 today for our climate scope 2014 session. This is a particular pleasure both because we had the climate scope 2013 rollout, right? 2013? Yeah, that was last year. 2013 rollout last year and it was a really really popular event both the during the time that we did it but then throughout the year had lots of people sort of ask about it and it served as a really good fodder for discussion. And so today what we'd like to do is talk about what they've done this year, what Bloomberg New Energy Finance and our colleague Ethan Zindler who is a visiting associate here at the CSIS Energy Program, what they've done this year in terms of expanding and sort of deepening their coverage of what is it the climate for the investment climate for climate investment. I like that. So what the world looks like in terms of policies and processes put in place to incentivize or promote clean energy investment. So we've got a really great event today and one of Ethan's really good ideas was to rather than just go through sort of the context of the study and some of the findings but have both do that first and then also we've got with us today two practitioners, people who actually go about the business of promoting clean energy technologies and practices in in other countries as well to sort of give some perspective on how they view a document in a project like climate scope and some of the issues and challenges and opportunities they face in the work that they do each and every day. So without further ado, we'll get started. Greg Watson who is the head of strategic planning and partnerships at the Multilateral Investment Fund is going to introduce Ethan and then after Ethan's presentation, maybe actually during Ethan's presentation, if you've got clarifying questions, you can go ahead and ask them but we'll save sort of the discussion part for after our two panelists have provided some remarks. On the panel, we've got Don Ness who's the deputy coordinator for Power Africa and the trade Africa initiative. So thanks very much for being here Don and then David Rogers, who's the team leader for green growth and global and at the global environment facility and also just return back from Peru. So again, thanks very much for being here today and we look forward to a good discussion. So Greg. So Ethan asked me basically to give a brief overview of where the climate scope came from and a little bit of the history for those of you who weren't here last year and don't know how this began. Excuse me, I've got a little bit of a cold. So what is the climate scope? Really, the climate scope was designed to be a actionable source of data. So it's not designed to be a report that goes on the shelf. It's supposed to be actionable data for energy investments, for governments, for entrepreneurs, for investors and for project developers with the ultimate goal of mobilizing more climate investment into emerging economies. And we started to look at this in 2011, I think, from the multilateral investment fund in the IDB's perspective because we were seeing a lot of requests from our clients. We work with private sector projects in the region and I work on the green growth team there for this kind of data because we saw both internally within countries and externally in the wider investment world that there wasn't a lot of information about countries outside of maybe Brazil and Mexico and that there were real opportunities for future action and activity. The project does three things. It's an index and it measures the relative conditions for each country for clean energy and development and it weights them on a scale from zero to five and so you can see some of the scores between those two numbers. No country yet has come in with a five. It's an aspirational goal, I think. And then there's the report that comes with it, which provides a detailed description for every country that is studied, both with the financial resources, the market, the framework, some other information that we particularly were interested in looking at how these flows get down to the grassroots level through some cases microfinance. And it's an interactive online tool, which I think was the most interesting innovation when we started pulling this together because that way you can go on and you can change the weightings of the different rankings because we have an opinion on what those weights should be for the different components of the climate scope, but not every user wants to use the tool in the same way. And also there's an ability to download the full data set and to really get granular into the weights and into the data contained within each indicator. And so we thought that was an important component to making this really practical and usable by a wide audience. And so it goes to this point, which is that it's open source data resource. And a lot of the data that is involved in the report is data that in the past would have been behind a firewall, would have been very difficult for a grassroots entrepreneur or a policymaker in Guatemala to say, for example, to find. And we wanted to make that accessible to a wider audience. We knew that there was a wealth of information out there. It wasn't necessarily getting to the right audiences. And we thought that was important as part of the tool. A little bit of the history. Like I said, it was started in 2011 within the IDB, within the division where I work. And we did two sets of reports. The first was launched at Rio plus 20 based solely on Latin America and the Caribbean. And we saw really good results from the release of the tool and release of the report. And I'll get into those a little bit later. And we saw growing international interest. We were the first funder and we only focus on this hemisphere. So that really necessitated that we should open the discussion to other donors, other interested parties that would be interested in expanding to other regions of the world. And that's what's happened in subsequent years. And so this is the first year we've expanded the climate scope to 55 nations in our region, Sub-Saharan Africa and in Asia. And we now have both the IDB, DFID, USAID's Power Africa initiative as co funders of the program. And it goes a little bit to the selection of countries. The countries are selected based on where the source of funds are and the interest of the funders. And so if you see a certain country that's in or out, it's not necessarily because we didn't have data or because we weren't interested. It's more that it's the institutional priorities of the funders and the source of funds within those funders. We're now planning for next year's edition and the data collection should begin fairly soon. This is the coverage that we have now. You see in blue the initial set of climate scope countries, which was every country in Latin America and the Caribbean except for Cuba and some of the smaller Caribbean islands. And it gets there. There were some interesting lessons that we learned in the collection of the data. I mean, clearly some markets were much more challenging than others and required a lot of on the ground presence. Others, the information flow, the partnerships, the connections between Bloomberg Energy Finance, IDB, we were able to kind of pull some of that more easily. And I think that gave us lessons to be able to expand to some of the other countries in the world and to be able to figure out how to collect data and how to make this tool work in a variety of contexts. And just before I pass over to Ethan to get into the meat of the matter, when we created this, we were thinking about various different stakeholders that might use the product, policymakers, industry players, media, NGOs, clean energy users and entrepreneurs. We've gotten feedback. We hold feedback sessions after each release with very various variety of these players to find out how useful the tool was, what they've done with it. And we've put a few examples here of feedback. For example, with policymakers, we saw after the Climate Scope 2012, the Nicaraguan government and actually the ministry level created a working group and a committee tasked with boosting the country's score and subsequent additions. And that really ended up in some policy changes that we saw reflected in the following years. Climate Scope, Mexico has recently actually used a climate scope indicator in the indicators they're using to track the implementation of their new energy reform law. We've seen industry players say that this has been useful to them. And it's doing what we were hoping it would do. A Chinese producer has said that they've used this to really understand the Latin American market from the initial additions because they thought that it was an interesting market, but it was very difficult for them to find information. It's been fairly successful in the media. And all of our types of organizations, the NGOs, the academics, the World Bank, the international organizations, we talk amongst ourselves and some of the data is used in other reports and we pull from each other in various different ways. And then the users, I think, for me, this is the part that I am most interested in and closest to as someone who does projects on the ground. In the Bahamas, the report actually galvanized the industry to get together and to argue and to advocate with the government for a more active role of the government in supporting renewables in the country to move their industry forward. And we've seen that happening in various different countries and I think that for me is what we really want to see is we really want to see this creating action on the ground. And that's been a very nice result. So I'm going to pass now to Ethan Zindler from Bloomberg New Energy Finance, who's going to talk through the methodology, the scores, and kind of how this was put together for this year's edition. Thanks, Greg. And first thanks, Sarah, for hosting us here today. This is the second time we've done this, as you mentioned. So it was fun last year and it's great to be back. And of course, I really do want to thank Greg and Miff at IDB and of course USAID and UK DFID for supporting this project, which we're really very, very proud to work on. And it's been frankly a tremendous learning experience, I think, for us and for our clients. And for those of you who don't know Bloomberg New Energy Finance, we are essentially an energy market research firm. And our main clients are major investors in energy and clean energy in particular. So we feel that the information that we're gathering, in addition to all the other kind of boxes that hopefully it's checking, that Greg mentioned also is informing a very