Topic: energy

Limiting global temperature rise to 2°C above pre-industrial levels will require billions of dollars in investments each year to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions and shift to low-emissions development pathways. This report draws on the experiences of six developing countries to examine how public climate finance can help meet the significant investment needs of developing countries by creating attractive conditions for scaled-up investment in low-carbon energy. Building on lessons from the case studies, it provides a number of recommendations for international climate funds and institutions, in particular for the new Green Climate Fund.

This is the first in a series of three issue briefs based on a three-day workshop held by the World Resources Institute (WRI) and the DOEN Foundation in March 2012. Through the workshop and subsequent interviews, WRI brought together the experiences of 25 socially oriented energy enterprises, organizations, and financiers who understand the energy needs of low-income consumers in developing countries. Their collective knowledge can help entities involved in delivering renewable energy to rural communities and inform policy recommendations to improve and expand distributed renewable energy services in developing countries.

This first brief describes four common core business strategies employed by the enterprises and provides examples of how these strategies were implemented.

This report examines opportunities to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the United States through actions taken at the federal and state levels without the need for new legislation from the U.S. Congress. It can serve as a road map for action by providing both a legal and technical analysis of these opportunities.

In this testimony, Jennifer Morgan, Director of WRI’s Climate and Energy program, describes the energy risks and opportunities that climate change presents; the role that clean energy can play in the U.S. energy mix; and actions Congress can take to mitigate global warming’s threats.

This guide will help companies be better prepared as they seek to secure attractive external financing for energy efficiency improvements at their facilities in China. The guide can be used by industry, energy services companies, and financiers to achieve a smoother financing process and prompt more energy efficiency upgrades to be implemented.

Coal-fired power plants are a major source of greenhouse gas emissions—one that could be increasing significantly globally. This working paper analyzes information about proposed new coal-fired plants and other market trends in order to assess potential future risks to the global climate.

This paper examines the development of the solar PV and wind industries across China, Germany, India, Japan, and the United States from 2001–2011. It takes a unique, comparative approach to track the policies and incentives put in place by these key competitors, documents the state of play in each market, and determines what policy strategies seem to have been most successful to date. The analysis illustrates why these policies are so important to both installations and the stable growth of domestic manufacturing capacity.”