power purchase agreements are being finalised,” he added.

In the Gambia, challenges in implementing renewable energy exist also. The small West African nation of only 1.8 million people is considered to be rare in its ambitious commitment to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions — it pledged a 44 percent reduction below its business-as-usual emission level. It’s a big task as currently around 96 percent of all electricity produced in the country comes from fossil fuels.  

Sidat Yaffa, an agronomist with expertise in climate change at the University of The Gambia, told IPS there were barriers to renewable energy programmes because the sector was still new to the Gambia.

“Therefore, a better understanding of the technology is still a challenge, securing adequate funding for implementation is a gap, and availability of trained human resources using the technology is also a gap,” Yaffa said.

He added that the Gambia’s renewable energy programmes included a wind energy pilot project at Nema Kunku village in West Coast Region.

“The agriculture sector’s GHG could be drastically reduced in the next five years in the Gambia if adequate solar panel water irrigation technologies are implemented,” Yaffa added.

Cote d’Ivoire also has strong ambitions for the development of reliable and profitable renewable energies, a cabinet minister said last year, adding that the country is committed to produce 42 percent of its energy through renewable energy.

This week representatives from Burkina Faso, Cote d’Ivoire, the Gambia, Guinea and Senegal will meet in Burkina Faso’s capital Ouagadougou to discuss both the challenges and successes they have had in reaching their nationally determined contributions (NDCs). NDCs are blueprints or outlines by countries on how they plan to cut GHG emissions.

The regional workshop, the first of its kind, is hosted by the Global Green Growth Institute in association with the International Renewable Energy Agency and the Green Climate Fund.

It aims to enhance capacity for NDC implementation, share experiences and best practices, and discuss renewable energy opportunities and associated challenges in the region.

Rural electrification headache

This regional cooperation is a significant step forward as 60 percent of the West African population living in the rural areas continue to depend on firewood as their primary source of energy.

In the Gambia and Senegal a quarter of the rural population has access to electricity, while the number is slightly higher in Cote d’Ivoire with about 29 percent having access.

But in Guinea and Burkina Faso only three and one percent of the respective rural populations have electricity.

Last year, Smart Villages Initiatives (SVI) conducted energy workshops in West Africa and it attributes poor electricity access in the region to insufficient generation, high prices of petroleum, lack of financing and transmission and distribution losses.

The World Bank’s 2017 State of Electricity Access Report makes the link that energy is inextricably linked to every other critical sustainable development challenge, including health, education, food security, gender equality, poverty reduction, employment and climate change, among others.

The Agence Française de Développement acknowledged the benefits of rural electrification programmes, stating, “(they) have the opportunity to reach more poor households and have larger impacts in the lives of the rural poor by providing new opportunities and enhancing the synergies between the agricultural and non-agricultural sector,”

Bangoura has acknowledged his country’s challenge to electrify rural areas. He said his government has just created the Guinean Rural Electrification Agency and launched a couple of projects, including a collaboration with the Electricity of Guinea, that will pave the way for the electrification of rural areas.

However, SVI said while most governments had set up rural electrification agencies or funds, the impact of such organisations may be hampered by a lack of financial and technical expertise. Hence the need to turn to international institutions and experts for capacity building and green energy finance.

Bangoura agreed that one of the problems his country is struggling with is implementation. “The problems at this level lies in the adaptation of the texts of the country to those governing the Paris Agreement…Hence the importance of this workshop that is focusing on capacity building.”

Dr. Frank Rijsberman, director-general of the Global Green Growth Institute (GGGI). Credit: Diana Mendoza/IPS

By Diana Mendoza
MANILA, May 14 2018 (IPS)

IPS caught up with Dr. Frank Rijsberman, director-general of the Global Green Growth Institute (GGGI), at the end of the flagship side event of the GGGI during the 51^st Annual Meeting of the Asian Development Bank (ADB) in Manila on May 4, 2018, which featured the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and its potential to create sustainable infrastructure and promote green growth pathways.

In this brief chat with IPS correspondent Diana Mendoza, Dr. Rijsberman noted the success of just a few countries with successful environmental protection policies, while many others have yet to adopt green growth policies.

Q: China is obviously the major player in the BRI. How does GGGI see China influencing other countries to actively take part in it and adopt green growth policies?

A: China is a huge investor. Among the countries in the BRI, China is the most important foreign direct investor, if not one of the most important. What we are particularly interested from our GGGI perspective is that China has also become, out of necessity, an important source of green technology because it implements renewable energy policies at a large scale. It is but fitting for it to have initiated the BRI. It is a leader in electric mobility, green technology and policy. It is keen on its air quality around Beijing and has very rapidly cleaned it up in just the last two years. What we’re interested in also is not just having large direct investments as part of their BRI initiative but how it will influence its government to export green technology.

Q: On one hand, China has also upset its Asian neighbors, particularly in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), that claim China is exploring their islands and upsetting territorial boundaries.

A: I know basically nothing about territorial disputes but it’s clear that China is a world power, a dominant force.  It is very influential and we are hoping it will use this to bring opportunities for other countries to prosper. We’ve been seeing China for decades as having relations with countries in bringing resources such as Afghan steel or mineral resources to which China is a huge importer. That’s basically the first relationship we’re seeing in a bilateral way. It is also starting its ODA ministry to bring more support to developing countries and is willing share more environmental technology and hopefully, to also share the benefits of the equal civilization approach.

Q: What would the equal civilization approach mean to countries around the BRI?

A: There are small and relatively poor countries along the Maritime Silk Road. Growth and development should also benefit them. The impact of climate change and the unhealthy effects of modernization and urbanization affect all countries, but green development has to be equal for all.

Q: What are GGGI’s priorities in the next five years?

A: We would like to see countries adopting renewable energy policies. Many countries are not introducing renewable energy to the potential that they have. Many countries also have some policies but we see they only have something like 1 percent solar, where it could be 20 or 30 percent. Only in China do we see a very rapid transition to renewable energy and electricity generation. But I live in Korea and they only have 2 percent. The government recently increased the target for renewable energy to 20 percent, but you know even 20 percent is still modest.

Q: How much is the ideal target for renewable energy?

A: It should be 50 or 60 percent if we want to achieve what was agreed upon in the Paris Agreement. Vietnam is still planning to build 24 more coal fire-powered plants. The current paths that many governments are on are still very far away from achieving the Paris Agreement. We need to see a rapid switch to renewable energy and we think it’s much more feasible than governments are aware of. Prices have come down so quickly that you know I’ve been spending most of my week in the Philippines and the provincial governments are still talking about hydropower because that’s what they know. You go to Mindanao and they’re talking about this big project in 1953 and they know that renewable energy is hydro.

Q: So hydro is not the answer?

A: We told them that if they want more hydro they should realize there are much better opportunities now in solar energy.  Even if the potential in hydro is there, it’s complex. It takes a long time and it has a big environmental risks. It takes five years to put it in place and construction is complicated. You can have solar in six months if you have enough land. In Manila, every school, factory and shopping mall should have solar rooftops already. In Canberra, even if the central government was not all active in this movement, it adopted in 2016 the 100 percent renewable policy by 2020. It is doing just that and it looks good.

Q: What can you say about tiny efforts to protect the environment such as opting for paper bags instead of plastic bags?  

A: A plastic bag should no longer be available. We should absolutely stop using all those disposable plastic bags. We should all look at the major impact that plastics cause, that micro-plastics go into the sea and the fish eat them. It goes back to our body when we eat the fish. It goes right back in the body.

Q: So which counties have totally eradicated plastic?

A: Rwanda — they said no more plastic bags. There will be many more countries that will do that. They will say you don’t have to pay for plastic bags if you didn’t bring your eco bag or there’s no available paper bag. If there is plastic, it has to be biodegradable. The cheap plastic in the supermarket lasts forever. It looks biodegradable if you leave it in the sun, but it’s more dangerous when it is thrown into the sea. But either way, there should be no more plastic bags anywhere.

Q: You live in Seoul and you mentioned about your child not going to an event because of bad air. How do you think kids understand environmental issues?  

A: The school nurse checks the air quality and informs us in the morning. My wife also does that. Our nine-year-old is totally aware of that. Even if it’s not too bad, the kids go to school wearing masks. The kids’ experiences on a daily basis will help them understand the need for clean, quality air.  This way, they will learn about the rest of the environment concerns as they grow up.

Sinsiri Tiwutanond Interviews the Director-General of the Global Green Growth Institute (GGGI) Dr. Frank Rijsberman in Bangkok. Credit: Sinsiri Tiwutanond/IPS

By Sinsiri Tiwutanond
BANGKOK, Feb 26 2018 (IPS)

Energy efficiency in industries presents a unique opportunity for Thailand’s environmental and economic policies as regional trends push towards more inclusive and sustainable green cities for the country and its neighbors, says the Director-General of the Global Green Growth Institute (GGGI) Dr. Frank Rijsberman.

Rijsberman, who is currently on a visit to the country for the UN SDG 7 Conference, revealed that expediting the global transition towards renewable energy was at the heart of discussions for international policymakers and green leaders attending the conference.

“Conferences like SDG 7 are a good opportunity to take stock of what is happening around the world. We are seeing all these exciting projects to replace coal-fired power plants with solar and wind energy. The percentage of renewables in energy production is rapidly growing to about 25 percent of the global power generation,” said Rijsberman.