large group of people who have a great deal of assets that they're interested in deploying in all kinds of different ways, including in the developing world. So what you see in front of you is just how, you know, what the global climate scope output looks like. And I would say that the best way of consuming it is that, is that that web address and anybody who's online, please go, you know, take a look and see that right now. And you can look at the results in a variety of different ways. There is also a very large PDF that can be downloaded and a report that comes with it profiling all these countries and providing some of the qualitative background on some of them. And as Greg mentioned, we're very proud to put the whole Excel sheet up there. And what we think is a pretty nifty model that you can play around with and create your own charts and do all kinds of analysis for yourself. We really want to try and be open source as much as we can about this. All right. So as Greg mentioned, if you go on the website, you can adjust the weighting and all the main inputs into the climate scope score. And I sort of put this up right at the at the front to Greg's point as well, which is that, look, there's this is a system where we're going to score countries are going to show rankings. But the reality of it is there's no perfect way to do this. And we really do want users to be able to kind of use the data in their own way, make their own adjustments draw their own conclusions really based on what their interests are. So I'll show you the high level stuff. But again, the encouragement here is to anybody who's a policymaker or market participant or others, if you really want to make solid decisions, dive into the data, do your own work on this. All right. So just first, I'm going to talk for a moment about the methodology. As was mentioned, just to back up, you know, what climate scope does is we look at 55 countries in developing world. And ultimately, we gather a tremendous amount of data on each one of them. And we come up with a zero to five score. And where you rank in that continuum really says a lot about how welcoming you are for private investment and clean energy development. All right. So the four main parameters that we look at are one, the enabling framework, which looks at the policy and regulation of a country, the level of clean energy penetration so far, the price attractiveness. And I do want to stop and just mention that one for one second, which is to say that one of the sort of fundamental editorial positions of climate scope is that countries that have higher priced electricity, we consider more attractive markets for clean energy investment. That's because it simply means that clean energy capacity can be deployed in a more competitive manner in those countries. And then we look at the market size expectations as well. We also look at levels of investment. And you know, this is one of the things that our firm has done for a long time is track capital flows in different countries and projects, etc. around the world. So we look at how much has been invested. We look at where that money has come from. We do try to give countries more credit for capital that comes locally. We also conduct a fairly comprehensive green microfinance survey, which has really been very much at the prompting really frankly of MIF to get a sense of some of the microfinance opportunities that are specifically focused on clean energy. And then we do our best to try and understand cost of that though it's very challenging. Next we look at the low carbon business and clean energy value chains in different countries and essentially how much is on the ground in terms of wind, turbine manufacturers, but also things like service providers, developers and others. And we look really across the board. This one I will I will say is certainly influenced by the size of the country, larger countries tend to have more value chain segments. But it's something that we think is important for understanding, you know, the overall conditions in a country. And then finally we look at greenhouse gas management activities, carbon offsets, carbon policies and corporate awareness. Now, I just learned a lot of things at you. And I could probably talk all day about the methodology. I will not. We have about a 25 page document that explains it all as part of the report. And I would encourage folks to to read it because it is quite there is quite a lot of data. In total under these four parameters, there are about 190 different what we call sub indicators that went into the actual report. And even there's some cases sub sub indicators as well. So there's a lot of information in there and happy probably best afterwards to try and talk to anybody about methodology. But the best way to understand it is to actually read it because it is rather extensive and has evolved over the last couple of years. We certainly taken on input from stakeholders and we'll do so again as we move into 2015 as well. This year, though, one major change from the prior years. Well, there's been several major changes. This was mentioned by Greg. We did 26 Latin American and Caribbean countries the first year. This year, we're doing 55 countries globally. And that includes, by the way, specific analyses of 15 provinces in China and 10 states in India as well. I mean, mainly as a recognition of the sheer size of these of these domains compared to some of the Latin you do, you know, do analysis of Uruguay, which is three and a half million people. And then you want to do, you know, a state in India that has 50 or 100 million. You really have to do it completely. You can't just do India as a whole country. So that's the first change. But the second thing and within that is that, frankly, you know, just about all, not quite all, but almost all the countries in Latin America would be considered middle income. And this year, we took on a lot other countries that are the less developed spectrum. And so we had to adjust the methodology to some degree to take into account those kinds of conditions. When you're talking about a country that has well less than half the population on any kind of an electricity grid, you have to look at some other factors. So for this year for those countries, we looked at things like the electrification rate, the distributed energy regulatory framework, and the energy access policies that are on the books. We also, when it came to the value chain, looked at some of the so called off grid value chain factors as well, whether or not they have the existence of the kinds of players that can facilitate off grid development. And that was a pretty big change for us. But I think it was important because it's simply apples and oranges when you're comparing middle income countries to lesser developed ones. Anyway, this is again the website, but let me get on with actually talking about the findings. So I'm sorry if I pop this open just I'm having a little, I'm the only one I think in this room who's not seeing the slides really well, because there's about eight screens in here except for the near me. But so I'll get to the actual scores and rankings in just a second. But you know, when you gather this much data, obviously you can draw a larger conclusion. So I wanted to talk a little bit about a few things. The first thing is to sort of state, maybe the obvious to those in developing the development community. But the rate at which energy capacity is being added in the developing world is is increasing at a much faster pace than it is in the most developed countries. So again, climate scope countries are certainly not the entire developing world. But it is a 55 country chunk of it, which is substantial enough that you could sort of take that as a proxy and compare that to OECD countries, which is what we're doing here. So if you look at the rate of growth, you know, about 600 gigawatts of capacity has been added in these countries from 2008 to 2013. That's like the equivalent of I think three times Russia's installed capacity. So three Russia's were added over those five years, about two thirds of that about two rushes was added in China about 400 gigawatts in total. But the rate of growth overall in terms of demand for electricity is much higher in these countries, both on a percentage basis and on an actual absolute basis. We saw maybe 300 gigawatts added in OECD countries over those five years. So the demand is very strong. But I think what we found, which was also interesting was that the rate of growth of clean energy capacity. And here I would note that we talk about clean energy. And this is an important footnote for a lot of folks. I'm not actually talking about nuclear and I'm not talking about large hydro. I'm not talking about natural gas. I'm defining this fairly narrowly as renewables, wind, solar, biomass, geothermal primarily. But you look at the rate of growth in these countries in terms of their capacity on a percentage basis. It's been faster in climate scope countries than it has been in OECD countries. Now, of course you could say, well, on a percentage basis, of course it's faster. There's smaller countries, there's less activity going on. But actually I think this year, we'll probably see absolute volumes of new capacity added in developing countries that are higher than in the OECD countries. Now, a huge part of this is China, which is the world's number one manufacturer of wind turbines, of solar modules, but also the largest installation market for those technologies as well. So I only point this out within the context certainly of the things that we've seen in Lima and elsewhere about what countries can afford to do, what they are doing. The reality is they're doing a lot right now and they are finding a way to afford it in many cases. So I sort of throw that out there within the context of rich country, poor country debate that goes on in these talks. In terms of cost, this is one point I just wanted to make is that I think that one of the reasons why we're seeing this level of high deployment is policy and I'll get to that in a second. But it's also the sheer fact that in some of these markets you're talking about very expensive prices for electricity for a variety of reasons. It could be that they're burning a lot of oil, it could be that they get expensive coal, it could be who knows whatever the reason. It could be that it's an island country. So this is just a look at the cost of industrial power prices across these countries. You can see from left to right Haiti being one of the highest priced in the world, but running the game. But these are average prices and I know