IRENA and the Inter-American Development Bank Award Support to Renewable Energy Project Development

IRENA and the Inter-American Development Bank’s (IDB) Sustainable Energy Marketplace for Latin America and the Caribbean, have announced a $300,000 technical assistance award to advance the development of six renewable energy projects across Latin America and the Caribbean.

The projects — based in Argentina, Colombia, El Salvador, Haiti, Honduras, and Mexico — cover a range of areas including solar, wind, and carbon management. “The Sustainable Energy Marketplace supports projects at different stages of development. Through the project development support and the work with IDB, this platform will create a bigger, more liquid market for renewable energy projects that will eventually improve access to sustainable and reliable energy in a financially sustainable manner,” said Henning Wuester, Director of IRENA’s Knowledge, Policy and Finance Centre.

Between November 2015 and March 2016, IRENA received 76 project proposals from 16 different IDB member states and after careful evaluation a final six were selected. Proposals were submitted via the Sustainable Energy Marketplace platform, which has portals focusing specifically on Latin American and Caribbean as well as African projects.

More than a marketplace

The Sustainable Energy Marketplace, a virtual platform developed by IRENA, gives renewable energy project developers and investors a simple way to connect. With aims to scale up existing global investment, the marketplace supports the channeling of public and private finance to meet market demand.

The platform allows stakeholders to join efforts in the development of renewable energy projects by sharing project pipelines, encouraging joint financing, sharing information and relying on the active support of the platform to the project developers.

In addition, the platform facilitates project assessments — providing a better understanding on the needs of projects — and matchmaking with relevant stakeholders depending on the specific needs of a project.

The scope and conditions for technical assistance is yet to be jointly defined by IRENA and the IDB, but assistance will consist of funding studies on social, environmental, financial, technical and economic feasibility, legal structuring and other issues related to advancing the project.

Technical assistance will be sponsored by the Sustainable Energy for All Americas initiative, while climate technology transfer mechanisms and networks will be financed by a grant from the Global Environment Facility.

The six selected projects are: