Promoting Renewable Energy Is Focus of New Agency

The New York Times
By DIANA S. POWERS
Published: May 18, 2009
PARIS — In Sharm el Sheik, Egypt, delegates from 79 countries will meet next month to choose a home, a director and a preliminary work program for the International Renewable Energy Agency, which was set up this year to lead a global drive to accelerate and expand the development of renewable energy resources.
The agency grew out of a conference in Bonn on Jan. 26, which was sponsored by the German government, with support from Denmark and Spain. Of the 192 United Nations member states invited, 125 sent delegations and 75 European and emerging countries signed on to the final agreement establishing the agency, also known as Irena.
Since January, four more countries have joined, most recently Mauritania. Membership includes leading European economies like Germany and France; emerging economies like India; major energy producers like Norway and Nigeria; hostile neighbors like Eritrea and Ethiopia, or Israel and Syria; and poor states like Liberia and Burkina Faso.
The United States has not yet joined the agency because of lingering commercial concerns, but is likely to do so, Hermann Scheer, a member of the Bundestag, the lower house of the German Parliament, said during an interview. Major countries like China, Britain and Brazil have not yet joined, either.
Very few countries “have adequate and comprehensive programs for renewable energy, ” Mr. Scheer said, “The others do not, and they need them urgently.”
Mr. Scheer, an economist by training and general chairman of the World Council for Renewable Energy, an advocacy group, worked for almost 20 years to establish Irena and is one of the world’s most outspoken advocates for renewable energy.
Irena, he said, will help countries evaluate their specific renewable energy resources and advise them on the best policies to adopt — preferably, for best effect, the use of price incentives rather than quantitative regulatory targets. As an example, he cited the special pricing system known as a feed-in tariff, introduced in Germany in 2000 by the Renewable Energy Act.
“This gives a privilege, a priority to renewable energies as a compensation for the avoided social costs that come from replacing conventional energies by renewables,” Mr. Scheer said.
The feed-in tariff law offers unlimited access to the electricity transmission grid to all energy producers, at a guaranteed price. “In many countries,” Mr. Scheer said, “the grid owners are the owners of the conventional power companies, and it is normal that they want to give priority to their own production and even block the entry of renewables. The feed-in tariff law is a market access privilege, so each power producer can come to the market.”
By overriding the monopoly structure of the energy supply chain, he said, “it makes the grid neutral to all producers and consumers of energy.”
Together with earlier legislation favoring renewable energy, the feed-in law supported a solar roof generation program which by 2003 had allowed 100,000 households sell surplus energy to the grid, Mr. Scheer said.
Including other energy sources such as wind, “alone in the past two years in Germany,” he said, “we introduced new renewable energy capacity with an energy production of 5 percent of total electric power.”
Seeing that example, France has introduced a feed-in tariff as part of its plan to meet the European Union target of 20 percent renewable-energy generation by 2020.
As a result of last year’s financial market meltdown, global investment in renewable energy has slowed but still remains positive, according to the Renewables Global Status Report, released last week by the Renewable Energy Policy Network for the 21st Century, or REN21 — a multilateral advocacy network set up in 2004 with funding from Germany and, latterly, the United States. The report shows that global investment in renewable energy rose to $120 billion in 2008 from $104 billion in 2007 and $63 billion in 2006. Global power generating capacity from renewable energy rose to 280,000 megawatts in 2008, up 16 percent from 2007.