there's a lot of different ways to look at it, but this is sort of an average price look. And this is what we estimate right now at the levelized cost of electricity for solar photovoltaics. Now let me first be the first one to say this is an oversimplified analysis in the sense that the cost of solar PV varies greatly from part of the world to the world and whatever cost of capital you can get your hands on. But let me just point out that we estimate on a global average basis you can do PV in the neighborhood of $140 per megawatt hour. And the point being is that's cheaper than the incumbent price of electricity in a number of markets that we've studied. When you look at wind, again we do global LCOE analysis for wind, a levelized cost analysis. And you can see that at about $80 per megawatt hour, an even larger number of countries, wind is a technology that is in our view cost competitive. Again, you got to get your hands on financing. You've got, you know, there's a lot of factors that can impact this. But at the end of the day, thanks to, you know, dramatic declines in the cost of the equipment, these technologies are cost competitive in these countries. And I think that helps to explain part of the reason why we've seen so much development. Another reason, of course, is the fact that there's a lot more policy adoption going on in these countries as well. This is, again, pretty basic stuff, simply counting up the number of policies. And I would encourage anybody later, you know, to go to globalclimatescope.org. We tracked about 450 clean energy policies in these countries. There are capsules on each of them on the website, and you can click to the original documentation if you want to as well. But year on year, the number of policies that have been put on the books has been rising in these countries as these nations are increasingly trying to embrace this technology, these technologies for any number of different reasons. Energy security, maybe being number one, economic reasons, and ultimately climate, perhaps in some cases as well. I'm going to move, actually, I'll move fairly quickly now, but this is just the kind of analysis and chart that you can build off of the research, and this is just a look at total dollar volumes into clean energy in Africa. And you can see that there's been an incredible couple of years for South Africa in terms of attracting capital for new projects in some large degree. It's been funded by some development institutions, but others as well, locally as well. And you can see how much the money's gone up and down, but generally has been up and the other countries that are coming along. This is just a quick look and again, you could do this analysis yourself. This is a look at the technology splits that we're seeing in Africa overall. I'm going to move quickly just in the interest of giving everybody a chance to talk here as well. So these are the countries and I apologize to those who can't read. I'll get to it. I'll zoom in on this in a second in a forthcoming slide, but these are the top 30 countries. China is the number one country by the scoring at about 2.23. But it is worth remembering that this is all on a zero to five basis. And the average, I think, is about 1.1. So that means there's a lot of opportunity for growth. Let's put that in positive light. And we think we will continue to see that. I think actually we're starting to data collection again. We are probably going to see higher scores this year among a number of these countries. There's a lot of changes that have come into play. But this is just a quick glance. I'll zoom in here a little bit more. These are the bottom countries. And I'll talk a little bit more about who's where. But let's talk for just a second about the top 10 and the bottom 10. I highlight a few. So China, obviously, the largest country on the list. And you can see Uruguay, which was one of the smaller countries we analyzed. And I highlight those two just for a moment, just to try and say that we did our best to create a methodology where small countries could compete as well. And there's some factors in this survey that, frankly, have a bias towards large countries, like how many segments of a value chain do you have in place? Inevitably, big countries are going to do better. But Uruguay, on a per capita basis, saw more clean energy invested in its country than any other nation in 2013. Only 3 and 1 half million people there. I think it was about 10 billion. I've got to check my figures. Don't quote me on that. But on dollar investment, it was one of the very highest per capita. China, on the other hand, you know, obviously an enormous country, but is doing so much in this area. And it's not just in terms of viewing these industries anymore as simply export opportunities, but it is to serve a domestic market as well. And we've seen, really, I would say an evolution now in policymaking over there with a move towards wanting to facilitate more domestic clean energy. I would love to think that this is because of some sort of concern over global climate change. But it may very well be more driven by local concerns about smog and the problems that are caused there. Brazil is another country which, I frankly, did not attract as much capital last year as it had in prior years, but has put in place a series of policies, in particular, tenders and reverse auctions that have helped that clean energy industry to thrive. And we think put it on a good path going forward despite the economic challenges there. South Africa, similarly, has held tenders and has seen a good deal of project deployment and capacity build out. As I go through the rest of the top 10, it is a balance. We never know how this is going to come out, but we have, I think, at least three countries from each of the three continents that we looked at. And you can see also Kenya and Uganda crack the top 10 as well. And this is, in part, because in Kenya's case, there has been large-scale project development. We saw an announcement, I think, just yesterday about big wind turbine makers selling about 300 megawatts of new wind capacity into that country. And Uganda is in the top 10, in part because of some of the so-called off-grid conditions and the efforts towards allowing more off-grid to develop there. Now, at the bottom of the list, I'm not going to pick on anybody too much other than to say that, you know, sometimes countries, this is an assessment about the clean energy opportunity within a nation. And if you have, for instance, Paraguay, basically 100% large hydro generation, you don't need to add a whole lot of clean energy, new clean energy capacity. And thus, the opportunity there from an investor's perspective is pretty low. And this helps to explain it. Venezuela similarly, you know, there's obviously a very large fossil resource. There's not necessarily going to be the kind of opportunity for clean energy development there, at least not yet. There may be as policies change. And then there are other countries where you could make a pretty good case that they really should be doing more, given how expensive the local electricity is. And if you're an island nation like the Bahamas, you know, it's a case of policies and other kinds of things that could potentially allow those countries to attract more investment. Because I can tell you, from the private sector perspective, a lot of our clients are interested in opportunities in new markets, potentially like island nations in the Caribbean. In the interest of time, I'm not going to go through everybody here, but this is just, and I think we'll make the slides available afterwards. But you can see the stack up in Latin America, Brazil at the top, but interesting other countries up there along with them, Chile and Uruguay. Mexico, a fascinating story that we're of course watching very closely as they reform their energy sector at the moment. It's been a lot of focus on the oil industry, but it's the electricity industry that's also in markets that are being very much reformed right now. And Mexico could certainly see its score rise as that process continues. These are some of the nations I mentioned, South Africa, Kenya, Uganda, and you're at the top of the list. A number of other nations, there's a lot of opportunities going forward, but doing business in some of these places can be challenging overall, but some have really made real strides. Asia, China, number one, but India, somewhat far behind, but also doing a great deal, and in part because their manufacturing industry has been developing quickly for wind and solar, and India's coming along very quickly. In some of the other nations with room for improvement, you can see there as well. Finally, I won't go through all of this, but just to say that we did, again, just as a reminder, we did do this analysis for the Chinese provinces and the Indian states as well. And there is a pretty big gap within China in terms of some of the states, some of the provinces being much more favorable than others. Finally, I'll just finish up by saying where we're going with this project, and maybe if we're really lucky, we'll be back here one year from now talking about the next year's results, but basically we are, we've been holding a series of meetings to reconsider the methodology and hopefully improve it for next year. We're almost done with that process, and then we will send researchers out into the field again, February through April to gather all this information once again. Ultimately, our hope and expectation is to get the next iteration of this report out by October, which may seem like a long way off to some of you, to me it seems like tomorrow, because the amount of information that has to be gathered, and one of the things that we do try and pride ourselves on is getting information out about a calendar year in the following calendar, you're not two years later if we can avoid it. So it'll be about 2014 data that's released in 2015. And one of the reasons at our view that speed is important on all of this is because these markets are changing so quickly, and the technology costs have been evolving so rapidly that we think it's very important to stay on top of it very quickly. So with that, I'll just say thanks so much, Sarah, again, and I'll hand it over to Don. Are there any clarifying questions? Jane reminded me, because she's got one. Jane, the kind of energy program, the, I guess, 15 provinces and states in China and India, did you pick them by the types of industries that they have, how did you pick them just out of curiosity? It's a good, we did it certainly in consultation with the funders of the project