The Thai government recently halted its plans for a coal-fired power plant in the South following more than a week of protests and a hunger strike by local residents and activists. Energy Minister Siri Jirapongphan said on Feb. 22 that the construction of new large-scale power plants in southern Thailand is unlikely over the next five years, as the current power development plan (2015-30) is under revision by the government to serve the real demand in each region with a specific focus on the Eastern Economic Corridor (EEC) – a move that Rijsberman sees as a hopeful signal from the government.

The EEC, an ambitious investment project to position Thailand as the region’s powerhouse for industrial production, is also key to GGGI’s work here, added GGGI Thailand’s Green Growth & Planning & Implementation Program Manager Khan Ram-Indra.

“We have been working with industrial estates because they have the key role in driving the economy, especially for the EEC, and we want to be certain that they can deliver sustainable results,” he explained.

As part of the visit, Rijsberman planned to meet with the Industrial Estate Authority of Thailand and the National Economic Sustainable Development Board to engage more key players at different levels of governance to push for viable green strategies. With the country’s employment issues and energy access at a positive level, the organization looks to industries’ energy efficiency and the shift towards renewables as its primary approaches in Thailand.

Director-General of the Global Green Growth Institute (GGGI) Dr. Frank Rijsberman (far right) moderates a panel at the Global SDG 7 Conference in Bangkok. Credit: Khan Ram-Indra/GGGI

While their work in Thailand is still in its early stages since the country only recently joined GGGI as a member in early 2016, Rijsberman said the organization has made strides in connecting the private sector with government support to develop projects that primarily focus on reducing greenhouse gas emissions and promoting energy efficiency. This extends to an e-waste management project with Udon Thani province’s municipality.

GGGI also directly deals with companies in the automobile, palm oil and frozen seafood industries to provide them with a successful roadmap. The goal is to hold Thailand’s commitment to The Paris Agreement with a 35 percent reduction in greenhouse gases.

“We think there are many commercially attractive opportunities for the industries to take, but often they are not necessarily thinking about energy efficiency. We want to help them be more aware and show them that it is possible to change their technologies. If they need financial help, we can help bring green finance to help, so that in the future they may not even need government support and will be able to make these investments themselves,” said Rijsberman.

While economic incentives and curbing climate change impacts are important to the overarching agenda, Rijsberman added that public health remains another immediate concern. The capital of Bangkok has been under the spotlight after suffering its worst air pollution in the city’s history between Jan. 1 and Feb. 21. The Pollution Control Department issued a warning for children to remain indoors after the city’s air pollution reached dangerous levels, measuring a level of particulate matter smaller than 2.5 micrometres, or PM 2.5 dust.

“We believe that the same green growth things that help clean up the environment can also provide a more inclusive way of growth that is critical for marginalised groups in society. Within that framework, we try to desegregate our beneficiaries. We look to work specifically with women and children. Children are often the first to suffer from pollution and climate change,” he said.

Rijsberman hoped that the visibility of such pollution will help prompt the government to be more concerned with environmental issues.

“I think the government is becoming more and more aware that economic growth is important but the quality of growth is equally as critical,” he noted.

This sentiment was echoed by Ram-Indra: “The Thai economy is growing very fast. Now is the critical time that we need to do something right for the country. Thailand as the leader country should be able to share our knowledge to neighboring countries. On top of that, Thai companies hold many stakes in investments across the region, so we should apply the same sustainable approaches to all.”

Regional efforts are starting to take shape to make green cities a priority, Rijsberman said, citing GGGI’s progress in solar and waste management in Vietnam, sanitation projects in Cambodia and electric mobility in Laos. They are not isolated opportunities either, with many countries working together to share experiences. He believes China and Korea are the key players in these areas with the most developed technologies and models for the region.

The Global Green Growth Institute (GGGI) is a treaty-based inter-governmental organization dedicated to supporting and promoting strong, inclusive and sustainable economic growth in developing countries and emerging economies.

Established in 2012 at the Rio+20 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, GGGI is accelerating the transition toward a new model of economic green growth founded on principles of social inclusivity and environmental sustainability.

With the support of strong leadership and the commitment of stakeholders, the GGGI has achieved impressive growth over the last several years and now includes 27 members with operations in 25 developing countries and emerging economies.

Protesters at the COP3 in Bonn demand the complete phase-out of coal, a major contributor to carbon emissions. Credit: Stella Paul/IPS

By Stella Paul
BONN, Nov 19 2017 (IPS)

As the summit of governments known as COP23 reached its conclusion in Bonn, Germany this week, two clear alliances have emerged in the global energy landscape.

One of them, the International Solar Alliance, was launched in Paris and is all set to become a legal entity. The other, an alliance to phase out coal, was announced on Dec. 16 in one of the biggest developments at COP23.“Phasing out coal power is good news for the climate, for our health and for our kids." --Catherine McKenna, Canada’s Minister of Environment and Climate Change

Jointly launched by Britain and Canada – both developed countries – the alliance already has 20 members, including Italy, France, Mexico, Norway, El Salvador and several U.S. states.

The International Solar Alliance, on the other hand, is led by India – an emerging economy. Forty-four countries have already joined this alliance, of which 16 have also ratified it. As a result, the alliance will come into force on Dec. 6.

New Emissions Data, New Alliances

The launch of the Global Alliance to Power Past Coal comes at a time when global carbon emissions are rising. Earlier in the week, the University of East Anglia and Global Carbon Project global emissions report showed a significant rise in global carbon emissions in 2017. The rise was observed after three years during which emissions figures were static. The biggest increase in carbon emissions occurred in China and India.

According to the report, Global CO2 emissions from all human activities are set to reach 41 billion tons (41 Gt CO2) by the end of 2017. Meanwhile emissions from fossil fuels are set to reach 37 Gt CO2 – a record high. China’s emissions are projected to grow by 3.5 percent while India’s emissions are projected to grow by 2 percent.

Launching the new alliance to phase out coal, Catherine McKenna, Canada’s Minister of Environment and Climate Change, said, “Phasing out coal power is good news for the climate, for our health and for our kids. Coal is literally choking our cities with close to a million dying every year from coal pollution. I am thrilled to see so much global momentum for the transition to clean energy – and this is only the beginning.”

The members of the new alliance, which aims to grow to 50 by the next COP in 2018, would not only phase out coal in their own countries by 2030 but also stop investing in coal-fired electricity both within and outside of their countries.

In sharp contrast, the members of the other alliance – the ISA – are reluctant to make any commitment to end coal energy before 2030. India, the leader of the alliance and a major coal producer, argues that coal is needed to end poverty and provide its poor citizens access to electricity. The country plans to produce 1.5 billion tons of coal by 2020 – double the amount it produces now.

“From the Indian perspective, let me make it very clear: there are development imperatives which as a country we need to fulfill. If you look at the total emissions, our contribution is miniscule. The point is, while this factor is spoken of, what is not spoken [about] is India’s extreme effort at trying to get energy much better,” said India’s Environment Secretary in a definite statement to the press.

“Today we are talking of producing 175 gigawatt of energy from renewable sources by 2022. Of that 120 GW will be from solar and the rest from biomass and others. Coal will continue to be used for some time, but we are continuously looking at alternative sources of energy.”

Anand Kumar, secretary at India’s Ministry of New and Renewable Energy, said that IAS’s core goal is to bring 121 countries on a single platform to explore ways to utilize and promote solar energy.

Besides production, the alliance would also focus on making solar energy cheaper and more accessible by garnering investment, bringing down the cost of solar cells, solar modules and solar storage.

The other prominent members of the alliance – China, Australia and New Zealand – still heavily invest in coal, even as they’re trying to produce more energy from renewable sources. At the COP, soon after the emissions report was presented by the University of East Anglia, Brazil, India, South Africa and China – known as the BASIC countries – released a joint statement reiterating their right to grow and asking the world to look at their emissions from the perspective of equity.

No coal vs no unabated coal

However, even as the new Global Alliance to Power Past Coal was announced, some of the statements raised doubts over whether the alliance only wanted to end unabated coal or coal in general.

Unabated coal refers to plants that are not fitted with carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology, which captures the harmful emissions that cause global warming.

According to Claire Perry, Minister for Climate Change and Industry in the UK and one of the alliance’s leaders, unabated coal was “the dirtiest” and her country would try to end using it. “The UK is committed to completely phasing out unabated coal-fire power generation no later than 2015 and we hope to inspire others to follow suit.”

Perry did not elaborate if the UK or the new alliance would still support use of abated or partially abated coal.

India, which otherwise refuses to end its use of coal, is also in favor of using partially abated or so-called “clean coal.” Says C K Mishra, “We are also looking at making use of better quality coals.”

Sitting on the Fence: Germany’s non-partisan status

Interestingly, Germany – which provided the venue for COP 23 – has not announced its intention to join either of these alliances. This has been severely criticized by anti-coal activists who have accused Germany of having a double standard by organizing the climate conference while not taking a strong step on either ending coal or shifting to renewable energy.

On Nov. 15, as Angela Merkel reached the COP to address the parties, the activists laid out a red banner that read “keep it in the ground” for the chancellor to walk on.

“We want no coal. We want no dirty power,” said one of the activists who was not allowed inside the conference.

Dominica says it plans to establish a small geothermal plant despite a few “hiccups’’ with investors. Credit: Charles Jong

By Desmond Brown
ROSEAU, Dominica, Sep 6 2017 (IPS)

The tiny Caribbean island of Dominica has moved one step closer to its dream of constructing a geothermal plant, a project that is expected to reduce the country’s dependence on fossil fuels.

