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Summit Offers Platform for Debates on Renewable Energy

ABU DHABI - The World Future Energy Summit, or WFES, beginning here on Monday (today) will be a platform for intense debates on the opportunities and challenges in exploring and developing new sustainable and cleaner energy sources.

Mobilising finance for locating and developing new sources forms of energy, technological challenges involved in scaling up the newly identified energy forms into commercially viable propositions and increasing the energy efficiency of the new forms of fuels are some of the issues that are likely to be at the focus of discussions the four-day Summit.

The topics like the climate change, containing carbon emission, sustainability of the fossil fuels and approach to the nuclear energy will also be debated at the event.

According to the Helene Pelosse, the Interim Director General of the International Renewable Energy Agency or IRENA since 2004, annual renewable energy investment has increased to reach $120 billion in 2008.

“In 2008, the US became the leader in new capacity investment (in renewable) with $ 24 billion invested or 20 per cent of the total global investment. China usurped Japan to become world leader in PV cell production and also experienced huge growth in wind power industry,’’ Pelosse told a recent Press conference here.

More than 70 countries have now announced their national level renewable energy targets. Kuwait and Bahrain aims at five per cent power from renewables by 2020 while Bangladesh, Pakistan and Israel have set a target of 10 per cent by then. India has announced plans to generate 20gw from solar power by 2020. Abu Dhabi has set a target of seven per cent renewable energy by 2020.

The renewable energy experts are optimistic that these countries will be able to make adequate investments to meet these targets despite the impact of the global financial recession.

According to the IRENA officials the total power capacity from renewables increased by 75 per cent and reached 280gw between 2004 and 2008. There was growth in every components of renewables: Solar photovoltaic capacity increased six-fold to more than 16gw, wind power capacity increased by 250 per cent to touch 280gw in this period and biodiesel production increased six-fold to 12 billion litres per year.

However, there are still sceptics who argue that the renewable energy is yet to be developed as an economically viable option. They argue that even now technologies in this sector had been developed as prototypes or in micro unit levels, and are yet to be scaled up to commercially viable alternatives. It will also be challenging for the advocates of the renewable energy to convince the sceptics on the cost of renewable energy. “But fossil fuel is currently enjoying a subsidised pricing structure, and once that is removed their cost will be equivalent to that of the renewable. The environmental impact of fossil fuels also must be taken into account while working out the cost,’’ Ms Pelosse argued.

The question whether nuclear energy can be included under the spectrum of sustainable energy sources will be another subject of debate at the WFES. The summit has a round table discussion session on ‘Revival of nuclear energy’ on its itinerary. But Ms Pelosse has made it clear that nuclear will not come under the renewable energy sources that IRENA has been mandated to develop and support.

ramavarman@khaleejtimes.com