Central America is an economically and ecologically diverse region with growing energy needs and unique vulnerabilities to climate change. Boosting investment in renewable energy is a key way that the region can protect its ecologically sensitive areas while achieving reliable access to clean energy for its population. In Central America, the top four renewable energy sources are geothermal, hydroelectricity, biomass, and wind. The relative importance of each renewable resource is different for each country depending on the geographical and geological situation. The Worldwatch Institute has recently begun work aimed at creating a favorable policy and investment environment for renewable energy in Central America.

Globally, the electricity sector is one of the largest and fastest-growing consumers of energy.  It is therefore important

The BELCOGEN bagasse plant in Orange Walk, Belize. Photo Credit: Belize News

to consider the role of state and private utility companies in transitioning Central America to renewable energy sources. One of these companies, BELCOGEN, a subsidiary of state owned Belize Electricity Ltd (BEL), has received enormous amounts of attention and praise due to its recent investment in a 31.5 megawatt (MW) biomass power plant fueled by bagasse. BEL invested US$63 million to create BELCOGEN and the bagasse project. The price tag has officially made the deal the largest private investment ever made in Belize. Originally, the project was scheduled to be completed in 2007 and the investment was much lower; however, the necessary investment grew as the scheduled date of completion was postponed, and the project was finally completed in 2009. The plant runs on a combination of 92 percent bagasse and 8 percent heavy fuel oil. BELCOGEN is contractually obligated to sell at least 106 gigawatt-hours (GWh) to BEL for the first year of operation, making the company the source of at least 20 percent of Belize’s national energy demand. The rest of the energy produced (up to 44GWh) will be sold to Belize Sugar Industries Limited (BSI).

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Worldwide, the total square footage of green buildings (defined here as LEED certified buildings) is doubling every year, and 85 countries now have their own green building standards. But are we doing enough to harness the overwhelming benefits that come from boosting energy efficiency in buildings?

On January 25, Greg Kats, President of Capital E and the author of Greening Our Built World, presented on “Sustainable Solutions for the Planet’s Energy Challenge” as part of a new series from the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program. In his talk, he discussed the many ways we can move sustainability forward in three target areas: transportation, industry, and building efficiency, which account for 28 percent, 26 percent, and 40 percent of U.S. energy use, respectively.

Among the obvious solutions to promoting a more sustainable economy, Kats noted, are increasing the production tax credit for renewable energy, pumping more money into energy efficiency financing, and incorporating more renewable energy into building and city designs. He pointed to positive patterns already emerging in the field of low-carbon technology: solar photovoltaic technology, for example, has seen an 80 percent price reduction in just four to five years. Similarly, the price of a plug-in hybrid vehicle is now near that of a non-hybrid in a similar class.

The benefits of building green

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Universal energy access is fundamental to achieving Haiti’s Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) as greater access to energy facilitates progress in education as well as poverty and mortality reduction.  The dynamic development strategy embodied in the MDGs is ineffective unless accompanied by affordable, reliable, and sustainable energy services provided by a capable electricity distribution grid. Haiti is lagging behind in its progress on almost all of its MDGs, and much of this is due to a lack of reliable energy access in the country.

Haiti’s population has the lowest levels of electrification in the Western Hemisphere, with an estimated 70 percent of the population not connected to the grid. Many areas that have access to the grid only have limited access, such as in metropolitan Port-au-Prince, where power is available for only 10 hours daily to most power consumers. Implementing the use of sustainable energy in the form of solar, wind, or hydro power will work to close the development gaps created by a lack of electricity services through several dimensions.

Haiti's MDGs' Progress Report Card Source: UNICEF

Reducing dependency on expensive fossil fuels by transitioning to renewable energies in countries like Haiti, which has no oil reserves of its own, increases domestic revenue streams that can be channeled into other sectors such as healthcare and education.  The use of renewables also diversifies Haiti’s energy portfolio, which reduces the country’s vulnerability to oil price fluctuations. According to Haiti’s Energy Sector Development Plan 2007 – 2017 “Haiti’s petroleum products subsector, which represents only 20-25% of the national energy supply, uses more than 35-50% of external receipts of the country.”

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As conventional oil – oil extracted using traditional oil wells – becomes increasingly uneconomical to extract, unconventional sources are being turned to as a solution to meet the global demand for petroleum-based energy sources. One unconventional source shown to have abundant reserves is oil sands, also known as tar sands. Canada is home to one of the largest oil sands deposits on earth.  Despite the promising amount of reserves that can be added to the global supply from this supply, the substance, which resembles cold molasses when at room temperature, is sparking a lot of controversy amongst public opinion and is playing a large role in defining U.S. energy infrastructure priorities.