The Dominica government is contributing 40.5 million dollars towards the project and has been seeking to raise the additional funds from various sources.The road towards geothermal has been a long and arduous, not only for Dominica but also its Caribbean neighbours.

“In addition to government’s contribution we have secured all the funds required to construct the plant from our development partners,” Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit said, noting that the funding will include EC$30 million from Britain, EC$5.4 million from New Zealand and also EC$5.4 million from SIDS DOCK.

SIDS DOCK is an initiative among member countries of the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) to provide the Small Island Developing States with a collective institutional mechanism to assist them transform their national energy sectors into a catalyst for sustainable economic development and help generate financial resources to address adaptation to climate change.

It is called SIDS DOCK because it is designed as a “DOCKing station,” to connect the energy sector in SIDS with the global market for finance, sustainable energy technologies and with the European Union (EU) and the United States (US) carbon markets, and able to trade the avoided carbon emissions in those markets. Estimates place the potential value of the US and EU markets between 100 to 400 billion dollars annually.

Skerrit noted that the environmental and social impact assessment for the geothermal project is ongoing in the Roseau valley.

“Every effort will be made to ensure that adverse impacts on the communities and the environment will be mitigated,” he said, adding that land owners in the area can also expect to be compensated for use of their property and support will be provided to residents who occupy lands to ensure that they are not left worst off.

The designs for the plant are progressing and should be completed by the third quarter of 2017.

“Once the plant has been commissioned, the DGDC will sell power to DOMLEC (Dominica Electricity Company) to be distributed throughout the country.

“So far, I have been advised, that based on the regulations of the Independent Regulatory Commission (IRC) DOMLEC must pass on the lower tariff to the consumer. That is to say DOMLEC is not allowed to add to the cost at which the power will be sold. This will ensure that the lower cost of electricity from geothermal will pass through to the consumers of our country,” Skerrit said, adding that negotiations are ongoing with DOMLEC to finalize the terms of the power purchase agreement.

Dominica has also applied for grant funding from the United Arab Emirates Caribbean Renewable Energy Fund and is expecting between EC$8.1 million and EC$13.5 million to fund a battery storage system to be used on the national electricity grid.

Skerrit said funding for this project will also be obtained from the World Bank in the form of a loan of EC$16.2 million at a highly concessionary rate of 0.75 per cent with a 10-year grace period and 44-year repayment plan.

“We have invested millions thus far,” Skerrit said, adding he is confident citizens “all look forward to the significant reduction in the cost of energy that will follow”.

He said the development of the plant “will be a positive impact on businesses and this should also stimulate investments by others establishing new businesses”.

The road towards geothermal has been a long and arduous, not only for Dominica but also Caribbean neighbours St. Kitts and Nevis and St. Vincent and the Grenadines.

Last December, Energy Minister Ian Douglas said Dominica was moving closer to harnessing geothermal energy.

He said the Dominica Geothermal Company had been registered, and planning of the power plant is progressing.

“We are moving ever closer to the vision of realizing power from our geothermal resources. The Dominica Geothermal Company has been duly registered, and plans for the construction of the power plant are progressing satisfactorily,” he stated.

This follows a decision made by the government to run the geothermal project as a company solely owned by the government and people of Dominica.

Earlier this year, the St. Lucia-based Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS) Commission said financing and government policy had been identified as the major challenges to the development of geothermal energy in the Eastern Caribbean.

A survey, conducted by the Energy Unit of the OECS Commission, gathered the views of 86 people involved in geothermal energy, half of whom were based in the OECS region.

The respondents of the survey were geothermal stakeholders working with or with an interest in geothermal energy in the nine-member sub-region.

According to the OECS Commission, most of the respondents (82 percent) were employees of government or utility companies pursuing geothermal energy initiatives.

With respect to non-OECS respondents, almost 50 percent were private sector geothermal experts with past experience working on geothermal projects.

“There was clear consensus amongst all survey participants that finance and government policy are the main challenges to geothermal energy development in the region. These were followed closely by competition from other energy sources, and technological issues,’ the Commission said.

It said the majority of survey participants would like to see the establishment of a regional mechanism to support geothermal development in the region.

“The geothermal stakeholders are convinced that such a mechanism would be beneficial to the industry, especially as it relates to policy, legislation, and regulations.”

The Commission noted that all countries of the Eastern Caribbean are almost totally dependent on imported fossil fuels, despite their significant potential for renewable energy such as solar, hydro, wind, and geothermal.

In recent years geothermal energy has emerged as a priority for the OECS region. Currently, seven of the ten OECS member states are working towards the development of their geothermal resources. The scientific evidence shows a strong potential for development as countries continue to assess and quantify their geothermal potential.

The Bouillante geothermal plant on the French island of Guadeloupe is the only geothermal power plant currently operating in the Caribbean. It’s been operating since 1986 and currently provides about six percent of the electricity in Guadeloupe.

Second- and third-place winners, respectively, in the Caricom Energy Month Photography and Art competition, Candice Sobers and Seon Thompson, holding the works that won them the prizes. Credit: Jewel Fraser/IPS

By Jewel Fraser
PORT OF SPAIN, Trinidad, Aug 30 2017 (IPS)

Conversations about renewable and sustainable energy don’t typically include artistic ideas on the subject. However, the Caribbean Community (Caricom) has chosen to engage the region’s youth in the conversation by inviting them to create artistic works on sustainable energy for a regional competition.

Seven of the nine winners in the 2016 competition were from Trinidad and Tobago and in June they were honoured at a ceremony held by Trinidad and Tobago’s Ministry of Energy and Energy Industries.Sobers said her focus in painting “Mother Energy” was to encourage “sustaining the environment with the right motive, with a motive of loving it, cherishing it and benefiting from it."

Some of those winners told IPS that the competition had indeed kindled their desire to be a part of the sustainable/renewable energy discussion now taking place in the region.

Candice Sobers, who won second place in the professional art category, describes entering art competitions “as a hobby” because “exposure in the arts is difficult to come by in Trinidad”. Nevertheless, the research she did for the competition has had an impact on how she uses energy. She now turns off any lights and appliances in her home that are not in use, and she has invested in energy-saving light bulbs.

Sobers’ entry to the Caricom Energy Month art and photography competition depicted a tree painted in the shape of woman who is seen pregnant with the sun. The mother tree’s mode of transportation is a bicycle and the environment she inhabits comprises various forms of renewable energy.

The painting, entitled “Mother Energy”, is rendered in acrylics, coloured pencil, and oil pastels. Sobers describes her work, in part, as follows: “The bicycle is a means of exercise without burning fossil fuels, encouraging the reduction of the carbon footprint. The energy saving bulb hangs on her neck as an accessory while she rides by the hydro-electric plant and wind mill landscape.”

Sobers said her focus in painting “Mother Energy” was to encourage “sustaining the environment with the right motive, with a motive of loving it, cherishing it and benefiting from it. If the motive is only for money mankind will find themselves abusing it in some form.”

Winners in the Caricom Energy Month art competition Fidelis Iwueke (from left), Candice Sobers, and Seon Thompson. Credit: Jewel Fraser/IPS

Third-placed winner in the professional art category, Seon Thompson, likewise chose to use a woman as part of his iconography. Like Sobers, Thompson holds a BA in Visual Arts from the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine. He told IPS, “I tried to give a double meaning to some of the elements.”

He explained that the hair of the woman, in a traditional corn row hairstyle, was also used to depict rows of plants while the palm trees seen in the landscape behind her also carried the implication of wind turbines. As one gazes at the painting, one’s eyes are led by the graceful lines of the woman’s arm and the undulating lines of cool blue and green depicting her hair to the warm, vividly coloured sun and mountains she carries in a basket on her head, with their obvious allusion to solar energy.

In explaining his work, Thompson said. “I really wanted to connect sustainable energy with the elements of the Caribbean we all could relate to—sun, foliage, fauna, people, houses and hills.” The houses in his painting are shown with solar panels on their roofs.

“In the Caribbean, we have two seasons, rainy and dry, so we really should be using solar energy, hydro energy, and so on….We are a prime example of nations that have all the elements aligned to practise sustaintable energy. We just need to invest in it more and see the value of utilising these mediums that exist and are readily available.”

Thompson said in creating his painting, “I really wanted to create an experience, not just have people say ‘that’s nice’. You must have an experience and really leave with something on your mind.”

He said he has started a project at the school where he teaches art to promote the idea of sustainability. The project encourages Form 5 students to find objects that are discarded and repurpose them in ways that are beneficial and profitable.

For 19-year-old Fidelis Iwueke, the first prize winner in the Caricom Energy Month video competition, his studies at A’Level in Environmental Science provided the foundation for his creation.

He provided IPS with a textbook definition of sustainability. “Sustainability is to ensure that the needs of today are provided for without compromising the future.”

Iwueke has just finished secondary school and his success in the video competition has awakened an interest in documentary production as a prospective career. “I am a former documentary junkie. I love documentaries,” he said. He is also a poet and spoken word artist, which made the video competition the most suitable category for him, he said.

Using public domain footage and videos that he gained permission to use, Iwueke was able to create his award-winning video. He began by creating an audio track of his voice discussing the topic of sustainable energy, to which he added music. He then overlaid this on the video he had obtained, following which he edited the video using the WeVideo app on his phone. The result was a seamless production that belies the fact that this was his first foray into video production.

