18 May 2007 - On 9 May, the German Federal Ministry for the Environment and REN21 organised a joint side event at the CSD15 Conference in New York to highlight increasing activity in renewable energy investment and deployment.



Martin Schöpe of the German Environment Ministry moderated and opened the event by citing some figures of REN21's Renewables Global Status Report: almost EUR 40bn were invested in renewable energy in 2005. This figure has been clearly outperformed by 2006 investment.

Virginia Sonntag-O'Brien of the REN21 Secretariat and the UNEP SEFI project leaked some punch lines of the upcoming 2007 Sustainable Energy Investment Report. The upbeat presentation demonstrated that renewable energy investment "is so big that it's here to stay". Having more than doubled in the last two years, worldwide investment is forecasted to reach USD 85bn in 2007, driven by high oil prices, and energy security and climate change concerns. Ms Sonntag-O'Brien emphasised the importance of these investment figures in bringing about a more complete insight into the future position of the industry than static figures of today's energy production.

John Cavalier of Credit Suisse Securities highlighted the importance of policies to back renewable energy industry development. He pointed to the crucial work undertaken by the IPPC and UN agencies, and to the leadership role taken on by Europe. From a banker's perspective, Mr Cavalier qualified these policies not only as justified, but as "absolutely appropriate" to bring down costs through a steep learning curve. Moreover, he argued for a "global carbon penalty".



Annette Schou of the Danish Energy Authority presented the experiences made with promoting renewable energy in her country. Motivated by an exceptionally high dependance on imported fossil fuels in the 1970s, feed-in-tariffs and other support policies brought about the highest share of electricity from new renewables in the world. In 2005, wind energy covered almost 20% of electricity consumption, and has developed a major manufacturing industry. Ms Schou illustrated in particular how Denmark succeeded in integrating such a high percentage of a fluctuating power source into the grid.

Aldo Iacomelli of the Italian Ministry for the Environment and Territory gave a short introduction to the role and ongoing pojects of the IEA's Implementing Agreement Renewable Energy Technology Deployment (RETD). He said that "political will" was the main challenge in advancing renewable energy, stating that "money is not the problem". He underlined the need for well-designed energy scenarios based on appropriate neutral statistics to show the real technical and political potential of renewables. Mr Iacomelli noted that costs were continuesly decreasing, e.g. in the PV sector through deplyoment "roof by roof". Regarding subsidies, he criticised a lopsided focus where all complained about renewables support but few talked about subsidies given to nuclear and fossil energy.

Arno Tomowski of GTZ emphasised the role of capacity development as a prerequisite for the deployment renewable energy in developing economies. He noted that liberalisation in the energy sector was needed to bring market forces to bear, as well as knowledge dissemination to make citizens and institutions aware of the benefits of renewables. With developing economies often lacking the necessary capacities, Mr Tomowski sensed an increasing "renewables divide" between the development of complex technologies on the one side and the need for affordable appliances on the other. Today generally geared towards rich countries, more private money needed to go into serving the needs of developing countries, too.