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IRENA to Set Criteria for $50 Million Funding for Green Ventures

IRENA will define ways to cooperate with the Abu Dhabi Fund for Development, which has a fund to finance projects. The agency will define the selection criteria on the basis of which projects would be chosen to benefit from the funds available.

After IRENA and the Abu Dhabi government jointly decides upon governance structures and selection criteria for the fund, the cooperation could be started in the second half of the year. The IRENA Secretariat is currently drafting the agency’s Work Programme for 2010, outlining its strategic director for the year, says a report issued by the agency.

The agency plans to spend the next year gathering, analysing and systematising existing knowledge and information related to global renewable energy.

IRENA plans to produce inventories of stakeholders, technologies, policies and financial mechanisms. It also plans to conduct reviews of data and establish databases and start first projects with member states.

“Prior to January 2009, there was no centrally located global knowledge centre for renewable energy. While some member states have their owner internal resources of renewable energy knowledge, many do not,” the agency said. IRENA hopes to make the sharing of information, lessons learned and best practices among members even easier and lay important groundwork for the future. The 2010 Work Programme is being developed with input from experts in the field of renewable energy and IRENA’s members, who have had the opportunity to provide comments and suggest amendments as the document evolved. This work will further establish URENA as a centre of excellence for renewable energy, it said. To brainstorm on IRENA’s future activities and to liaise with experts, the agency hosted a number of workshops on topics that might feature as core activities in the 2010 Work Programme.

· haseebhaider@khaleejtimes.com