The video opens with delightful clips showing the sea and other scenes from nature in the Caribbean, then segues to West Indians in the midst of carnival, as his voiceover ties the clips together by referring to the Caribbean’s sea and sun and then to Caribbean people as “a people full of energy…and we rely on energy for growth, survival and sustainable development. For sustainable development, we need sustainable energy.”

The video then goes on to discuss why sustainable energy is important and the different forms that are available to Caribbean people and encourages their use, while holding viewers’ attention with arresting footage.

Reflecting on the competition theme, Iwueke said, “The sun is always there. We have nice oceans for tidal energy. We just need a basic attitude change; changes in our consumption patterns could go a long way.”

Despite learning environmental science at school, preparing for the competition was a learning experience for him. “I liked and followed the Caricom Energy page to keep in the know. I learned how far the Caribbean has come and how much more we need to do,” he said.

The competition thus provided an avenue for these young Caribbean artists to further their practice, while making them more invested in sustainable energy as a lifestyle. “Now that I am more aware of renewable energy, I will become more of an advocate in any way possible. And when the finances are there I will make better choices,” said Iwueke.

The solar farm in Arribeños, a locality in the province of Buenos Aires, which began to inject 500 Kw into the Argentinian power grid in August. Credit: Argentine Chamber of Renewable Energy

By Daniel Gutman
BUENOS AIRES, Aug 14 2017 (IPS)

The first thing anyone who looks at any official document this year in Argentina will read is: “2017, the year of renewable energies.” This indicates the importance that the government gives to the issue, although translating the slogan into reality does not seem as easy as putting it in the headings of public documents.

Renewable sources of energy today make up an insignificant proportion of Argentina’s energy mix. But under a law passed in 2015, with the consensus of all political sectors, this scenario is to be reverted in the next few years.“The main driver of these initiatives is that Argentina has a large energy deficit and needs new power from all sources: from hydroelectric plants as well as the two new projected nuclear plants, while increasing its production of natural gas and also boost production from renewable sources.” -- Javier Cao

The objective is not only based on commitments of turning to clean sources of energy undertaken by Argentina within the framework of global agreements to combat climate change, but also on the need, imposed by the economy, to expand and diversify the energy mix.

For years, Argentina has been spending a fortune to import fossil fuels, although the amount has decreased, from seven billion dollars in 2014 to less than three billion dollars last year.

However, that did not happen due to increased productivity or a diversification of local sources, but because of a fall in international oil prices.

“Fossil fuels form an absurdly large portion of our energy mix. We have to change that,” Daniel Redondo, the government’s secretary of strategic energy planning, acknowledged in July in front of an auditorium of experts.

“We are going to live up to the law on renewable energies, which stipulates that 20 per cent of our energy should come from clean source by 2025,” he added.

According to official data, Argentina’s primary energy supply is based on 51 per cent natural gas and 33 per cent oil.

With respect to power generation, thermal plants which use fossil fuels cover 64 per cent of the supply, while 30 per cent comes from hydroelectric plants. The country’s three nuclear plants provide four per cent of the total.

Since 2016, the government has signed 59 contracts with private investors to develop renewable energy projects around the country. These initiatives, which should begin functioning next year, involve an overall investment of about four billion dollars, according to the Energy Ministry.

These projects will jointly add 2,423 megawatts (MW) to the energy supply, which the state has assumed the commitment to buy and incorporate into the national grid, which currently has some 30,000 MW of installed capacity.

China, a decisive player in the energy sector

Besides these projects, which form part of the government’s RenovAr Programme, the governor of the northern province of Jujuy, Gerardo Morales, announced that he signed a contract with the Power China company for the construction and financing of a 300-MW solar farm in the Salar de Cauchari, some 4,000 metres above sea level.

The contract was signed during President Mauricio Macri’s visit to China in May, when Morales was part of the official delegation. According to the governor, it will be “the biggest solar farm in Latin America.”

President Mauricio Macri signs contracts for renewable energy projects, together with members of his administration and representatives of the Buenos Aires city government. Credit: Argentine Presidency

During the visit, China consolidated its role as a key player in the renewal of the power industry in Argentina. In Beijing, an agreement was reached for the Asian giant to finance 85 per cent of the construction of two nuclear plants, with an investment of 14 billion dollars.

Before the visit, they had agreed for China to finance the construction of two hydroelectric plants in Argentina’s southern region of Patagonia, at a cost of nearly five billion dollars. But the two mega-projects are still on hold by a Supreme Court order, in response to a complaint filed by environmental organisations.

The government is keen on solving this situation, as the Chinese investors have threatened to apply a “cross-default” clause and block their investments in other projects.

Energy Ministry officials reiterate in every public forum in which they participate that the goal is for 20,000 MW of power to be added to the electric grid by 2025, and for half of this to come from renewable sources.

To finance this, the government created the Fund for the Development of Renewable Energies (Foder), which was endowed with 800 million dollars from the state, in addition to another 480 million approved by the World Bank to finance the projects.

The ones that are already underway are mainly wind and solar power projects, since Argentina has favourable conditions for the former in the windy southern region of Patagonia, and for the latter in the high plateaus of northwestern Argentina, where solar radiation is intense.

There are also small-scale hydroelectric and biogas projects.

“This is the first time that Argentina is really moving forward in the development of renewable energies. Today we have what we used to lack: financing,” said Javier Cao, an expert in renewable energies for the economic consulting firm Abeceb.

“The main driver of these initiatives is that Argentina has a large energy deficit and needs new power from all sources: from hydroelectric plants as well as the two new projected nuclear plants, while increasing its production of natural gas and also boost production from renewable sources,” he told IPS.

Will the third time be the charm?

Argentina’s dream of developing renewable energies is not new, but up to now all the efforts made had failed.

The first law that declared renewables a matter of “national interest” was passed by Congress in 1998. But the financial incentives created by that law were destroyed by the late 2001 economic and political crisis that led to the resignation of President Fernando de la Rúa.

In 2006 a second law was enacted, which set a target: eight per cent of the electric power consumed was to come from renewable sources by 2016. But once again, it failed, due to problems with financing.

The third, which will hopefully be the charm, was passed in 2015, with votes from lawmakers who backed then president Cristina Fernández (2007-2015) as well as members of the opposition, in a rare example of consensus.

This law created tax and customs incentives for investors and included among renewable sources hydroelectric dams up to 50 MW of capacity, in contrast to the ceiling of 30 MW set by the previous law.

In addition, it established the obligation to reach the target of eight per cent renewable energies in the electric grid by Dec. 31, 2017 – a deadline that will not be reached. However, the government hopes to meet the target by 2019.

The government does hope to reach the second target set by the law, on time: 20 per cent renewables by 2025.

“One of the challenges in this respect is decentralising production,” said Marcelo Álvarez, president of the Argentine Chamber of Renewable Energies, which represents companies in the sector.

Towards that end, Congress is expected to pass a new power distribution law this year, which will allow users who generate renewable power to sell their surplus to the grid, which would be a real innovation in Argentina.

“We already have achieved a unified text for the bill in the Energy Commission of the Chamber of Deputies, with the participation of technical advisers from all the parties and technicians from the executive branch,” said Juan Carlos Villalonga, a former Greenpeace environmental activist who is now a lawmaker for the governing alliance Cambiemos.

“The take-off of renewable energies will be one of the legacies of this government,” said Villalonga.

Within the Paris Agreement on climate change, signed by 196 member states in December 2015, Argentina committed itself to cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 15 per cent before 2030, a level criticised as low, but to which this country would add another 15 per cent if it receives special funds.

Safa Khasawneh interviews the Director-General of the Global Green Growth Institute (GGGI) Dr. Frank Rijsberman. Credit: Safa Khasawneh/IPS

By Safa Khasawneh
AMMAN, Aug 10 2017 (IPS)

Jordan may be one of the smallest economies in the Middle East, but it has high ambitions for inclusive green growth and sustainable development despite the fact that it lies in the heart of a region that has been long plagued with wars and other troubles, says the Director-General of the Global Green Growth Institute (GGGI) Dr. Frank Rijsberman.

In a wide-ranging interview with IPS, Rijsberman stressed that Jordan has shown a strong commitment towards shifting to a green economy, and has made significant strides in the area of renewable energy.The demand for water and energy is increasing due to the influx of more than one million Syrian refugees.

Following months of intensive cooperation with GGGI, the government of Jordan – represented by the Ministry of Environment with contributions by line ministries and other stakeholders – launched its National Green Growth Plan (NGGP) in December 2016, Rijsberman said.

Highlighting GGGI’s key role in helping Jordan launch its NGGP and develop a clear vision towards green growth strategy and policy framework in line with the country’s vision 2025, Rijsberman said that his institute will also play a critical part in mobilizing funds and investments to enable green growth.

Rijsberman, who is currently visiting Amman to check on projects funded and implemented by GGGI and the German government, underscored Jordan’s accelerated steps towards preserving its natural resources, leading the country into a sustainable economy, fighting poverty and creating more jobs for young people.

Rijsberman told IPS that the NGGP, which was approved by the cabinet, lists 24 projects in six main sectors, including water, agriculture, transport, energy, waste and tourism, the most pressing of which are water and energy, two of Jordan’s most limited resources.

The demand for these two resources is increasing due to the influx of more than one million Syrian refugees, Rijsberman said, adding that the GGGI water projects take into consideration that Jordan is one of the world’s poorest countries in terms of water. According to World Bank data, the availability of water per capita stands now at 145 m3 /year but is projected to decline to 90 m3 /year by 2025.

