Phase II of Renewable Energy in America

National Policy Conference

November 28-29

Cannon Caucus Room, Washington, DC

American Council On Renewable Energy (ACORE)

Thanks, Mike.  Before I do that I just wanted to follow up on a couple points from the last session.  First, Mike just mentioned BP and acknowledged Catarina [ph?].  We're very thankful of that, but he didn't mention that as a Diamond member that's a million dollar contribution, so this is a really strong commitment.  And since I'm the treasurer of ACORE, on the board, and part of the finance committee we're particularly thrilled with that check.  Secondly, I wanted to say to Admiral McGinn that I loved your Santa Claus list.  I'm going to add it to my Hanukkah list to ensure we're covering as many bases as possible because we need all the help we can get.
Woman 1: Kwanzaa ________.
Judy Siegel: Kwanzaa too.  And then last, John Cavalier put up the energy map at night, which is also one of my favorite maps.  Running the Energy and Security Group about half of our work is in developing countries, and that map shows clearly that despite billions of dollars of investment in the last 20 years there's more people without power today than there were two decades ago.  And it really helps to hone in where the problem is the strongest.  And that's clearly in part of Asia, Latin American and virtually all of Sub-Saharan Africa.  But from the security side of our company, where we work a lot with DOD, we overlaid that map with the countries that DOD considers its highest security risk according to its criteria, and there was almost direct correlation.  If you don't have energy you don't have security.  And so it's really an important tool, I think, for all of us.  So just to go into a little bit more about Bonn so you know what we're trying to do here.  The Bonn Renewable Energy Conference involved over 150 countries and 2,000 participants.  It was an event that was held in the Bundestag, just a tremendous facility.  It was also coupled with the parliamentary forum.  There were over 50 sanctioned side events that went on during the course of the days of the event, and those really were able to enable a number of different players to speak on the topics that were of interest to them.  There were three key outcomes of the Bonn conference.  First there was a political declaration which really sought consensus from all the players that they were going to move forward with a sense of urgency on renewable energy.  Second, Mike mentioned several of the countries and other participants actually put forward their own plans for what they were going to do and how they were going to do it with respect to renewable energy.  Then thirdly, there was a report on what are the policy options that you should be considering if you're looking forward to putting renewables in place in your country to help guide the process so we're not starting from scratch and can benefit from the experiences of other countries.  And lastly, there was REN21 network that put in place so they could continue the dialogue and the exchange of information between the countries and the other organizations.  And as Mike mentioned, unlike WSSD, which was a UN forum where countries came and they worked in blocks of countries, this was something where we had voluntary commitments.  We had countries that came because they really wanted to be there, and they wanted to express their own views on renewable energy.  It was conducted in open forum. Countries were able to talk about what they wanted to do.  There was no criticism of any country saying you ought to do more you ought to do less.  We just took what they said and that was the consensus of the whole meeting.  And it was really what we saw a democracy in action.  Just to show you how it was structured because we're trying to work in the same sort of context with WIREC.  You'll be hearing more about this from Reno.  But the first day was really a dedicated stakeholder forum which is not the norm in the UN system.  We actually had the ministers sitting down with the other key stakeholders to share their views, share their concerns.  And many of those UN forums the ministers are over here, the rest of the stakeholders are over here, and there's very little interaction.  And this was not the case in Bonn.  And it was deliberately structured to ensure that there was engagement across the parties.  And one of our own advisors for ACORE, David Hales was here yesterday, but couldn't stay all today, was actually the facilitator for this entire stakeholder event.  So we have a lot of people on the team who really have experience in this area.  The second day was very key.  It allowed countries and organizations to share their best practices, their lessons learned, what's worked, what very importantly isn't working so that we can start to move the process forward much faster.  The next two days were the plenary sessions, and you'll note that these were open forums by invitation, but did engage more than just the ministers.  And there was only one section of the second day afternoon that was a closed forum for just the ministers.  And then at the same time on Wednesday there was a parliamentary forum going on, so just a lot of activities, a lot of enthusiasm throughout the event.  Should note that 60 different countries put forward their actions plans, and in doing that they also made a commitment to report on the progress they were making on those plans on a routine basis.  And they've been doing that, and REN21 has been collecting it and reporting back on that information.  Similarly in Beijing this was by invitation of the Chinese government.  We had over 1,200 participants from 80 different countries.  It was held in the Great Hall of China which is an extremely impressive place, very well guarded.  You feel like if you come out of there without delivering results you're not going to get out the door, so it really motivated you to make progress.  During this session we had a ministerial session as well.  The side events a little differently here, there were four major side events and these were longer than usual sessions you would have in a side event.  One was on Investment and Finance.  The second was a CEO Roundtable and ACORE was really instrumental in conducing both of those activities.  There was a Technology Forum which was very useful to the minister particularly, and then a South-South Cooperation where the countries could talk amongst themselves, and what they were doing and sharing their experiences.  The key outcome at Beijing was a political declaration.  It was actually facilitated by Mohammed El-Ashry.  He'll be speaking in the next session.  And it was really good to see the process of how all the countries came together to make these commitments to moving forward in a much more strategic, accelerated way.  So where does that leave us with WIREC and our official side vents?  Basically the side events at WIREC are going to be open to all the participants who have signed up and registered for either the ministerial or for the business conference and trade show.  The side events have to address one of the four themes of the broader WIREC event which is Agriculture and Rural Development, Financing, Technology R&D and Policy and Marketed Option.  In this session only governments, NGOs and multi-laterals are going to be able to host a side event, although anyone can be engaged as a speaker and clearly participate and attend.  And we've done that, not having private sector conduct a side event, because they'll have opportunity through the business conference and the trade show to express their views and get their thoughts out.  However, private sector can participate and speak in any of the official side events.  And then because we have limited space we're asking that each organization only submit to host one official side event, but again, you can participate in others.  The core event of WIREC is going to be held Tuesday through Thursday March 4th through 6th, but to ensure that we have more opportunity for side events we're going to be adding sessions the whole day on Monday and the morning of Friday the 7th.  So we will have opportunity throughout the entire week.  Mike, because we've added these two days on the wings we now can go from 50 side events, which is what we originally expected, to about 100.  And we're seeing there's strong interest in these activities, so we think we're going to need those spaces.  Each of these side events will be one and a half hour segments.  We don't have time to do longer sessions, but we will try to accommodate as many as we can.  And we will be forming through ACORE a selection committee to review each of these proposals and come up with a recommended list for State Department, and State will have the final say in the side events.  And we do need to charge a fee for this because we have incremental costs for audio visual equipment, security, license, insurance, other things, so we really need to cover those costs.  That fee is about $495 dollars.  So for those of you who are interested we just posted the registration form last week on the WIREC side events.  We've got a lot of interest so we encourage you to get your applications in, and we're going to do a lot of outreach to let people know about this.  But just to let you know some of our key dates.  We're asking that all the applications be in by January 4th, and we're not taking these first come first served, so there's no rush to get your application in.  We'd rather have you think about the side event and try to be as detailed in what you're proposing including identification of speakers and topics if possible to ensure that side event gets accepted.  We then hope to notify you all by January 15th.  We'll need to receive payment of the $495 by February 15th, and then we'll launch the side events during the first week of March at WIREC.  So thank you and I hope that you all can really think about engaging in some way at WIREC.  It could be through the side events, it could be through the business council, could be through the ministerial, but there's lots of opportunities and we want to make sure we have as many players as possible participating.  Thank you.