Promoting Renewable Energy Through Innovative System Approaches and Technology

To stimulate increased use of renewable energy through:

1. Improved policies and regulations;
2. Local supportive institutions established or strengthened;
3. Financial institutions mobilized; and  
4. Businesses - and local/U.S. partnerships - mobilized to invest.

To advance investment interest, activity focused on limited applied research, competitive grant research programs, general technical analyses, and guided project implementation activities in the field in Thailand, Jamaica, and Costa Rica.

Due to global climate change concerns, verifying the carbon sequestering effect of land use projects led to the BEST project to consider how to monitor such projects in a scientifically defensible way to enable parties to validate their anticipated benefits objectively. This led to the activities:

• Testing Carbon Monitoring Methods in Philippine Agroforestry
• Testing Carbon Monitoring Methods for Indonesia Home Gardens

Develop a new mechanism for developing renewable energy projects by first developing in-country human capacity. This led to the formation of the REPSO network that today is established in Brazil, Guatemala (for Central America), India, Indonesia, and the Philippines. The objective of each REPSO is to match global interests of the renewable energy industry with the specific needs of a developing country's rural populations who are mostly living without electrical service.

A venture capital fund was designed to establish a nonprofit corporate entity, the Environmental Enterprises Assistance Fund (EEAF). The fund provided financing to projects at rates that would catalyze projects while allowing the fund to cover its costs. The objective of creating the venture capital fund was to establish a mechanism for channeling loans and equity investments to promising, commercially viable renewable energy projects that are unable to secure financing because of size or other non-market barriers.

To open the market for co-generated power, USAID/New Delhi developed a program with the USAID Office of Energy and Infrastructure to bring together sugar industries, utilities, and state governments to overcome existing barriers to grid-connected co-generation. The program consisted of a detailed assessment of the technical, economic, and regulatory parameters of grid-connected co-generation and a set of seminars to share the findings with all parties that would have a stake in the market for co-generated power.

• A ten-minute video entitled " Biomass: Energy's Renewable Resource" was completed. The video was produced in both Spanish and English. Copies were distributed to USAID for distribution to the mission, the National Biomass Industry Association (NBIA), the Biomass Users Network (BUN), industry, and others.
• A user-friendly microcomputer model called CANEPRO was developed to predict financial and economic performance of sugar mill cogeneration schemes based on user provided inputs. The spreadsheet model used readily available software programs that were able to run on both Apple and IBM personal computers.
• The ICEN brought together representatives from leading sugarcane research institutions to promote the concept of cane energy development.
• A workshop was organized to target utility investment subsidiary personnel and to create a network of key domestic and international investors who have the ability to attract outside investors to invest in the clean utility model.