and we picked the ones, frankly, we thought had seen the most activity today based on our understanding of the market over there. All right, well, Don. Good morning. It's great to be here today. I wanted to thank Sarah and CSIS for hosting the event and having Power Africa here and for Bloomberg New Energy Finance and IDB as well as DFID for our partnership over the last year on climate scope. What Ethan described earlier of trying to encourage greater investment, private sector investment in the renewable space is really perfectly aligned with what we're trying to do under Power Africa. And in part, I'll provide a little bit of background just to describe that for you. Power Africa approach, it was, well, Power Africa was announced in June of 2013 during President Obama's trip to Sub-Saharan Africa and this is really a new model for development for us. The idea behind it is it is private sector driven. That is, we are working through existing transactions that private sector developers and others are moving forward and the reason for that is it shows us two things. One is that someone thinks that there's a fundamental economic return that can be earned on a particular transaction and as a result, that helps us build in a level of sustainability into the transaction going forward and that's really key for us going forward. So our goal is really to, USAID serves as a as a secretariat for Power Africa and we're working across 12 US government agencies which include OPIC, XM, Department of Energy, State Millennium Challenge Corporation and several others like Treasury and that all have different tools that can be brought to bear for energy sector development. And so these kind of come in a couple of different buckets. We have financing, technical assistance and training, commercial engagement as well as diplomatic engagement and I'll explain a little bit about that in a bit. We're focused on this from a transaction basis. That is, we have across, we have six focused countries but we're also engaged regionally and we are tracking about 26 transactions that cover renewable technologies as well as a handful of gas transactions as well and this covers the whole scale of wind, solar, geothermal, biomass, small hydro and others and the idea behind these is that they are transformational and foundational is that they help set precedents in the countries where they're working to help bring and encourage investment going forward. And so let me talk about that for a second because this is another key point about Power Africa is that one of the things that we looked at as we were developing Power Africa is looking at the scale of the issue and how we could best address this, the gap here. There's about 600 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa that do not have access to electricity and we know even though the resources of the governments and the donors while formidable are not sufficient enough to cover the gap and the estimates that of how much investment overall that's needed range anywhere from about $300 billion to a trillion dollars over the next 15 to 25 years in order to reach universal access and so the question came down to us how do you bridge that gap and so fundamentally what we're doing is we're taking transactions that set these precedents for countries and looking for how we can improve the investment environment within the energy space so that once one transaction is done other private sector investors can come in behind that and replicate what's been done. So and that's applied in two ways. So we have two threads particularly as it relates to renewables and the first is utility scale transactions that I talked about. We have these 26 priority transactions that we have and so one example of how we've engaged on Power Africa is the case of Kenya which I think Ethan just referenced before there was a large announcement yesterday about I think some turbine sales to support one of the projects there and so Kenya has set ambitious goals for the country in terms of adding increased capacity to the country and a large focus of that is on renewable in the form of wind and geothermal and so one of the things that we've done is we have engaged with the government and with the private sector to help encourage these wind transactions and so how we do that is we get feedback from the private sector investors who've said we think there's some great opportunities here in Kenya but we're particularly concerned about the ability of the utilities and the regulators to manage the intermittent energy generation that comes from wind generation and so we wanna know that the grid code and the other grid management elements are sufficient to manage that intermittency without destabilizing the grid because if the grid is destabilized then we can't count on necessarily on being paid for the power that's being generated so what Power Africa did is we engaged it at about four different levels and I won't get into all the detail but I'll talk a little bit is we did some analysis with three key institutions Kenya Power and Light, Contraco and Kenjin and looked at how they were situated to manage the grid and incorporate this new power that could come on board. We did some partnering with utilities, some of the peers outside from the United States and India and other countries to help them understand what were some of the international best practices for managing intermittency and we've also worked with them on amending there and strengthening the grid code so all of these help reduce the risk and help encourage greater investment in that space so that's one way that we've engaged and just a quick additional point here is in almost all of our focus countries and more broadly on some of the regional aspects we have a key interlocutor on the ground or one of the key ways that we provide assistance is someone called a transaction advisor and they're usually someone who has tremendous experience within the finance side of energy and sits between the government and the private sector and helps each side understand each other and what are the concerns, what are the goals and then helps bridge that discussion so that they're each speaking the same language because obviously we talked a little bit as part of Climate Scope there's this whole question of what are the tariffs that are being paid for this and obviously for private sector perspective they want that tariff to be higher but frequently governments as a matter of political and social policy have set these tariffs lower and so one of the jobs of Power Africa and of these transaction advisors is to help each side understand each other and understand fundamentally what is the economics behind this in addition to the political and social impacts so being able to show the government what is the actual economics of producing the power so that they understand how the costs can be covered for this and making sure that those costs reflect the whole gamut of operations and maintenance of investment over time that's required to keep some of these facilities running over the say the 25 year economic life of these assets and so that's not always factored into their understanding and so that's really critical for us in helping making sure that both of these parties are speaking the same language. The other thread that Power Africa's engaged on is something called beyond the grid and this is our effort to focus on or to take into account the realization that there are there's huge issues with in terms of rural access huge areas that are underserved and are not likely to be connected to the grid within say the next five to seven years and so this effort is intended to leverage a lot of great work by private sector and donors in terms of developing new technology and new business models for providing off grid and distributed energy resources in these areas and so what we're looking to do here is to act on more of a wholesale basis by helping leverage interests from institutional and impact investors to put more resources into the space. So we have 40 partners and beyond the grid who are interested in investing upwards of about a billion dollars and we're working with them to figure out what are the best ways to mobilize that while reducing the transaction cost of making that investment and then the second part of this is looking at what is the overall environment for investing in these types of projects and making sure that it facilitates this process of scaling up these successful business models and technologies to a greater scale so that they can move from pilot phases and smaller scale coverage into greater scale and an example of this is in Tanzania where we were working on a small hydro project and one of the key considerations there was this interest of getting a sovereign guarantee for because obviously in Tanzania there are issues with the liquidity of Tanesco who's the main off taker there and so investors wanted to have some level of comfort knowing that they were gonna be paid for the electricity that was being provided by the project. A lot of countries have, there are challenges with respect to providing sovereign guarantees with respect to their overall levels of indebtedness. The IMF obviously takes a close look at this and usually has an opinion on how much countries can issue sovereign guarantees for and so one of the things that we did is we engaged with the project developer and the government to look at providing risk insurance through private providers rather than having a sovereign guarantee and in this case that helped facilitate and give the investors comfort that the off taker risk would be covered sufficiently so that also was facilitated in the case of Tanzania we actually have two transaction advisors one operating out of the Ministry of Energy and then another one operating out of the Rural Electrification Agency looking at the small scale projects and efforts and so that kind of in a snapshot gives our overview one of the things I'll just kind of close with is just to give you a sense of the scale of interest from the private sector and to show to the extent that Power Africa is very much a private sector driven initiative is that we have 40 private sector partners that have made over $20 billion in commitments to Power Africa in terms of transactions over the life of the initiative and these include private sector developers, EPC firms, equipment suppliers, financial firms, banks, infrastructure funds and other players in the energy sector and so we've really been encouraged by this level of interest by the private sector in fact we've been so encouraged that President Obama tripled