With the addition of oil sands to its proven reserves list, Canada is now second place amongst oil-producing nations, behind Saudi Arabia. Despite the promising amount of reserves that can be added to the global supply from oil sands, the topic is sparking a lot of controversy amongst public opinion and is playing a large role in defining U.S. energy infrastructure priorities.

Bitumen, the substance found in oil sands, was at one time light crude oil. Geologists theorize that tens of millions of years ago, oil was pushed up during the formation of the Rocky Mountains, allowing it to reach depths shallow and cool enough for bacteria to thrive, which degraded the oil to bitumen. Bitumen is not oil or tar, but a semi-solid degraded form of oil. Once extracted, bitumen deposits can be sold as raw bitumen, or upgraded to synthetic crude oil frequently refined for use in essentials such as asphalt, gasoline, and jet fuel. The upgrading is done by increasing the ratio of hydrogen to carbon by either removing carbon (coking) or adding hydrogen (hydro-cracking).

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On July 25^th, 2011, The Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) committed $35 million to help reconstruct Haiti’s electricity sector. The grant is the first of three policy-based operations the IDB expects to conduct over the next three years to help Haiti build a reliable and sustainable electricity grid.

The objectives of the grant are to develop and implement a new legal and regulatory framework to foster Haitian-based institutional capacity to govern and oversee the power sector while supporting the use of clean energy. Specifically, plans include supporting the creation of an Energy Direction as an autonomous entity in charge of planning, regulation and supervision of the energy sector. Importantly, this is the first step towards the creation of a Ministry of Energy, which Haiti does not yet have. The plans further call for expanding electricity access to rural areas and developing an institutional and regulatory strategy for urban biomass and Liquefied Petroleum Natural Gas. Finally, the grant aims to convert the national utility Electricité d’Haïti (EDH) into a financially and operationally viable company through short term targets of creating operational and financial indicators for EDH in an effort to reduce operational costs. The long term objective is to open up participation to the private sector by working with Haiti’s already established Commission for the Modernization of Public Enterprises.

Haiti has nine isolated small electricity grids throughout the country as opposed to one national transmission grid. A recently-approved grant by the Inter-American Development Bank aims to help Haiti increase the efficiency and reliability of their electricity sector.

EDH was created in 1971 and has a national monopoly on electricity generation, transmission, distribution and commercialization. It was formed to control the newly built Péligre hydroelectric plant. Since then, efforts have been made to privatize the company in part due to a Structural Adjustment Program led by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund in 1995; however, these efforts have since stalled. Today, combined technical and commercial electricity losses are above 50 percent. The Government of Haiti transfers 12 percent of the national budget annually, or over $100 million, to keep the company afloat.

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The C40 Summit was held in Sao Paulo, Brazil, a C40 participating city

Several international organizations have collaborated recently to combat climate change in the world’s largest cities. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and former U.S. President Bill Clinton announced last month that they will be combining the resources of the Clinton Climate Initiative, a program of the William J. Clinton Foundation, and the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group, which Bloomberg chairs, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in cities.

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By: Mark Konold and Cristina Adkins

This entry is an update on the Worldwatch Institute’s Caribbean Low-Carbon Energy Roadmap project.  

Dominican Republic Wind Zones

Worldwatch’s Climate & Energy team recently received a wind resource assessment for particular zones within the Dominican Republic. This final installment in a series of deliverables from 3TIER complements the solar analyses that 3TIER provided earlier in the project for the country’s two main cities, Santo Domingo and Santiago. With these resources, Worldwatch is now in the process of preparing a presentation of first findings for key in-country stakeholders that will be presented next month in Santo Domingo.

As was noted in a previous post, Worldwatch’s approach combines thorough policy analysis with 3TIER’s resource assessments to provide governments with options for fostering a low-carbon energy mix. These resource assessments are foundational for making planning decisions around generation and transmission in the Dominican Republic.

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It is well known that the two Chinese characters that comprise the word “crisis” translate into English as “danger” and “opportunity.” In the world of disaster relief and humanitarian aid, dangers are typically identified and dealt with expediently: get in, save lives, ensure stability, and deal with outstanding issues later. The approach is not a bad one—it prioritizes and puts first things first.