“In terms of water, our projects in Jordan aim to preserve the country’s efficiency of water distribution system, provide clean drinking water, maximize the use of treated wastewater for agricultural and industrial purposes and prevent pollution by cleaning some of the polluted rivers,” he told IPS.

Rijsberman, who is also an expert in water issues, revealed that one of the GGGI’s important near future projects in Jordan is the “Master Plan for Cleaning and Rehabilitation of Zarqa River Basin,” a heavily polluted river located 25 kilometers east of the Jordanian capital Amman.

The GGGI also works to address Jordan’s energy challenges, Rijsberman said, adding that the Kingdom imports 97 percent of its energy needs, and its annual consumption of electricity rises by 5 percent annually.

“In the energy sector, our primary focus is on the efficiency of this resource, since Jordan has already made good progress in setting up solar energy plans, and the need lies on storing this energy,” he said.

During his visit to Jordan, Rijsberman said that he had talks with officials in the ministries of energy, environment and planning on ways to exploit solar energy for battery technology, another renewable technology that can store extra solar power for later use. This new technology, Rijsberman explained, will provide the country with the opportunity to shift to renewable energy and reduce imports of fossil fuels.

In transportation, Jordan has also made further progress by introducing eco-friendly hybrid cars with greater fuel efficiency and lower carbon emissions.

In order to move to a green economy, another step in the right direction was made by the Ministry of Environment, which established a “Green Economy Directorate (unit)”, he said, adding that the GGGI is truly impressed by the full support the unit is receiving from the Ministry of Planning, the Ministry of Environment and the Ministry of Energy.

As Jordan faces new geopolitical challenges and an unprecedented influx of refugees, Rijsberman revealed that GGGI is working with government on a Country Planning Framework (CPF), which is a five-year in-country delivery strategy that identifies and operationalizes the institute’s value additions to national development targets in partner countries.

As a strategic and planning document, the CPF aims at delivering in-country development targets that are in alignment with the overarching GGGI Strategic Plan and Corporate Results Framework. It also elaborates a clear and logical assessment of development challenges and enabling conditions, identifies GGGI’s comparative advantage in country and sets priority interventions, he explained.

In Jordan, he explained, there is political will and determination to create green jobs, green businesses, a healthy environment, and secure and affordable supply of energy for all. What the country lacks is the capacity and technical skills as well as adequate financing mechanisms to encourage the private sector to implement green growth projects.

“So a big part of our job is capacity-building to come up with bankable projects that are green and sustainable, and as we know that the government can’t fund projects by itself, therefore it is very important to build partnerships between the private and public sector to reach this end,” the DG told IPS.

According to official data, four workshops were organized in 2016 to enhance capacity among green growth stakeholders in Jordan. A total of 177 participants attended these workshops in Amman, Jordan, and Abu Dhabi, and the UAE. Eighty-two percent of participants responded to surveys conducted after the workshops, indicating an improvement in their knowledge and skills as a result of their participation.

Rijsberman stressed that although Jordan has made tremendous progress in its approach, there is still a long way to go and a lot of work to do.

Despite accelerating degrees of environmental degradation and depletion of resources in the region because of wars, poverty and high unemployment, the GGGI official said he was impressed by how rapidly some Arab countries such as the UAE and Qatar are shifting towards green growth.

The concept of green growth is starting to take hold in the region, Rijsberman said, adding that there is a sustainability week held annually Abu Dhabi, the GGGI has offices in Masdar city in UAE, Jordan started implementing its National Green Growth Plan and the Arab League has requested to share this plan be with its 22 members.

The Global Green Growth Institute (GGGI) is a treaty-based inter-governmental organization dedicated to supporting and promoting strong, inclusive and sustainable economic growth in developing countries and emerging economies.

Established in 2012 at the Rio+20 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, GGGI is accelerating the transition toward a new model of economic green growth founded on principles of social inclusivity and environmental sustainability.

With the support of strong leadership and the commitment of stakeholders, the GGGI has achieved impressive growth over the last several years and now includes 27 members with operations in 25 developing countries and emerging economies.

CNG fuel signs at the NP Ramco service station, on the Churchill-Roosevelt Highway, Orange Grove, Trinidad. Credit: Jewel Fraser/IPS

By Jewel Fraser
PORT OF SPAIN, Mar 26 2017 (IPS)

The Trinidad and Tobago government has invested about 74 million dollars in the first phase of a 295-million-dollar project to encourage more drivers to use Compressed Natural Gas (CNG), described by experts here as a preliminary step in the country’s transition to using more sustainable forms of energy.

Use of CNG would represent a major behavioural shift for Trinidadians and Tobagonians whose country’s economy has relied heavily on exports of major fossil fuel reserves, giving it one of the highest per capita incomes in Caricom as well as placing it among the top ten emitters of carbon per capita in the world.The economic downturn has made maintaining generous fossil fuel subsidies an unsustainable proposition.

The shift to CNG “starts a certain behaviour because [CNG] is the cleanest fuel Trinidad and Tobago has which is affordable,” said the president of NGC-CNG, Curtis Mohammed.

In 2013, the government mandated the National Gas Company (NGC) to promote the sale and use of CNG. NGC formed NGC-CNG in January 2014 to carry out the mandate. In keeping with its mandate NGC-CNG has offered substantial incentives to both public and private vehicle owners to retrofit their vehicles for the use of CNG, including thousands of dollars in free CNG to school buses and taxis. The government has also given substantial tax incentives to buyers of CNG-fuelled vehicles.

Mohammed said the Public Transport Service Corporation (PTSC), which is Trinidad and Tobago’s government-run bus service, has plans to eventually convert its entire fleet to CNG vehicles. The country’s Finance Minister Colm Imbert in his 2016-2017 Budget report also said that the association representing the privately owned public service vehicles, known as maxi taxis, has committed to introducing approximately 1,200 OEM CNG vehicles over the next three years.

However, “while CNG offers a cheaper and cleaner option for transportation fuel, it is to be recognized that it is a transitionary fuel and the deployment of renewable energy sources are more sustainable…the 10% renewable energy target signals Government’s intention to gradually move away from traditional fuels to more sustainable sources,” explained head of the Multilateral Environmental Agreements Unit, in Trinidad and Tobago’s Ministry of Planning and Development, Kishan Kumarsingh, in an e-mail interview.

Though CNG has been an option under consideration for many years, a combination of factors over the past couple of years has increased interest among citizens in shifting from heavy domestic use of fossil fuels to the use of CNG for transport and eventually to renewables.

The government had for decades provided generous fuel subsidies that made owning and driving a vehicle in the country affordable for a large portion of its population. However, the government saw its revenues decline by 35 per cent between 2014 and 2016, that is, from 8.4 billion dollars in 2014 to 5.5 billion in 2016.

“Because of the collapse in oil and gas prices, we have lost 20 billion in annual revenue since 2014,” Minister Imbert was reported as saying in his 2016-2017 budget speech.

Thus, the economic downturn has made maintaining the generous fuel subsidies an unsustainable proposition and the government has gradually removed most of them.

Retrofitting to use CNG is a cheaper alternative for drivers who travel substantial distances. CNG retails at 15 cents per litre, compared to 46 cents per litre for super gasoline, 85 cents per litre for premium and 25 cents per litre for diesel. The government still subsidises the price of diesel which is used by public transport.

Another factor is Trinidad and Tobago’s active engagement over the years in initiatives to combat climate change, with the country being a signatory to the 2015 COP21 Paris agreement.

“The country has adopted a National Climate Change Policy and is currently implementing a range of projects aimed at addressing climate change nationally such as reducing emissions and assessing climate vulnerability. Trinidad and Tobago has taken a proactive approach and was the first Caribbean country to submit its NDC [Nationally Determined Contributions] to the UN as well as among the first countries to formulate and adopt a National Climate Change Policy,” Kumarsingh said in an e-mail.

Included in government’s plans are “a feed-in-tariff to allow for renewable energy to be generated and to be fed into the national power grid,” he said. However, “the current legislative and policy structure limits the wide deployment of renewable energy mainly due to very old legislation.”

Kumarsingh said, “As a first step, the enabling environment from a policy and legislative perspective has to be in place. Once that policy and legislative framework is established, opportunities for installation of generation capacity from renewable energy sources, and therefore opportunities for job creation and income generation, can be more fully explored.”

The members of the Energy Chamber, representing more than 400 gas and petrochemical industry companies in Trinidad and Tobago, also see opportunities opening up with the removal of the fuel subsidy. Dr. Thackwray Driver, CEO of the Energy Chamber said, “You would see opportunities for electric vehicles as well. Trinidad’s electricity is very cheap…Because of the decreasing price of renewable energy we might reach a point where…electricity vehicles would be more attractive.”

He said there was “a lot of interest” in energy efficiency and renewable energy among Energy Chamber members.

Dr Driver said the Chamber had always advocated for the removal of subsidies because they encouraged “wasteful use of valuable resources which could be sold on international markets…In other countries you see people are less wasteful in using fuel. When there are higher prices to pay for it, they buy cars that are more fuel efficient, they tend to make more fuel-efficient decisions. People in Trinidad do not worry about fuel efficiency.”

With regard to renewables becoming a major source of energy locally, Dr Driver said, “I think given the structure of Trinidad and Tobago’s economy, it will remain relatively small for the next decade:” He added that the domestic sector was likely to see a 10-15 per cent uptake of renewables in the next decade or two.