our goals at the African Leaders Summit this past year and so we're going through a process right now of looking at how we will potentially expand over the next year leveraging in the first phase of Power Africa the focus on the six focus countries as well as our regional efforts and I would just note that of the top 10 countries in the climate scope for Africa, five of those are Power Africa focus countries, Liberia's the sixth and they come in at 11 and so we think that just to illustrate the importance and these countries that we're engaged with climate scope is really a strong tool for us to work with the governments and to show what are some of the areas in terms of the policy space that they can work on and then also working with the private sector to really encourage them in terms of investing in this space and in these particular countries and so with that I will conclude and pass to David. That's great, thanks Don, it just goes to show that in life good work is rewarded with more work so congratulations. Super, thank you so much. Look forward to this discussion very much, thank you Ethan and it's a pleasure to be on the panel with these intuitive leaders because I find that the climate scope has really opened our eyes and the eyes of our agency partners into where to target their scarce public resources and it's been a tremendous new tool. Very quickly, as you may know, the Goldman Environment Facility is an operating entity in the Financial Mechanism United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change which just concluded the COP20 and Lima last week so we've been donors have found it helpful to have an organization like the Jeff and so we've invested so far $4 billion plus in climate change mitigation since 91 and one of the things that we strive for as Don indicated is that our investments should be a catalytic, innovative so that others, especially the private sector can come in afterwards and replicate. I've been asked to talk about our renewable portfolio I'm really an energy efficiency guy by heart and I think this is a very important area that as climate scope matures and grows where our country partners are gonna absolutely need this same type of information on how they can best establish the right environment for investment in energy efficiency which is some things are similar many things are different but in renewable we've been very pleased as part of the Jeff to fund almost every renewable technology that has been out there. We were one of the early funders in concentrating solar power and what we're really pleased is that in the maturing of the Jeff portfolio we have been following the technology development and encouraging the policy development in our country so we've seen the evolution that Ethan described in terms of the new cost competitiveness of solar and wind. Where our projects are all over in the developing world we've been especially pleased to be on the ground early in some of the new hotspots like China, like India but I'm gonna give you a couple of examples later of where we need to be in the future. Our most of our resources went to Asia and that's not a surprise since China is our single largest recipient India is our second largest recipient but we have a lot of investments on renewable projects in Latin America, in Africa and we've spent most of those resources to help promote enabling environments through policy but we've also provided a lot of resources for what we call incremental finance. The difference between what the country would have invested in before the Jeff came on board and the clean energy technologies that we encourage them to invest in with our resources. So in the last four years we have again continued to push out in support for renewables. I think energy efficiency investment was around 250 million in this last four years, about 300 million for renewables with a significant chunk going to Africa and this has been a trend in that China doesn't really need our support for on-grid renewable energy right now so we've been focusing our investments in China in other places. But where are we going? And here if you'll allow me to just try to draw together some of the themes that we've heard I believe that in many areas of the world for on-grid renewable power, private sector investment is already so far out in front that development institutions, financial institutions like the Jeff are really we're supporting on the edges, on the margins. So as I mentioned, if China, some ministry in China came and asked us for a on-grid wind power, onshore wind power project in China we'd say really? What do you need us for? You've got National Development Bank of China, you've got ADB, you've got World Bank, you've got private sector, you don't need us. But if that same idea came to us from another country in a different location where private sector had not found the environment for investment as conducive, that's where the Jeff and its partner agencies can come in. So a couple of other things though that we're looking at. For us, three key words that we are interested in right now because of the challenges of global climate change are speed, scale and reach. So on speed, we really can't do much for the private sector. They're much faster than we are. But we can help them get to that speed if we help promote enabling environments and policy conditions. So one of the first things that we're looking for on my short list here is to improve and stabilize policy regulatory and contractual frameworks as Donald indicated. This is something where a small amount of public money can help a government make a real change and improve the environment. On scale, again here, we don't have a lot of resources and private sector has a lot more resources financially. So when you're talking about big scale projects, the Jeff contribution is going to be quite small. Occasionally though, and here we partnered with IDB in several instances and with IFC, when there is a gap between commercial financing and what the project needs in order to go through, a Jeff can provide a little bit of concessional financing that can, even though small, really help move a big scale project forward. We just did that recently with IFC in Morocco with the Warsaw Zide Concentrating Solar Plant Facility. It's a billion dollar plus project. Everyone that you know of is in that project, but there's $10 million of Jeff money in that project. And I'm not a financial engineer, I'm a chemical engineer, but our money made a big difference in allowing IFC to stay a major partner in that project. So again, here's an example where we can help with scale. But where we can really help is in reach, in helping go to places where it's not quite friendly enough for a private sector. And we wanna go there in those places and help. One of the ways we do that is to try to help look at some of the challenges for clean energy with systems level thinking. So in many projects that we've done in the past, we're asked to do a one-off demonstration for renewable energy in a remote village. And then that's it, we're done. And we're asking now our agency partners to be a lot more thoughtful, bring a lot more integrated thinking into their project. So maybe water is the real challenge in that local area. And maybe the clean energy is going to be a source for improving water quality. Maybe it's waste. Maybe there's a challenge with land degradation in the area or access to the forests. Or maybe the forests are being destroyed because people are using wood very inefficiently and we can help replace that with an improved technology. So again, we're asking our partners to look at things through a more systems thinking and integrated approach. We're also asking our partners and we're gonna be putting a lot of our resources in the next few years is in making sure that energy supply becomes climate resilient. It's donors do not want to see their resources going for clean energy, even though it's reducing carbon tons now, if the weather patterns change or if the water disappears or if the wind changes and that resource now becomes less helpful in the future, that's not good for the donors and it's not good for the recipient country. So we are asking for climate resilience to be a big criteria in our future project designs. And again, on grid, I'm sure most of the folks in this room can probably speak on this topic better than I, but grid modernization, grid intelligence, smart grid, whatever you wanna call it. You've seen the challenges in many countries, India in particular where they've got more wind than their grid can handle and their producers are not able to sell their wind as Don indicated because the grid can absorb it at certain times of the day. And as we get into more countries that are going to go on this steep growth curve that Ethan indicated, having them modernize upgrade their grid at the same time I think is gonna be incredibly important. We believe as well that many developing countries may be poised to leapfrog in the area of grid modernization maybe past some of the very structured thinking that's going on in the US and in other OECD countries. We do believe and we do have enough resources that we can help of the private sector in the renewable space with risk guarantee mechanisms, risk sharing, performance based funding mechanisms that in all cases we design to crowd in private sector financing. So for example, in India along with the government of India and the climate investment fund, we have a large risk sharing facility that we're working on with the World Bank to try to attract local banks into the clean energy space. And there's a lot of domestic capital and we would like to get that domestic capital focused on domestic investments in clean energy. Now a couple of the on-grid technical areas that we do expect folks to be submitting Jeff projects in the next few years include micro hydro, energy storage, hybrid gas and renewable systems. We also are hearing a lot of interest from our client countries and agency partners on geothermal. IDB rolled out a new Latin America geothermal fund in the last two weeks. And this is a very important area for our client countries but also one of the most risky and most capital intensive. So it's gonna take some very smart people and a little bit of patience to figure out how to make this in the market work. Let me then just wrap up with a discussion on the off-grid side. And here, echoing Donald's concerns and priorities, a lot of our developing country partners still have hundreds of millions of people without access to electricity or modern cooking. Options and they're still using a dung and biomass