The Cobrador Island Solar – Diesel Hybrid Project is one of ADB’s outstanding projects and led to increased service hours (24 hours per day), affordability (50% tariff reduction), and environmental soundness (RE share up to 90%). This presentation analyzed the impact on local development and the SDGs through a household questionnaire focusing on socio-economic characteristics, electricity usage patterns, and subjective perceptions of change after hybridization.

Solar pumps present an opportunity to extend access to irrigation in Asia. The presentation highlighted The Council's multi-pronged research on identifying gaps and solutions to facilitate solar-powered irrigation in a sustainable manner. This ranges from end-users' outlook about solar pumps, financier's risk perceptions and challenges in financing the technology, determinants of sustainability, and a decision support tool to identify locally-suitable deployment strategies for solar pumps.​

Electric Vehicles (EVs) are hailed as a silver bullet to reduce carbon emissions in smart cities. However, EV charging can destabilize the grid by spiking power demand. Evergo is a blockchain-based, plug-and-play backend system that addresses this challenge. It tracks energy trading and diversifies the energy mix for charging solutions. Evergo enables Machine-to-Machine communication between chargers, grid, and solar panels. It leverages on big data and analytics to provide smarter charging and load shifting.

Finance is a significant challenge for clean energy projects in developing countries. Simultaneously, the crowd-investment industry is rapidly growing, driven by persistently low interest rates in developed countries. By building collaborative partnerships with crowdfunding platforms and clean energy companies, Mynergy is pioneering the approach of facilitating access to finance for clean-energy projects through no-collateral loans, better rates, and tenures, whose model focuses on small and medium clean energy enterprises, considered risky by banks.

Investors need certainty. Yet, government incentives are public policy-based goods. Public policy is not law and can change at any moment. Change in government, change in strategy, change in budget all influence public policy. Acknowledging possible public policy change upfront is a necessary part of an investor’s risk assessment. Assuming no change in policy creates the moral hazard of banking on the non-bankable.

An increasing trend in clean energy is hybridized plants, which are especially applicable for distributed or off-grid generation in developing countries. Hybrid power plants can be combinations of renewable energy with storage, renewables and/or storage added to thermal generation or full-scale microgrid solutions. There are several obstacles when it comes to project finance of hybrids, such as the perceived maturity of storage technologies and the small size of many pilot projects, however, a bigger challenge lies in creating IPP business models that are tailored for hybrids.

The presentation gives a brief introduction to the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB)'s Sustainable Energy Strategy, energy investment portfolio and products focusing on clean energy and renewables. It also gives an overview of AIIB's Environment, Social and Governance (ESG) Enhanced Credit Portfolio and the Sustainable Energy and Infrastructure On-Lending Facility.

In 2017, the Marawi City Siege in Mindanao, Philippines led to months of military combat displacing many people and disrupting the city’s electricity and water supply. With national and international organizations offering support for the area’s rehabilitation, post-conflict, what kind of collaborative opportunities are there to rebuild the city and make considerable gains in Health and Well-being, Climate Action, Clean Energy, and Peace?

The Global Environmental Institute (GEI) has developed a Renewable Energy Implementation (REI) toolkit that evaluates, implements and scales-up renewable energy (RE) projects at national and regional levels. The toolkit includes GIS analysis, technology application MCA screening and financial analysis, and has been used to design industrial rooftop solar PV installation projects in China’s Guangdong Province. In 2018, the REI toolkit was used for deploring solar power potential of Gampola Town, Sri Lanka – about 1.8MW rooftop solar PV.

The Philippines has close to 150 cooperatives and private distribution utilities, which are responsible for power supply for households and industry on their franchise area. Many of these cooperatives have over contracted themselves with traditional inflexible coal baseload capacity, on top of which they have expensive peaking contracts based on Diesel. That leaves little room to contract cheaper and cleaner renewable energy source into their generation portfolio before existing long-term Power Supply Agreements (PSA) expire.