Meanwhile, “I think right now the biggest interest is in energy efficiency, because there is a huge opportunity in the electricity sector to improve energy efficiency…Once we get energy efficiency up that is where we will see the deployment of grid-scale renewable energy,” Dr. Driver said.

The immediate must-do “no-brainer” actions to be completed by 2020 include the elimination of an estimated 600 billion dollars in annual subsidies to the fossil fuel industries. Credit: Bigstock

By Stephen Leahy
UXBRIDGE, Canada, Mar 24 2017 (IPS)

The Carbon Law says human carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions must be reduced by half each decade starting in 2020. By following this “law” humanity can achieve net-zero CO2 emissions by mid-century to protect the global climate for current and future generations.

A “carbon law” is a new concept unveiled March 23 in the journal Science. It is part of a decarbonization roadmap that shows how the global economy can rapidly reduce carbon emissions, said co-author Owen Gaffney of the Stockholm Resilience Centre, one of international team of climate experts.“Coal power plants under construction and proposed in India alone would account for roughly half of the remaining carbon budget.” --Steven Davis

To keep the global temperature rise to well below 2°C, emissions from burning fossil fuels (oil, gas and coal) must peak by 2020 at the latest and fall to around zero by 2050. This is what the world’s nations agreed to at the UN’s Paris Agreement in 2015. Global temperatures have already increased 1.1 degrees C.

“After the Paris agreement we began to work on a science-based roadmap to stay well below 2C,” Gaffney told IPS.

The “carbon law” is modelled on Moore’s Law, a prediction that computer processing power doubles every 24 months. Like Moore’s, the carbon law isn’t a scientific or legal law but a projection of what could happen. Gordon Moore’s 1965 prediction ended up becoming the tech industry’s biannual goal.

A “carbon law” approach ensures that the greatest efforts to reduce emissions happen sooner not later, which reduces the risk of blowing the remaining global carbon budget, Gaffney said.

This means global CO2 emissions must peak by 2020 and then be cut in half by 2030. Emissions in 2016 were 38 billion tonnes (Gt), about the same as the previous two years. If emissions peak at 40 Gt by 2020, they need to fall to 20 Gt by 2030 under the carbon law. And then halve again in 2040 and 2050.

“Global emissions have stalled the last three years, but it’s too soon to say if they have peaked due largely to China’s incredible efforts,” he said.

Source: N. CARY/SCIENCE

The Science paper, “A roadmap for rapid decarbonization”, notes that China’s coal use swung from a 3.7 percent increase in 2013 to a 3.7 percent decline in 2015. Although not noted in the paper, China’s wind energy capacity went from 400 megawatts (Mw) in 2004 to an astonishing 145,000 Mw in 2016.

“In the last decade, the share of renewables in the energy sector has doubled every 5.5 years. If doubling continues at this pace fossil fuels will exit the energy sector well before 2050,” says lead author Johan Rockström, director of the Stockholm Resilience Centre.

The authors pinpoint the end of coal in 2030-2035 and oil between 2040-2045 according to their “carbon law”. They propose that to remain on this trajectory, all sectors of the economy need decadal carbon roadmaps that follow this rule of thumb.

“We identify concrete steps towards full decarbonization by 2050. Businesses who try to avoid those steps and keep on tiptoeing will miss the next industrial revolution and thereby their best opportunity for a profitable future,” said Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany.

Elements of these roadmaps include doubling renewables in the energy sector every 5-7 years, ramping up technologies to remove carbon from the atmosphere, and rapidly reducing emissions from agriculture and deforestation.

The immediate must-do “no-brainer” actions to be completed by 2020 include the elimination of an estimated 600 billion dollars in annual subsidies to the fossil fuel industries and a moratorium on investments in coal. Decarbonization plans must be in place for all cities and major corporations in the industrialized world.

Rapidly growing economies in India, Indonesia and elsewhere should receive help to take a green path to prosperity. They cannot use coal as China did because CO2 emissions are cumulative and there is little room left in the global carbon budget, said Gaffney.

This is an extremely urgent issue. India is already on the brink of taking the dirty carbon path.

“Coal power plants under construction and proposed in India alone would account for roughly half of the remaining carbon budget,” said Steven Davis of the University of California, Irvine about his new study that will be published shortly.

Davis, who was not involved in the carbon law paper, agrees that rapid decarbonization to near-zero emissions is possible. Cost breakthroughs in electrolysis, batteries, carbon capture, alternative processes for cement and steel manufacture and more will be needed, he told IPS.

All of this will require “herculean efforts” from all sectors, including the political realm, where a cost on carbon must soon be in place. Failure to succeed opens the door to decades of climate catastrophe.

“Humanity must embark on a decisive transformation towards complete decarbonization. The ‘Carbon law’ is a powerful strategy and roadmap for ramping down emissions to zero,” said Nebojsa Nakicenovic of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Austria.

The Reventazón Hydroelectric Project, Costa Rica’s fifth hydropower dam, will begin to operate in the first half of this year. Credit: Instituto Costarricense de Electricidad

By Diego Arguedas Ortiz
SAN JOSE, Mar 1 2016 (IPS)

Over the last decade, Central America has managed to reduce its dependence on fossil fuels for the production of electric power, while expanding coverage. But the progress made by each country varies widely.

“The question is not whether or not demand is met, but which sources we are using to generate electricity,” Diego Fernández, one of the researchers with the State of the Region Programme (PER) of the Consejo Nacional de Rectores (CONARE), which groups Costa Rica’s four public universities, told IPS.

Fernández pointed out that more and more Central Americans are connected to their national power grids. The electrification rate climbed from an average of 69 percent in 2000 to 90 percent in 2013, according to a joint study by PER and the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC).

“The biggest advances in the region (in terms of energy) have been seen in the electricity sector,” says the October 2015 report.

However, the growth has not been uniform. In electrification, Nicaragua has only 75 percent coverage, much lower than the regional average, while coverage in Costa Rica has reached 99 percent.

The sources chosen to generate electricity are the clearest demonstration of the priorities in each country’s energy strategy.

Costa Rica is the leader in clean energy sources, which now account for 95 percent of the country’s electricity.

Meanwhile, Honduras and Nicaragua have the dirtiest power grids, with nearly half of their electricity coming from plants that run mainly on low-cost bunker fuel, which is the heavy, residual oil that is left over after gasoline, diesel and other light hydrocarbons are extracted from crude oil during the refining process. This low-quality fossil fuel has an impact on the health of local inhabitants.

The clearest evidence that decisions about electric power have a direct impact on local economies is what countries spend on oil – nations that use fossil fuels to generate electricity spend twice as much as those that rely more heavily on renewable sources.

“In countries that produce more electric power from renewable sources, like Costa Rica, the oil bill is less than five percent of GDP; in Honduras and Nicaragua, the oil bill is 12 percent,” the researcher said.

Central America, with a total population of 48 million, is a net importer of fossil fuels, which are used mainly for transportation, and to a lesser extent in power generation.

As a result, Central America’s oil bill climbed from 3.5 percent of GDP in 2000 to 8.5 percent in 2014, according to statistics provided by PER and ECLAC.

But overall, expansion in electricity generation in the region between 2003 and 2014 largely involved renewables.

There are major disparities in Central America, where Costa Rica’s electricity, for example, comes almost entirely from renewable sources, while half of Nicaragua’s power comes from fossil fuels. And coal has been making a comeback. Credit: State of the Region

“Thanks to regional accords and national policies, the share of renewable energies increased….from 57 to 64 percent,” Víctor Hugo Ventura, the head of ECLAC’s Energy and Natural Resources Unit, told IPS.

The Guatemalan expert said the region still puts a priority on hydroelectricity, but medium and large-scale projects are blocked and delayed by opposition from social and environmental activists.

However, it is difficult to generalise about the region in terms of electricity production, because of the differences between the countries.

Guatemala, for example, increased the share of renewable energy from 50.7 to 56.1 percent of its energy mix between 2009 and 2014, according to ECLAC, but it continues to invest in coal-fired power stations, the most highly polluting form of energy.

A coal plant belonging to Jaguar Energy Guatemala, a subsidiary of the U.S.-based Ashmore Energy International, began to operate in Guatemala in 2014. Built at an estimated cost of 750 million dollars, it has an installed capacity of 300 MW, and is now the country’s biggest power plant.

However, Ventura said the plant does not necessarily mean the country intends to increase its dependence on coal. He argued that it was the result of a misguided decision taken when the price of oil skyrocketed in 2007. “Problems with the generators forced it to stop operating, and it is currently not producing electricity. Sometimes what’s cheap turns out to be expensive,” he said.

The ECLAC expert predicted a rise in consumption of natural gas, another fossil fuel, over the next decade in Central America.

But for years, this region, made up of Belize, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and Panama, has been urged to reduce its dependence on fossil fuels to generate electricity.

Overall, the region has responded, although it has not stopped installing power stations that run on coal and bunker fuel, drawing criticism in reports by international bodies.

“The outlook has been very positive for wind power, whose capacity has grown by a factor of nearly 10 so far this millennium,” states the joint PER/ECLAC report.

Three countries have large wind power farms: Costa Rica, Honduras and Nicaragua.

In Nicaragua, wind energy represented 14.8 percent of the country’s energy production in 2013.

These unconventional sources also make it possible to bring electricity to isolated rural areas, where community organisation plays a major role.

“We can mention several cases of solar panel projects, where the installation and maintenance has been put in the hands of local women sent for training to India,” said Ventura from the subregional ECLAC office in Mexico.