for cooking and decimating local forests and causing incredible air quality and health problems that primarily affect women and children. So what we're trying to do in this space is to figure out how to apply some of the lessons learned from on-grid evolution and growth and put it into the off-grid space. And so what that means for me is that we need to be much smarter about helping developers create projects that are bankable. So for me, that means project preparation facilities or providing seed capital that helps small scale developers, domestic developers address local conditions in ways that allow them to create a sustainable business model because we're way past the time where we can do a demonstration and put 10 solar panels on 10 health clinics and then leave. We don't have time for that anymore. The countries need sustainable and growing off-grid solutions. So for us, that means helping our agency partners, helping our country clients develop the right kind of policy tools for the off-grid market as well as the ones that are working so well in the on-grid market. Also, I wanna pick up on what Ethan was saying about value chain or what we sometimes call supply chain. And I don't think the word value chain showed up in Lima for two weeks and that's a real frustration, right? Because the vocabulary there is about technology transfer and the vocabulary here, and I think in climate scope and what needs to happen is about sustainable business models and supply chains. So for us, that means supporting not just a panel but parts, service, training, installation, et cetera, et cetera. Another area in off-grid that I think is incredibly important and could benefit from our support is standardization and aggregation of small-scale projects. We're finding that capital markets are very interested in clean energy in developing countries, but the project sizes are too small for direct investment so we need tools, mechanisms, groups that can aggregate these small-scale projects, create packages that are attractive to investors. And I think it's hardest in off-grid but what an exciting place to be as an entrepreneur if we can put those pieces together and make that happen. We think mini-grids, micro-grids in rural areas are really ripe for demonstration, validation of technologies, the IT space, information communication technologies absolutely have to come into this space and we think that can be done at low cost and create some replicable examples. And finally, let me just mention that many of our partners are already mentioning that as an entrepreneur working on off-grid solutions, the worst thing that can happen to them is the grid arrives in their work zone. Now you say, well, that doesn't make any sense but of course it makes a lot of sense. You go, you're an early mover, you make a big investment, you have paying customers and then a politician comes and promises that the grid will arrive in your village as soon as they're elected. So whether it ever really happens and it usually doesn't happen, now your investment is frozen and your clients go into wait and see mode. So I think one of the things that we need to experiment with are some risk reduction models for those entrepreneurs that are willing to go into that space but where the coming of the grid may radically impact their investment model, their business model. So those are some of the areas that we think deserve a lot of additional study. I've got some more information on past projects. Sarah, maybe if the slides can be circulated to the group, there's lots of examples on our website. We've got lots of reports. Every Jeff project for the last 20 years is on our website for you to research but if I could just say again and I don't think I emphasize this enough, we are a huge fan of climate scope because our agencies, our development partners are designing projects every day of the week and we require them to look at climate scope and to say is that policy package that Jeff project that I wrote four years ago, does that mean anything anymore? And we look at climate scope, we look at Bloomberg New Energy Finance, we look at Climate Policy Initiative, we look at CSIS tools and the project that you want to submit now for funding needs to be different and it needs to be based on this type of very helpful information. So we're a big fan and we're happy to be here. I look forward to that continued discussion and next year. Thanks guys, that was very, very helpful. So we've got about 20 minutes left for a bit of a discussion. If you do have a question, please raise your hand, state your name and affiliation and eventually if there can be a question mark somewhere involved in your question, that would be helpful. But let me start really quick because I have two things I want to follow up on. I've got a whole list of questions but I'll try and have some discipline here. One was sort of, maybe I'll pose this towards Ethan because we were talking about it a little bit on the elevator on the way down. So a lot of what you're doing with climate scope is about assessing an investment framework, right? And I remember when I was involved in sort of thinking about previous versions of that, one of the questions I had was, how much do you have to take into account just the basic investment framework in any one given country at any one period of time but easily correlated with that is sort of the market conditions, right? So building off of those two ideas, what do you think that sort of, one, are there any places that you were sort of assessing this time around where you just sort of had to be honest with yourselves and said, clean energy investment, any kind of investment in the energy sector really a no go here and how do you evaluate that within what you do? But then secondly, as we're very aware here in the energy program, there's sort of the coming sort of low oil price downturn while it's here and we don't know how long or how low and from a US perspective, oil is a transportation fuel but for a lot of the countries you're dealing with that's not necessarily just what oil is and so how are you thinking about maybe with your BNEF hat, what the impact of lower oil prices might be in that context? I'll ask that one first. Okay, so thanks, Sarah. Two interesting questions. Maybe the oil question is such an interesting one. Let me start with that. So the charts I showed, looking at the cost competitiveness of renewable energy technologies, comparing those versus the industrial electricity prices and by the way, I could show ones that compare those to residential electricity prices and these technologies, particularly solar looks even better given how expensive retail electricity can be in these countries. Those tariffs are reflective in many cases of oil prices. Not always, but in a number of cases, I think one sort of point of clarification sort of a lot of the media coverage that's gone on around low oil prices, it is worth remembering that particularly in the developed world or the most developed countries, oil plays a very small part in power generation. It's really, it's kind of apples and oranges. But when you're talking about lesser developed countries where you're talking about diesel or oil being burned, it is a bigger part of the story. And so when I'm going back to those slides, the analysis that we did was based on electricity tariffs from 2013 and those tariffs were based in many cases on the price of crude that was over $100. So it'll be very interesting as we go and redo this analysis this year to see if that's changed. I think the reality of it is, is it does make it more challenging for renewables to compete in these countries. On the one hand, on the other hand, I would point out that the sheer level of volatility that we're seeing with the oil price is a bit of a reminder of the advantages of doing clean energy. Because the one thing I can see, what is the oil price today? What will the oil price be tomorrow? I don't know, I mean, but I can tell you that if you go and you put a affordable take system into a house, well what's the price of the electricity of that five years from now? It's the current cost of that project amortized over the life of the project. There is the variation, this uncertainty is not there. So the one thing this is a bit of a reminder of is just the incredible level of volatility involved in oil and its impact. So I think that's worth sort of keeping an eye on, but there's no question that this has the potential to make renewables a little bit more challenging in terms of competing in some of these countries. But certainly anybody else any thoughts on that? Maybe just to build on that for Don and David, I did have sort of a different set of questions, which is both of you talked a little bit about on grid, off grid and sort of your approach to enabling those kinds of technologies and the role that your institutions play in both of those sectors. I found it interesting this idea that you have a more, you have potentially a more active role to be able to play in things that are off grid, just given sort of the status of the market, but at the same time that a grid itself could pose a threat to that kind of investment. But you also talked about the ways in which you're trying to enable smart grid and sort of a new model for electricity generation and building in both the sort of sustainability and resilience piece. How does that, I mean, how does that work, right? I mean, like the problem here being that, maybe in some countries ultimately grid access is still something that they predominantly want to be able to achieve at some point, right? And so in the ways in which you're working in some of these communities, to the extent that they would like to eventually be able to have a smart grid, a connected grid, so they have the resilience of both systems. Is that something that you're working on as well at sort of a planning stage in terms of working with governments on their eventual strategies? Or is that sort of, are your efforts at promoting and getting momentum behind some of these off grid storage options to be able to reach that speed of encouraging rural access? Is that sort of, is the impetus to get more of those opportunities off the ground before you can fix what is oftentimes a fundamentally broken, if not corrupt, if not working appropriately, sort of electricity planning system? I think what I would say to that is in many of the countries where we're engaged, we are working with the government in conjunction with other donors. So I mean, the really key message I would leave here is that what Power Africa does builds on the efforts of a number of