Please click here to download documents and reports related to renewable energy and distributed generation.
Renewable Energy and Distributed Generation Task Force
Chair: Canada
Co-Chair: Australia
Action Plan - Adobe PDF format
Renewable energy technologies, such as hydro (large and mini), solar, geothermal, wind and tidal can deliver power with virtually zero emissions. Distributed generation (including landfill waste methane-based generation) also has the potential to significantly reduce emissions and promote greater cost and network efficiencies. The wide scale deployment of renewable energy and distributed generation technologies increases the diversity of energy supply, and can contribute to improving energy security and reducing fuel risks, particularly in remote and fringe-of-grid areas. These energy sources and distributed generation technologies, which are ideally suited to mid-sized and smaller scale applications can also assist in alleviating poverty by improving access to energy services, as well as increasing job opportunities and improving air quality and public health.
The emerging nature of many renewable energy technologies means that there can be market and technical impediments to their uptake, such as cost-competitiveness, awareness of technology options, intermittency and the need for electricity storage. Work is currently being undertaken by many members of the Partnership to address these barriers to increase the wide-scale uptake of renewable energy. However, advances in technology design, system planning and grid operations are demonstrating the financial viability of distributed utility applications. In addition, alternative fuels, such as biodiesel and ethanol, also can potentially offer significant environmental benefits in the future. Similarly these alternatives are also on the pathway to becoming cost-competitive and for deployment on a large-scale. The Task Force will focus on the most promising technologies and applications, particularly rural, remote and peri-urban applications, where renewable energy and distributed generation applications can be cost competitive.
Objectives
- Facilitate the demonstration and deployment of renewable energy and distributed generation technologies in Partnership countries.
- Identify country development needs and the opportunities to deploy renewable energy and distributed generation technologies, systems and practices, and the enabling environments needed to support wide-spread deployment, including in rural, remote and peri-urban applications.
- Enumerate financial and engineering benefits of distributed energy systems that contribute to the economic development and climate goals of the Partnership.
- Promote further collaboration between Partnership members on research, development and implementation of renewable energy technologies including supporting measures such as renewable resource identification, wind forecasting and energy storage technologies.
- Support cooperative projects to deploy renewable and distributed generation technologies to support rural and peri-urban economic development and poverty alleviation.
- Identify potential projects that would enable Partners to assess the applicability of renewable energy and distributed generation to their specific requirements.