Caribbean nations, including St. Lucia, Turks and Caicos and the British Virgin Islands, committed last week to start replacing diesel generators, the most common means of producing electricity on islands, with renewable sources like wind, solar or geothermal.

Because diesel must be imported, the cost of electricity on the islands is generally very high, which makes renewable alternatives economically as well as environmentally attractive.

The countries signed the pact at a multiday meeting organized by the Carbon War Room, a nonprofit organization that Richard Branson, the billionaire founder of the Virgin Group, established to fight climate change. More here.

Brazilian presidential candidate, Eduardo Campos, proposed incentives for renewable energy in a set of guidelines outlining his new coalition’s policies. The guidelines include tax, fiscal and credit incentives to spur wider use of clean energy, according to Bloomberg. Campos is currently the governor of Pernambuco state, which held Brazil's first solar-only auction in December 2013. Former environment minister Marina Silva, best known as a champion for conservation of the Amazon forest, forged an alliance in October 2013 with Campos’s Brazilian Socialist Party.

A new report from the Center for the New Energy Economy recommends more than 200 actions that President Obama can take to accelerate America’s transition to a clean energy economy – actions the authors believe can be implemented within the President's existing executive branch power. The recommendations were developed by more than 100 energy industry experts and thought leaders, including chief executive officers, chief financial officers and other top executives from industry, academia, research institutions, NGOs and state and local governments.


The report's five areas of focus are:

1. Doubling energy productivity
2. Financing renewable energy
3. Producing natural gas responsibly
4. Developing alternative fuels and vehicles, and
5. Enabling electric & gas utilities adapt to the new realities of the 21st century

More than 63,500 MW of new power generation capacity will be installed in Brazil by 2022, according to the government's ten-year power expansion plan, PDE 2022. The plan calls for the majority of new capacity to be large hydropower, which has dominated Brazil’s electricity matrix for decades. However, the International Energy Agency (IEA) expects multiple factors to constrain hydropower’s expansion. Most importantly, environmental and social sensitivities are expected to increase over time due to the nature and location of Brazil’s remaining hydropower resources, which are heavily concentrated in the Amazon region. Large hydropower projects in the Amazon rainforest (more than 20,000 megawatts are contracted or under construction) are far from the main centers of demand and face resolute opposition from indigenous peoples and civil society organizations. If the Amazon were to be off-limits for new hydropower projects, a scenario the IEA World Energy Outlook 2013 contemplates, a significant portion of new capacity would shift to other sources.  

Pedro Joaquín Coldwell, the head of Mexico's energy ministry Sener, this week in Cancún laid out five reforms to promote renewable power in Mexico.

1) Create an independent system operator that manages expansion of the transmission network and all interconnection permits.

2) Facilitate the sale of renewable power through creation of a regulated wholesale generation market.

3) Develop mechanisms for distributed generation projects, which is still unknown territory in Mexico.

4) Create demand for renewable energy through stronger implementation of renewable goals and stimulate cheap renewable energy financing.

5) Establish regulation for public consultations on renewable projects to ensure inclusiveness in communities and mitigate negative externalities of projects.

For more see BN Americas (subscription required).

Chilean Energy Minister Jorge Bunster and Indian Minister of New and Renewable Energy Farooq Abdullah met in Santiago, Chile in September to explore greater collaboration between the two countries in renewable energy development.

Abdullah offered India’s support and expertise to Chile in setting up renewable projects as well as in capacity building and project preparation through the services of Indian experts and institutions like Centre for Wind Energy, Solar Energy Centre, and Alternate Hydro Energy Centre, according to a statement by the Indian government.

The minister also offered training slots in India to Chilean scientists, engineers and technicians through the Indian Technical and Economic Cooperation (ITEC) Programm, and expressed his country’s desire for a serious and meaningful cooperation with Chile and the entire Latin American region.

Chile is almost entirely dependent on imports for meeting its energy requirements and is looking to diversify by introducing a large component of renewable energy in its energy mix. Bunster noted the Chilean government’s interest in setting up a 50 megawatt solar thermal generating capacity in the north of the country, according to the statement.

REN21’s Renewables 2013 Global Status Report provides a comprehensive overview of renewable energy market, industry, investment and policy development worldwide. In a free webinar on October 7, REN21 experts will discus the status of renewables in South America. Click here to register.  Full report is available here.

Globally, 2012 saw:

• A shift in investment patterns from industrialized to developing countries
• A decrease in overall clean energy investment in dollar terms but simultaneously saw an increase in installed capacity in gigawatts due to significant technology cost reductions
• Renewables progressively supplementing established electricity systems demonstrating that the implementation of suitable policies can enable the successful integration of higher shares of variable renewables
• The emergence of integrated policy approaches that link energy efficiency measures with the implementation of renewable energy technologies.

Non-traditional renewable energy technologies (NRETs) —solar, wind, geothermal, ocean, small-scale hydropower, and advanced bio-energy—together with improvements in energy efficiency—are now ready to play a major role alongside hydropower in meeting the energy needs in Latin America and the Caribbean, according to a white paper recently released by the Inter-American Development Bank. The authors note that the costs of these technologies are falling rapidly, and in many cases are competitive with fossil fuels. Globally, the scale of recent developments in renewable energy suggests that a historic energy transformation is underway. NRETs —assembled in large power plants as well as widely decentralized small systems— are rapidly diversifying the energy economies of many nations.

The latest edition of Greenpeace's Energy Revolution study for Brazil (in Portuguese) offers an ambitious outlook for the development of solar photovoltaic (PV). The report projects that the country could install as much as 2.8 GW of photovoltaic solar capacity by 2020, up to 24 GW by 2030, and up to 100 GW by 2050. (More on Brazil's solar PV outlook here). Overall, the study projects that the country's electricity mix in 2050 could consist of hydropower (40%), wind (21%), solar PV (13%), solar thermal (10%), biomass (7%), natural gas (7 %), and tidal (1%).

An analysis of data from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) shows that in the first half of 2013, the U.S. added 959 megawatts (MW) of wind, 979 MW of solar, and 116 MW of biomass. The total new installed capacity from these renewable sources (2,054 MW) exceeded new coal power capacity (1,579 MW) but was less than half of new natural gas capacity (4,852 MW).