different donors and a number of different stakeholders within the power sector and years of work leading up to what, when Power Africa actually started up. So being very cognizant of like the role that the World Bank and the policies space, efforts to come up with energy master plans for these countries have been critical. You see the kind of the proactive efforts of say you're of Kenya kind of coming up with their, their very ambitious goals to add five gigawatts of generation to the grid. I think the other element that I would add though is in terms of, you know, there's probably two parts to this question of off grid versus on grid discussion is one is, you know, we're private sector driven and so there are very smart developers, investors in who are operating on a for profit basis that are making educated decisions on what is gonna be on the grid. What is the, what are the models that are gonna show this return making assumptions about how long they're gonna operate for before there is some potential connection with the grid. And the other is, you know, a lot of this is, you know, some of these areas we just know over time. It's gonna be a long time before they get connected with the grid. The other element to this is I think, I think you referred to this earlier and it may have been another one of the panelists here is, you know, we have this opportunity here to leapfrog in the same way that we had in the telecom space where you don't have to build up a large, you know, larger infrastructure that has big price tags attached to it in terms of transmission and distribution. And so there's opportunities where you can engage these areas on a much more cost effective scale than you might otherwise, so. Well, no, I think that's a very good point. And I guess maybe a sarcastic way to answer your question is that we don't have the answer. We're a project funding agency. And so it's very rare that one Jeff project will solve a nation's electrical grid problems or off grid problems. But what we can do, and we're working with IDB and our other partners, we're very excited is we pick a problem or a gap or a barrier and we fund a project that addresses that gap or barrier. And then we offer that up as a solution that can be included in the government's future policymaking and planning processes. So in India, for example, we're working with the World Bank to address off grid challenges at the state level rather than at the national level because the national level is too cumbersome, too bureaucratic to deal with those issues. So in that case, we go to a particular state and identify local financiers, local entrepreneurs and find out what can the state do to support them in building those off grid solutions. And then hopefully, as Ethan said, that state might have 100 million people. So that's a pretty big solution right there, but then you can expand that to other states in that. But I do think that another area where we're really depending on tools like climate scope is there's already a lot of great lessons learned and best practices out there for designing both on grid and on grid systems. And we still have challenges communicating those best practices to the farthest reaches of the globe where they're most needed in some cases. So, yeah. It's a really interesting question. I was also in Lima last week and I spent a lot of time with these kinds of entrepreneurs that are doing off grid solutions. And what multiple of them said to me was, can you please talk to the other side of your own institution? Could let us know what's going on with grid access initiatives within the IDB because you've got private sector divisions that are working on these spot solutions that are really innovative business models and you've got the energy division could come in with a huge loan that could obliterate the project in a few years. And I think that's a criticism for our institutions that we need to take on board and do a better job of. In the IDB, one of the things that the energy division is doing is coming up with a mapping tool that uses GIS data to show where the unserved off grid populations are. And then you can actually see from a project developer or a government's perspective, here it's gonna be too costly to bring the grid. It's a remote area in the Andes and the grid's not going to get there. So it helps with better planning for which solutions go where. And there's various different layers of data. And I think as those kinds of information tools which kind of supplement the work of the climate scope become more available, it really helps us make better decisions as to what the solution is that's best targeted for a specific area. And in Latin America and the Caribbean, I mean that's really one of the, because the off grid, the unserved population is smaller, we're at the point where most of those populations are in places that are probably not going to be served or that are gonna be served very far in the future. And so we have a little bit of a luxury in that we know the areas we can work because the grid's probably not gonna get there. But those tools help us. Just real quick on the climate scope end of things, we did try and create a scoring whereby we try to highlight best practices for policy makers in this area. So for instance on the mini-grid, if you build a mini-grid within that country and you're the operator, do you have the autonomy to set tariffs as you see fit? Or do you have to consult with the state grid operator on that? It makes a huge difference on the entrepreneur about whether they can build that mini-grid and have it be ultimately profitable. That's one example. And those countries that do allow that got higher scores. Now the reality of it, of course, is that that could be the policy today and then tomorrow they just build the grid out and they take the whole project over. We recognize the shortcomings of that, but we did try and build in a way of acknowledging countries that do more to allow autonomous development of this kind of stuff. Just to follow up on that really quickly, because one of the things I thought about when you were going through some of your findings to clarify that places where electricity prices were high were of a greater advantage for clean energy. And I thought to myself at the time that that likely has to be caveated by sort of subsidies and access and payment issues, right? Obviously, because if it's a high electricity price, but it's a smaller market because nobody can participate because it doesn't encourage sort of, or you have like widespread non-payment issues that would be kind of a barrier as well. Yeah, sorry. I like you Ethan, you're very concise. We had a question right over here. I'm Deena Stoner, representing the Cooperative Financing Corporation. So we're very interested in your rural off-grid issues. And I have a couple questions that I would be interested in your perspectives on. One of our experiences as we've gone across the world putting together private utility companies that would give a, that were cooperatives that would put comprehensive democratic controlled kind of solutions in the area was that we had issues with the state or nationally owned utilities that really did not want a private utility on the ground. And this has been a major barrier to setting up investment. Where we can get cooperatives on the ground, we find they're very sustainable. Bangladesh is an example. The Philippines is an example. Costa Rica is an example in the past. Are you looking at this mismatch of local solutions that are utilities that come in with and work with the local community for locally workable solutions? That's number one. And two, I would be interested in hearing, and this is the way on the other end of the question, how if some you could give some examples of the leapfrogging that you're talking about that could happen there where they could be seen as the leading edge, bleeding edge of investment that developing countries could use. And third, I simply mention, I'm sorry, that probably we are the example in the United States of standardization serving for 76% of the land territory in the United States. The REA early on set policies right from the beginning to standardize all poles, all transformers, every piece of equipment, all trucks, all equipment, which means today even that system is used and you see it in storm recovery mostly now today. Thank you very much. What I'd like to do, we're gonna run short on time. So I'd like to add the question from this gentleman here to the docket and then maybe one of you can respond. Hi, I'm Seth Stolgis with Kennergy Solar and Johns Hopkins. I was wondering if there's been any studies that have looked at the cost of implementing large scale grids in some of these rural areas because my thought would be as a, if you are an entrepreneurial developer developing micro grids in a rural region where they already have electricity but it's expensive, the cost of implementing a more reliable up-to-date grid would be absurdly expensive and that the cost of electricity certainly wouldn't go down. So is this really, do you guys think this is a threat in rural areas or is it more just cities or more urban areas that we shouldn't be developing micro grids for threats of a real grid coming into play? Okay, both sets sort of focus on that off grid on grid piece. I don't know if one of you wants to take a shot at it. And then before we are gonna end, Ethan, I'm just gonna give you a heads up that I'm gonna ask you to end on sort of the, the probably most asked about questions that you get, which I feel like if we didn't ask it here, we would be missing the opportunity, which is where is your next greatest area for potential expansion? And you said nobody gets a five. Outside of this group, can you imagine a country that could get a five? I'm gonna start off. Sure, sure. Thank you so much. I really appreciate the comments. And in fact, I took a call just recently from a development agency asking for information on the US of rural electric cooperative system and where could they find out more so that they could take those ideas and share them around the world. It's a great case study. Here's a leapfrogging example for you, I think, in terms of payment systems, folks using their cell phones to make payments on their electricity, their off-grid electricity system. I mean, a few years ago, not possible, and collecting payments in a remote area, very expensive. So that's an example where from our point of view, several countries could take advantage of that approach and go even farther financing on your cell phone bill of some type, water payments, water services on cell