reegle Blog

WIREC is over and we all are back in our offices now. Time to write a short conclusion.

WIREC 2008 was a really impressing conference with a very good trade show. The reegle booth (which was located at the German Pavilion in cooperation with BMU) was very well attended and we could present reegle to many very interested people. Several new contacts could be established and I am looking forward to these new partnerships and cooperations. It was really a pleasure to be part of this exhibition and to support WIREC with our customized search for “Best Practices”

Some interesting links to get up-to-date:

• You can find some outcomes of WIREC on the WIREC website as well as on this site
• You can find a list of all collected pledges at the REN21 website.
• You can find an interesting interview about the need of policymakers to push Renewable Energy here.

During the day (Wednesday) more than 80 pledges were collected.

I just want to show you some highlights:

Australia:

• Renewables to account for 20% of the electricity supply in 2020
• Implement a national Renewable Energy Target scheme that includes a legislated annual target of 45,000 gigawatt-hours in 2020

Council of European Union:

• A minimum of a 20% reduction of greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 compared to 1990 levels
• 20% share of renewable energies in final energy consumption by 2020
• 10% minimum target for the share of biofuels in overall transport petrol and diesel consumption by 2020

German Federal Ministry for Economics and Technology:

• Facilitate the feed of biogas from domestically produced biomass into the natural gas network
• By 2030 Germany can develop biogas potential equivalent to 10% of the current consumption of natural gas; 6% is to be achieved by 2020
• The ordinance will specify the duty to connect biogas plants to the natural gas network and expand the existing prioritization rules for biogas feed-in

Norway:

• Attain carbon neutrality by 2050
• Increase support for clean energy in developing countries by NOK 400 million in 2008
• Establish energy R&D strategy (Energy21)
• Reach new national combined target for renewable energy and energy efficiency: 30 TWh increased annual production from 2001 to 2016

You can have a look on all the highlights here.

Day two of the Washington International Renewable Energy Conference began with a visit from President Bush, who toured the trade show floor before speaking at the ministerial.
There he pointed out the U.S. strategy for reducing oil use in America, and discussed current initiatives to increase energy efficiency and renewable energy use. He also called for an international agreement to slow, stop, and reverse the growth of greenhouse gases and he announced the U.S. commitment of $2 billion over the next three years to create an international clean energy technology fund (to help developing countries finance renewable energy projects).

You can read the full speech here.

Today is the first day of the WIREC 2008. We will start with the exhibition at noon. Some last minute changes: The REEEP booth has moved to Nr. 135 on top right corner of the hall. The reegle both is in the German Pavillion (see new Floorplan)

As a short teaser, what you can see at WIREC I added you our reegle video … enjoy it

I just wanted to inform you about an interesting side-event at WIREC 2008:

Accelerating the Deployment of Renewable Energy Technologies

Organized by: Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Partnership (REEEP) with American Council for Renewable Energy (ACORE); Alliance to Save Energy (ASE); US Department of State (link); Environment Canada (link)
Date: 4 March 2008, 5:00pm - 6:30pm
Venue: The Washington Convention Centre, Room: 156

One must be a registered participant at WIREC to be admitted to the side event. Please see www.wirec2008.gov for more information.

Description (partly taken from americanrenewables.com):
At the request of the US State Department, the Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Partnership (REEEP) has carried out regional consultation meetings in Latin America and the Caribbean, Asia and Southern Africa. The consultations, with regional RE companies, energy utilities, financial institutions, regulators, NGO s and consumers, have assessed how national governments can help to accelerate the development and deployment of renewable energy technologies within their regions, focusing on the following areas:

• Agriculture and Rural and economic development
• Technology, Research and Development
• Finance and investment
• Commercialisation

Within these areas, the consultation process has focussed on understanding:

• What drives current successful investments in RE
• What policy tools and business models underlie successful RE investments
• What problems does the current policy and business environment present to potential RE investors/project developers

The outputs of the REEEP regional meetings/consultations are contained in a report which provides a clear assessment of the status and opportunities for renewable energy systems, and provide direct suggestions on how national governments and the international framework can help to accelerate the deployment of renewable energy systems within their regions. The report, which will be the focus of the proposed side event, provides a clear and specific regional message on what is currently working, what is not working, and what is needed for renewable energy systems to be developed, attract investment and be deployed in the delivery of sustainable energy services for development and environmental stewardship.

You can download the Agenda here

I would be very happy to see many people there and I am looking forward to interesting discussions with the representatives of the REEEP regional secretariats of North America, South East Asia, Southern Africa and Latin America.

I am sure you know that one of the largest conferences on Renewable Energy will take place next week (3.2.2008 - 6.2.2008) in Washington DC.

I will be there and present reegle at the WIREC exhibition (Booth: 220 - German Pavilion - BMU). If you want to talk to me about reegle it would be a pleasure for me to meet you there. See attached image to see where the REEEP booth and reegle can be found.

I am really looking forward to this exhibition …. hope to see you and have a talk about reegle

A short update from the reegle product-management:

• We just finished the work on the the reegle - WIREC search and it will go online soon. This page will be dedicated to the Washington International Renewable Conference 2008 and will provide a customised search on Best Practices als well as links to several very interesting other sites. reegle will act as the main-source for finding all the Best Practices about Renewables at WIREC.
• We will update our categorisation system soon. The reegle categories will be adopted to better fulfill the needs of our users. Thank you for all the feedback we got on the old categories, this was very important for us and we tried to design the new categories to make it as user-friendly as possible
• A new feature will be launched soon: A site-suggestion system. If you know a site that should be in our reegle-index, just submit it through this tool and our experts will review it and add it to the reegle-sources if it is a high quality source