In this triage process, however, the environment is often overlooked as a key stakeholder, which can lead to further dangers down the road. But expanding the purview of humanitarian work to include the environment and long-range sustainability can create the opportunity to rebuild communities that are more environmentally and socially sustainable than those that existed before the disaster.

Without an environmentally sustainable plan, this emergency camp might do more harm than good.

Recently, the Environmental Change and Security Program of the Woodrow Wilson International Center hosted the launch of the Green Recovery and Reconstruction Training Toolkit (GRRT), a collaboration between the American Red Cross and the World Wildlife Fund. The GRRT comprises 10 modules aimed at the various facets of aid work, examining everything from project design to supply chains and livelihoods through the lens of sustainability. Over the past five years, the partnership has helped survivors of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami rebuild their communities as well as the natural environments on which they depend.

Here at Worldwatch, we see this as an excellent opportunity to help promote the idea of sustainable development, particularly as we move forward with a plan to develop a Low-Carbon Energy Roadmap for Haiti, a country whose recent earthquake and other disasters pose daily dangers and opportunities.

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Starting last week, international climate negotiators entered a new round of discussions to prepare for the next Conference of the Parties, scheduled for Cancun, Mexico, this December. Here we all are once again, in the lobby of the Maritim Hotel in Bonn, and the question after the first week of negotiation is: Are we moving forward? It’s certainly true that the shock of last December’s Copenhagen summit is slowly fading and everyone is actually getting back to work. We’ve also taken up discussions on content again, after a depressing three-day session in April on purely procedural matters.

The UNFCCC talks in Bonn, Germany, image courtesy of UNFCCC

The agenda now looks pretty much the same as it has in every session for the last two years. This is good, because it means that we are getting back to work and that all the past effort was not in vain. But it is also disturbing, because it means that we are likely talking in the same old circles that by most accounts did not lead to a result in Copenhagen. There are slight shifts in the agenda items, though. Increasingly more emphasis (and negotiation time) is being given to questions surrounding the measurement, reporting, and verification (MRV) of both mitigation and adaptation actions, as well as financial support for these actions.

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Consider all of the ways you’ll encounter water today. For myself, I will drink it by the glass and in the form of tea; I will use it to cook and clean up afterward; I will avoid it with the help of my umbrella and by navigating around large puddles (it’s raining); I will use electricity, which requires water to generate; and I will take a shower, use the restroom, wash my hands, and brush my teeth. Elsewhere in the United States today, families will breathe a sigh of relief as the Midwest’s Red River rushes past without flooding their homes.

Water is an integral part of our lives, for better or for worse. We don’t want too much, but we don’t want too little. Water also plays a vital role in economic development. But as the impacts of climate change continue to escalate, water will become even more scarce. In many places, groundwater sources like aquifers are being overdrafted beyond their ability to replenish, and surface water sources like rivers and lakes are increasingly threatened.

Consider the Tibetan Plateau, which has long been called “Asia’s water tower.” Glaciers from the plateau have long fed the continent’s mighty rivers—the Ganges, Brahmaputra, Yellow, Yangtze, Mekong, and Salween—and currently sustain nearly 2 billion people (almost a third of the world’s population), nurturing their diverse cultures and civilizations. As temperatures continue to rise, however, glacial melt will likely peak, followed only by decreasing water flows into these rivers. How will local residents adapt?

And let’s not forget the sheer number of people who will be affected by water scarcity. According to Jacques Diouf, Director General of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), in just 15 years a total of “1.8 billion people will be living in countries or regions with absolute water scarcity, and two-thirds of the world’s population could be living under water stressed conditions.” This means that 600 million more people, two times the population of the United States, will be living in water-scarce conditions, up from 1.2 billion people in 2007.

U.S. Secretary of State Hilary Clinton observed at today’s U.S. World Water Day event that “water may become a potential catalyst for conflict.” Water scarcity may incite conflict among neighbors, or it’s possible that diplomacy and cooperation could emerge. But the deathly impacts of poor water quality cannot be negotiated with. A new report from the United Nations Environment Programme found that more people die from the effects of unsafe water each year than from wars and any other kind of violence.   But people have the power to prevent water pollution, clean up contaminated water and wastewater, and restore the ecosystems that naturally filter and clean unsafe water. Not all water challenges are inevitable. Proper management and protection can go a long way toward sustainable water use.

Water scarcity could pose future security problems, but Clinton says that improving water and sanitation, which are closely linked, also present the U.S. with a “great diplomatic and development opportunity.” That is, if we embrace the importance of clean and safe water for life.