He said the countries of Central America must take climate change and the need to cut greenhouse gas emissions into account in their long-term plans.

“Climate change represents major challenges for the region, where the effects and impacts of this phenomenon also have to be taken into consideration in terms of renewable resources and capacity to generate less polluting forms of energy,” Alejandra Sobenes, a lawyer who is an expert on sustainability, told IPS.

Sobenes, a former Guatemalan deputy minister of natural resources, said her country has recognised the need to take measures to prevent electricity shortages after 2026.

“But the commitment to reduce our emissions by at least 11.2 percent, or 22.6 percent in a more ambitious scenario, must be kept in mind, and the use of coal should be reconsidered,” she said from the Guatemalan capital.

Another problem is the variability of the most accessible clean energy sources: wind and the sun.

“In the case of solar and wind energy, the insertion of renewable sources in the region’s energy mix has been facilitated a great deal, but with one problem: these sources are variable,” Javier Orozco, director of electrical planning in the Costa Rican power utility, Instituto Costarricense de Electricidad, told IPS.

Each country gets around this variability as best it can. One strategy is to turn to geothermal energy, which is abundant and relatively untapped in the region. Another alternative is to build enormous reservoirs to release water when sun or wind are in short supply. And then there is the option of burning fossil fuels.

“In Costa Rica we use the most adequate technological solution: hydropower dams. We store up energy, or water, and release it as needed,” said Orozco.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

Costa Rican President Luis Guillermo Solís (centre-right) received United Arab Emirates Foreign Minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan (centre-left) in the presidential palace in San José on Friday Feb. 12. Credit: Diego Arguedas Ortiz/IPS

By Diego Arguedas Ortiz
SAN JOSE, Feb 12 2016 (IPS)

A visit by United Arab Emirates Foreign Minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan to Costa Rica paved the way for closer trade ties between the two countries, especially in the areas of tourism and sustainable energy.

During the first official visit ever to this Central American nation by a UAE foreign minister, Al Nahyan and his Costa Rican counterpart and host, Manuel González, signed two agreements.

One of them refers to air services, and will boost visits by Emirati tourists to Costa Rica.

They also agreed to immediately begin the process of negotiating and promoting investment in tourism.

“This agreement opens up opportunities to take better advantage of air services between the two countries,” Al Nahyan said in Costa Rica’s presidential palace, after an official meeting with this country’s president, Luis Guillermo Solis, at the start of his one-day visit to San José on Friday Feb. 12.

“I think you have a wonderful, beautiful country,” the minister said in a press conference at the end of his meeting with the president. “Of course, there is the problem of the distance between us, but I believe that after opening the air route between Dubai and Panama City, it will be easier to get back and forth between our countries.”

He was referring to the new Emirates airlines route that will begin to operate on Mar. 31 as the world’s longest flight – nearly 18 hours – according to the company.

Al Nahyan also announced that mechanisms would be sought to facilitate visas between the two countries, in order to expedite trade.

“We have a lot of work to do with my colleague, Costa Rica’s foreign minister, to talk to the airlines and make sure things work out,” he said.

A flight between Panama City and San José takes less than one hour, and more and more airlines are connecting the two cities.

United Arab Emirates Foreign Minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan (left) and his host, Costa Rican Foreign Minister Manuel González, in the Costa Rican Foreign Ministry after signing the agreements reached during the Emirati minister’s visit. Credit: Foreign Ministry of Costa Rica

“Emirates will fly from Dubai to Panama; this strengthens potential ties, not only between the UAE and Panama but with the entire Central American region, and particularly Costa Rica,” Foreign Minister González told IPS in an exclusive conversation about the visit.

The other agreement signed on Friday afternoon in Costa Rica’s Foreign Ministry provides a framework for cooperation, accompanied by a mechanism for formalising bilateral political consultations, which will facilitate diplomatic relations between the federation of seven emirates and this Central American nation.

Costa Rica was the fourth and last country on Al Nahyan’s official Latin America tour, which began Feb. 4 in Argentina before taking him to Colombia and Panama.

The Emirati minister said a key area of cooperation between the two countries would be energy, where both countries are pioneers in complementary niches.

“I know Costa Rica wants and plans to use more renewable energy, and I know they have done a great deal in terms of legislating to strengthen that sector,” he said.

This country does not depend on fossil fuels for electricity, because 97 percent of its electric power comes from renewable sources. But the use of fossil fuels in transportation means they still represent around 80 percent of the total energy mix.

The UAE has committed nearly 840 million dollars to help other countries of the developing South produce clean energy.

“That’s why we’re in Costa Rica: to see what has been done in this area, and to create a legal foundation with respect to how we can cooperate,” Al Nahyan said in the news briefing.

Solís, of the centre-left Citizen Action Party, said the UAE invited this country to take part in an annual energy conference held early in the year in the Gulf nation.

“Costa Rica will be represented there with the highest-level technical teams, precisely to seek opportunities for cooperation in energy,” the president said.

In an opinion piece published by the La Nación newspaper, Al Nahyan explained that his country is “an important investor in a series of international commercial clean energy projects. And we are proud to be the host country for the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA).”

The Emirati minister also stressed that “like Costa Rica, we recognise that turning to clean energies is the most promising solution. The United Arab Emirates has been a major investor in clean energy sources for many years, both within the country and abroad.

“Costa Rica has been one of the most ambitious and progressive-thinking countries in the issues of climate change and sustainable development at the international level,” the minister concluded in his article.

Minister González explained in his dialogue with IPS that there are three major areas where his country and the UAE find points in common: human rights, the fight against climate change, and the struggle against people trafficking and in favour of associated labour rights.

With respect to ties in the field of energy, he explained that the Emirates have “an economy very focused on oil and gas, and with the drop in prices of fossil fuels, they have seen the need to focus on other sectors of the economy.”

This new openness and their traditional leadership in renewable energy “opens up opportunities for Costa Rica, which does not depend on oil and gas,” González said.

The Costa Rican minister sees the UAE as a key actor in the Middle East, a region “with which we are seeking closer ties.”

González said his guest “has expressed interest in Latin America, as demonstrated by this tour,” and noted that he was one of the promoters of the Global Forum on the Relationships between the Arab World, Latin America and the Caribbean Region.

“I met with him in the context of the United Nations General Assembly, in September of last year, and suggested that he consider making a visit to the region, and specifically to Costa Rica,” González added.

Costa Rica has consulates in Lebanon and Jordan and an embassy in Qatar. But it does not yet have a consulate or embassy in the UAE.

“We hope to boost to their maximum expression our relations with the Arab world,” González said.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

An industrial sugar and ethanol plant in Sertãozinho, in the southern Brazilian state of São Paulo. The sugar cane industry in Brazil has shrunk under the government of Dilma Rousseff, due to the gasoline subsidy, which dealt a blow to its competitor, ethanol. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Jan 28 2016 (IPS)

Brazil, which boasts that it has one of the cleanest energy mixes in the world, is now plagued by corruption, poor market conditions, and bad decisions – a near fatal combination.

Brazil’s energy mix is made up of 42 percent renewable sources, three times the global average.

But the country also hopes to become a major oil exporter, thanks to the 2006 discovery of the “pre-salt” wells – huge reserves of crude under a thick layer of salt far below the surface, 300 km from the coast.

Megaprojects involving the construction of refineries and petrochemical plants, dozens of shipyards that mushroomed up and down the coast, and the dream of turning the new oil wealth into a better future lost their charm in the face of the corruption scandal that broke out in 2014, revealing the embezzlement of billions of dollars from the state oil giant Petrobras.

Nearly 200 people are facing charges in the scandal for paying or receiving kickbacks for inflated contracts. Around 50 of them are politicians, most of them still active members of Congress.

The heads of the country’s biggest construction companies were arrested, which dealt a blow to the real estate market and major infrastructure works nationwide.

The investigations took on momentum when over 30 of those facing prosecution struck plea bargain deals, agreeing to cooperate in exchange for shorter sentences.

The scandal is one of the main elements in the economic and political crisis shaking the country, which saw an estimated drop in GDP of more than three percent in 2015, rising inflation, a dangerously high fiscal deficit, a threat of impeachment hanging over President Dilma Rousseff and chaos in parliament.

Besides the corruption scandal, Petrobras has been hit hard by the collapse of oil prices, which has threatened its investment in the pre-salt reserves, and by the losses it accumulated during years of government fuel-price controls.

The government took advantage of Petrobras’ monopoly on refining to curb inflation by means of price controls, mainly for gasoline.

But the oil company scandal, which broke out after the October 2014 elections in which Rousseff was reelected, fuelled the growth of inflation, to over 10 percent today.

With Petrobras in financial crisis and selling off assets to pay down its debt, none of the four planned refineries has been completed according to plan. The only one that was finished is operating at only half of the planned capacity.

Most of the shipyards, which were to supply the oil drilling rigs, offshore platforms and tankers involved in the production of pre-salt oil, have gone under, and the government’s plans to build a strong naval industry have floundered.

The priority put on oil production, to the detriment of the fight against climate change, along with subsidised gasoline prices dealt a major blow to ethanol, which was enjoying a new boom since the emergence in 2003 of the flexible fuel vehicle, specially designed to run on gasoline or ethanol or a blend of the two.

The innovative new technology revived consumer confidence in ethanol, which had been undermined in the previous decade due to supply shortages. With the flex-fuel cars, consumers no longer had to depend on one kind of fuel and could choose whichever was cheaper at any given time.

