Green Energy Partnership Initiative

After completing the eight-country Asian Regional Study on Global Environmental Issues in 1994, the Climate Institute called for an international public private partnership to accelerate renewable and other greenhouse benign energy. Out of the Institute's efforts to promote a new energy paradigm came an innovative idea to spur dramatic change in the way the world produces and consumes energy while imposing little or no marginal cost on developed and developing countries alike.

This program called the Green Energy Partnership Initiative was designed with the notion that by melding emissions and stabilization scenarios with solutions integrating policy, finance and technological options, we could influence the tone and direction of Framework Convention negotiations.

It was designed to be undertaken with a coalition of groups including scientific, financial, technological and policy organizations to focus on an equally large group of climate change constituencies-the private business community, private financial institutions, multilateral lending banks, national governmental energy R&D programs and international negotiating efforts.

In early 1995 The East Asia and Pacific Parliamentarians Conference for Environment and Development asked the Institute to develop a concept paper describing this proposal for presentation at the Manila Asia Pacific Leaders Conference. This proposal developed by a team of Asian and North American energy and policy experts was strongly endorsed in the resulting Manila Declaration.

From December 4-6, 1995 the shape of such a partnership was a major focus of discussions of the Madras Workshop on Impacts of Climate Change on Food and Livelihood Security convened by the M.S. Swaminathan Foundation and the Climate Institute.

In March 1996 an article authored by John Topping, Jr., Ata Qureshi, and Christopher Dabi, all of the Climate Institute, appeared in The Journal on Environment and Development. This article, "Building on the Asian Climate Initiative: A Partnership to Produce Radical Innovation in Energy Systems," laid a framework for accelerating the application of greenhouse-benign energy. It called for a South-North, public-private collaboration and the use of multilateral and bilateral development funds to enhance near-competitive renewable technologies, rather than a global regulatory apparatus.

This ambitious project was formally launched on the occasion of the Institute's Tenth Anniversary at a one-of-a-kind event, the Washington Summit on Protection of the World's Climate in September 1996. A principal focus of the two-day symposium held in Washington, DC on Building Markets and Financing to Accelerate a Green Energy Revolution was cost effective medium term opportunities for renewable development and energy opportunities in a dozen countries with more than half of current global greenhouse emissions - U.S., Russia, China, India, Germany, Japan, U.K., Brazil, Mexico, France, Netherlands, and the Philippines. Participants included energy and policy experts from these countries, foundation and pension fund officials, multilateral and bilateral development finance officials, and procurement decision makers.

The Climate Institute's green energy investment strategy was the focus of a five-page interview in the September 22, 1997 issue of Chemical & Engineering News whose editorial commended the strategy to U.S. climate negotiations.

This approach was the central focus of three climate change symposia, one on October 24, 1997, during the UN Day celebrations at the UN University in Tokyo, Japan and the other at November 5, 1997 at University of Utrecht in the Netherlands. The third symposium was held at Otani University, Kyoto, Japan on December 6, 1997 drawing speakers from nine countries to illustrate how such a strategy might be implemented.

In April 2000 jointly with the Olympia, Washington-based Climate Solutions, the Climate Institute convened a Seattle Summit on Protecting the World's Climate which pulled together environmental, energy, finance and information industry leaders to identify ways that a global clean energy transformation can employ lessons from the information revolution. A keynote speaker was Sam Wyly, a major investor in green power, who was a pioneer in computer software and telecommunications. The overall message of the Seattle Summit is distilled in a video, Clean Energy: The Next High Tech Revolution, produced by the Climate Institute in 2001.

The Seattle Summit has helped catalyze positive developments on two fronts. First it helped inspire the idea of a G-8 Renewable Energy Task Force. Working closely with organizers of the Summit, Sir Crispin Tickell, the Climate Institute's Chairman, advanced the concept of the G-8's focusing on addressing the problem of two billion people lacking access to electricity to British Prime Minister Tony Blair for whom he is an advisor. Blair persuaded the G-8 at the July 2000 Okinawa Summit to create a Renewables Task Force. This task force issued a report in July 2001 that was implicitly endorsed by the G-8 at its Genoa Summit. The report focuses on practical means of scaling up markets for emerging clean energy technologies by targeting needs of the non-electrified portion of the developing world and coupling this with concerted efforts in the industrialized world to invest in renewables.

A second positive byproduct of the Seattle Summit was the heightening of interest throughout the US Pacific Northwest in becoming a world leader in clean energy development. Climate Solutions had advanced this notion in a white paper produced before the Summit. The Bonneville Power Administration has signed contracts to have 830 megawatts of wind energy built for use in the region; this would provide electricity needs of roughly 270,000 homes in the Pacific Northwest. In April 2002, Vestas Wind Systems of Denmark, a wind turbine manufacturer, announced its decision to build its largest manufacturing facility in Portland, Oregon in part because of the size of the growing market in that region. The Vestas plant is expected to employ about a thousand people as of early 2004.