phones. And in many cases, the cell phone companies have diesel-powered generators powering the cell phone tower in a remote area that can become the basis for a mini-grid or a micro-grid. And if you can replace that diesel generator with a biomass gasification system or another renewable system, now you're not only reducing carbon emissions, but you're giving local folks more control over their system. But I do believe there's a lot of competition for this gray zone of grid and off-grid. I mean, you go to a major metropolitan area in a country that has an unreliable grid. Well, every store has a backup generator, right? And every one of them, when they turn on, is spewing all kinds of air pollution and consuming very expensive fuel. So even if there's an established grid, there are opportunities for entrepreneurs, but there's also risks. And I'll just leave it at that. Sure. Let me add a couple of points here. One, I guess, one of the luxuries that Power Africa has as a private-sector-driven initiative is that we have a dialogue with the governments on whether or not they're creating a space or crowding out this development in terms of mini-grids and off-grids, as well as the private sector in general. There are a number of the countries have issues with respect to who's the main off-taker of power and if others can take that on. We can, our whole focus, fundamental to Power Africa is each of the focus countries have MOUs with us, where they've agreed to certain follow-through actions with respect to the policy environment and clearly demonstrating that commitment is one of them, creating the space for private-sector engagement. As we go through this expansion process, that's another kind of core principle that we'll be looking at. And we're looking for what we call a progressive partnership, whereas the greater commitment on the behalf of the governments to some core principles of encouraging private-sector investment will allow them to receive greater engagement in terms of funding. So we're not alone in this engagement. Within the US government, we obviously have the Millennium Challenge Corporation and other parts of the US government engaged. And then more broadly, other donors are heavily engaged. The World Bank and a number of the bilateral donors as well are encouraging the governments to not only focus more on the private sector side, but also move towards commercialization with respect to their energy services companies in there. The other thing I'll just mention with respect to leapfrogging, it's not only in addition to some of the technologies, it's also the business models that they're following as well. So looking at prepaid systems that help deal with issues related to commercial losses, looking. There was another example that was rattling around my head that's escaped me now, but I think that's the other thing as well is looking at what business models are helping that are nontraditional that are really helping to, I know what it was, where you have anchor tenants. Obviously power is an incredible input to not only economic growth, but also to the provision of health, to education, to a number of other key development objectives where maybe the government or other people are footing the tab, and then there's excess capacity available to offload to other users in the communities that are surrounding them. And so looking at those business models and how you tap into that as well. And again, I would emphasize the point that David raised with respect to, it's not only the provision of power, but it's how reliable is that and how much quality there is. I mean, if you look at Ghana and their access figures, their access figures are fairly high as reported. But we all know there's a lot of brownouts, there's a lot of reliability issues. And so when people are running generators, obviously the costs of that are significantly higher than what might be provided on paper from the grid. So. On the leapfrogging, I was gonna mention some of the same examples as David, but there's also another example that we've seen which is in conjunction with kind of these micro-releasing models where you prepay or you pay using your cell phone. You're also seeing innovations in, I think this is in Honduras, where the solar home system that's powering a remote off-grid home can actually report back to Tegucigalpa on the status of the system. And when something goes out and you need to have a repair, you no longer need to send to, you used to have to go, you have to look to see what the problem was, go back to Tegucigalpa, come back with the right equipment. And now the system actually can self-report using cellular towers back to Tegucigalpa so the technician arrives knowing what the problem is and is ready to fix the system. And we don't see that in the regular grid in Honduras really. So when you see that in kind of a very remote off-grid home, that's another example of an innovation. And I wanted to talk about the innovation in business models too, it's a lot of what we do in the part of the IDB where I work. One part is on distribution of product, looking at the existing networks that are already serving off-grid clients. And so I mean, I could talk for an hour about the linkages between microfinance and energy. And we've got a number of really innovative projects on that because microfinance institutions are already serving these clients. And so they're a natural channel for the financing of these types of systems at the low level. And a way to leverage climate investment, I mean, I just was working with one in Lima where we've helped them develop green clean energy products and that MFI now is gonna be putting this year $3 million of their portfolio is gonna be in climate investment. That's $3 million that wasn't there before. And if you multiply that $3 million by all of the MFIs that are in areas that have energy poverty, that starts to add up in filling that gap on international climate finance. And the other is immigrant remittances. We're working on projects where remittance companies are already distributing in these areas. There's already funds that are coming in for households to pay for wood, to pay for kerosene and substituting that and having these remittance companies actually serve as vendors and suppliers of green energy products and substituting that ongoing cost with a one-time cost. We've had some models that have been successful. And finally, just on the cooperatives. We've worked a lot with cooperatives and trying to, part of it is mapping. The mapping that I was talking about helps us figure out with the government and it's really a public-private partnership. I think one of the projects was with David in Guyana or in Suriname where the government saw that there was a community that wasn't gonna be served by the main grid, but they could rehabilitate an old, small hydro. And then there's a public investment in rehabilitating the hydro, which I think was supported partially by the Jeff. And then we come in and work with, to form a cooperative around that hydro of people who can do the billing, do the maintenance, do basically all of the services associated with that public investment and then expand that outwards into the surrounding communities. And so it required a lot of planning upfront, but once it's set up, it actually works tremendously well and we're seeing that now happen in Guyana and some other countries. And so I think that cooperatives in our region have been tremendously successful in some of these spot projects. The challenge is really getting them to kind of go to scale. I'll take those final questions and by this, thanks Greg and guys, this is really interesting. And I think it's fascinating that some of these questions were revolved around off-grid and the on-grid, off-grid, which is great. All right, so my question is who gets a five? I'm a zero to five. Well, Sarah, it's more about the journey than the destination. So the short answer is, I don't know. And we just try to make this as data driven as possible so it would take a lot of work to take, let's say, a Western country and throw it into the mix and see where they came up. So the short answer is I don't know. I do think though that we'll see the scores rise probably this year. A lot of important progress has been made in a lot of these countries. The other question you asked was about other countries and we certainly would love to expand this to include other countries. We've grown it from LADAM to include 19 Sub-Saharan African countries and then these 10 others in Asia, including the 25 states and provinces in India, China were open to expanding it further. But frankly, we can only do what we can afford to put people out into the field to do and we're about to send people out to 50 different countries again. So we're open to it and in particular, of course, we're interested in North Africa as expansion in Eastern Europe as markets that are interesting, I think, to us for sure. And then finally, the question that we probably actually get asked the most are not those questions but why didn't you include large hydro into the study? Which I think I did want to mention just for a second. In particular, you have a country like Brazil where 70% of the capacity or generation, I can't remember which, maybe both are large hydro and it's a good question and it presents interesting challenges for us. I would say that the main reason is because we want to look, by the way, we do include small hydro. So anything 50 megawatts, which is pretty big or smaller, we really want to look at technologies that could be deployed in some reasonably short period of time and make a fairly immediate impact. And this is not a knock on hydro, it just takes, for a large-scale hydro project, you're often talking a decade of development in a lot of places. So that's really been, we wanted to look at the new so-called newer technologies that could be deployed quicker at scale. Well, I just want to say thank you to all of you for being here, Ethan. We really appreciate the opportunity to talk about climate scope. It is a useful tool. It's always helpful to sort of quantify and I think the work that you guys do to sort of substantiate your research approach and sort of the evolving nature of how you try to improve it all the time is really commendable. On my behalf, I'd like to thank Annie Hudson, who did a lot of the legwork for our program in putting this all together and getting all of you here. And I just want to say thanks to Greg, and Ethan, and Dawn, and David for being here and thanks for having the discussion. So please help me to thank them with your applause. Thank you.