The use of ethanol, which is consumed in nearly the same quantities as gasoline in Brazil, broke the monopoly of fossil fuels, making a decisive contribution to the rise in the use of renewable energies.

But gasoline price subsidies drove many ethanol plants into bankruptcy and led to the sale of one-third of the sugarcane industry to foreign investors. Many local companies, facing financial disaster, sold their sugar mills and distilleries to transnational corporations like Bunge, Cargill, Louis Dreyfus and Tereos.

Brazil has practically given up on the idea of creating an international market for ethanol, after initially encouraging consumption and production of the biofuel made from sugarcane. Former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva (2003-2010) was very active in this campaign, unlike his successor Rousseff.

Part of what will be the Belo Monte hydroelectric plant’s turbine room in the northern Brazilian state of Pará – a mega-project which is 80 percent complete and is set to be finished in 2019. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

Hydroelectricity

Another decisive factor in achieving a more renewables-heavy energy mix is the predominance of hydroelectricity in the generation of electric power. In recent years, wind power has grown fast, and the use of biomass from sugarcane bagasse has also expanded, although to a lesser extent.

But the construction of giant hydropower dams in the Amazon jungle, such as Belo Monte on the Xingú River, has drawn strong opposition from indigenous communities and environmentalists, which, along with legal action by the public prosecutor’s office, has brought work on Belo Monte to a halt dozens of times.

As a result, work on the dam has been delayed by over a year. One of the latest legal rulings suspended the plant’s operating permit, and could block the filling of the reservoirs, which was to start in March this year.

When the plant comes fully onstream in 2019, Belo Monte will have an installed capacity of 11,233 MW. But during the dry season, when water levels in the river are low, it will generate almost no electric power. The flow of water in the Xingú River varies drastically, and the reservoir will not store up enough water to fuel the turbines during the dry months.

The dam has come under harsh criticism, even from advocates of hydropower, such as physicist José Goldemberg, a world-renowned expert on energy.

The controversy surrounding Belo Monte threatens the government’s plans for the Tapajós River, to the west of the Xingú River – the new hydroelectric frontier in the Amazon. For the last two years, the Rousseff administration has been trying to find investors to build and operate the São Luiz del Tapajós dam, which would generate 8,040 MW of electricity.

The presence of the Munduruku indigenous community along that stretch of the river and in the area of the São Luiz dam has stood in the way of the environmental licensing process.

The diversity of sources in Brazil’s energy mix, lessons learned from earlier negative experiences, and the complexity of the integrated national grid make decisions on energy almost a game of chance in this country.

Hydroelectric dams built in the Amazon rainforest in the 1980s, like Tucuruí and Balbina, caused environmental and social disasters that tarnished the reputation of hydropower. Belo Monte later threw up new hurdles to the development of this source of energy.

Another alternative source, nuclear energy, also brought negative experiences. Completion of the country’s second nuclear plant, still under construction in Angra dos Reis, 170 km from Rio de Janeiro, has long been delayed.

It formed part of a series of eight nuclear power plants that the military decided to build, during the 1964-1985 dictatorship, signing an agreement in 1975 with Germany, which was to provide technology and equipment.

Economic crisis brought the programme to a halt in the 1980s. One of the plants was completed in 2000 and the other is still being built, because the equipment had already been imported over 30 years ago. The final cost overruns will be enormous.

For the government and the different sectors involved in policy-making in the energy industry, giving up hydropower is unthinkable.

But the advances made in wind power, new energy storage technologies, and especially the reduction of costs in the production of solar power increase the risk of making large hydropower dams, which are built to operate for over a hundred years, obsolete.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

General Carrera Lake, the second-largest in South America, in the Aysén region in Chile’s southern Patagonia wilderness, a place of abundant water resources. Credit: Marianela Jarroud/IPS

By Marianela Jarroud
SANTIAGO, Jan 27 2016 (IPS)

The Chilean government’s approval of a hydroelectric dam in the Patagonia wilderness has rekindled the debate on the sustainability and efficiency of large-scale hydropower plants and whether they contribute to building a cleaner energy mix.

“Hydroelectricity can be clean and viable, but we believe every kind of energy should be developed on a human scale, and must be in accordance with the size and potential of local communities,” Claudia Torres, spokeswoman for the Patagonia Without Dams movement, told IPS.

She added that “there are different reasons that socioenvironmental movements like ours are opposed to mega-dams: because of the mega-impacts, and because of the way this energy is used – to meet the needs of the big mining corporations that are causing an environmental catastrophe in the north of the country.”

The movements fighting the construction of large dams in the southern Patagonian region of Aysén suffered a major defeat on Jan. 18, when the plan for the 640 MW Cuervo dam was approved.

This South American nation of 17.6 million people has a total installed capacity of 20,203 MW of electricity. The interconnected Central and Norte Grande power grids account for 78.38 percent and 20.98 percent of the country’s electric power, respectively.

Of Chile’s total energy supply, 58.4 percent is generated by diesel fuel, coal and natural gas. The country is seeking to drastically reduce its dependence on imported fossil fuels, to cut costs and to meet its climate change commitments.

Large-scale hydropower provides 20 percent of the country’s electricity, while 13.5 percent comes from unconventional renewable sources like wind and solar power, mini-dams and biomass.

Chile has enormous potential in unconventional renewable sources. In 2014, the government of Michelle Bachelet adopted a new energy agenda that set a target for 70 percent of Chile’s electric power to come from renewables by 2050.

In terms of water resources, Chile has 6,500 km of coastline, 11,452 square km of lakes, and innumerable rivers.

Aysén, in the extreme south of the country, has abundant water resources – fast-flowing rivers, numerous lakes, and distinctive lagoons. General Carrera Lake, the second-largest in South America after Bolivia’s Titicaca, is found in that region.

To generate hydroelectricity, the authorities and investors have their eyes on the wild rivers of Patagonia, a remote, untamed, unspoiled and sparsely populated wilderness area at the far southern tip of Chile.

But vast segments of civil society reject large hydropower dams, which they consider obsolete and a threat to the environment and to local communities.

However, Professor Matías Peredo, an expert on hydropower at the University of Santiago de Chile, says that thanks to the country’s abundant water resources, hydroelectricity is “one of the energy sources with the greatest potential for development.”

“It’s always good to diversify the energy mix, and well-managed hydroelectricity is quite sustainable,” he told IPS.

The expert argued that a properly managed hydropower dam “is better from an environmental and social point of view than a string of small dams that together provide the same number of MW of electric power.”

Ensuring that a hydroelectricity plant is well-managed means avoiding major fluctuations, Peredo said.

“Hydropower generation in Chile depends on demand and the plant’s load capacity….In other words, the plant can only operate with prior authorisation from the Superintendencia de Electricidad y Combustibles (the country’s power regulator), and depending on the availability of water,” he said.

“This combination means the hydroelectric plant operates on and off, thus generating large fluctuations in flow, which is a major stress for the ecosystem,” he said.

The law to reform the energy industry and foment unconventional renewable sources includes in this category hydropower dams of up to 20 MW – in other words, mini-dams.

Environmental organisations like Ecosistemas maintain that large hydroelectric dams have extremely negative social and environmental impacts.

These include the flooding of large areas of land, which destroys flora and fauna, and the modification of rivers, which causes bioecological damage.

And the negative social impacts of large dams are proportional to the multiple environmental impacts, displacing millions of people: between 40 and 80 million people were forcibly evicted for the construction of large dams worldwide between 1945 and 2000, according to the World Commission on Dams (WCD).

“It is important to diversify the energy mix, for local use, with good support, clean energy sources, and considerably fewer impacts, while strengthening consumption and development in the territories,” said Torres, the Patagonia Without Dams activist, from Coyhaique, the capital of the Aysén region.

“Decentralised power generation is key” to moving forward in terms of clean, sustainable energy, she said, adding that the people of Aysén are seeking to expand the use if wind, solar and tidal power in the region.

Peredo agreed that the decentralisation of power generation is of strategic importance.

“Distributed generation (power generation at the point of consumption) must without a doubt be discussed in this country. It makes a lot of sense for electricity to be produced locally,” he said.

In 2014 the Patagonia Without Dams movement won a major victory when the government cancelled the HidroAysén project, which would have built five large hydropower dams on wilderness rivers in Aysén to generate a combined total of 2,700 MW of energy.

But now the movement was dealt a blow, with the approval by a special Committee of Ministers of the construction of the Cuervo dam – a decision that can only be blocked by a court decision.

The project, developed by Energía Austral, a joint venture between the Swiss firm Glencore and Australia’s Origin Energy, would be built at the headwaters of the Cuervo River, some 45 km from the city of Puerto Aysén, the second-largest city in the region after Coyhaique, for a total investment of 733 million dollars.

Energía Austral is studying the possibility of a submarine power cable and an aerial submarine power line, to connect to the central grids.

The controversy over the plant has heated up because it would be built in the Liquiñe-Ofqui geological fault zone, an area of active volcanoes.

“It poses an imminent risk to the local population,” Torres warned.

Peredo said “the project was poorly designed from the start, and will not be managed well.”

“They failed to take into consideration important aspects, such as the connection of the Yulton and Meullín rivers at some point, which could have disastrous consequences for the ecosystem,” he said.

Opponents of the dam say they will go to the courts and apply social and political pressure, in a year of municipal elections.

“We have one single aim: to keep any dams from being built in Patagonia, and that’s what’s going to happen,” Torres said.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes