CIF reports on 3rd Geothermal Dialogue held in Vienna

Votive church tower, Vienna, Austria (source: flickr/ Herr P., creative commons)

Francisco Rojas 26 Aug 2015

In the official Climate Investment Fund’s blog, Abhishek Bhaskar gives some insights on last June’s Third Geothermal Dialogue event held in Austria. The meeting “is the third of a series of Geothermal Dialogues that bring together major actors from the world of energy finance in developing countries, to explore how to scale geothermal energy deployment.”

According to Mr. Bashkar attendees were varied and diverse (public and private actors, banks, developers, representatives of different nations) and the key topics included “regulatory and institutional framework, access to finance, private sector participation, innovative solutions, among many others. Some of the key messages to come out of the dialog included:

• Public sector engagement, including the role of DFIs, is key to alleviating some of the early stage risks in order to facilitate additional sources of financing. It could be in various forms such as through innovative financial products like contingency grants, through targeted interventions like standard setting for licensing or streamlining institutional framework, among others.
• Private sector engagement, both in terms of leveraging financing as well as reducing costs is critical to scale up geothermal development in a country.
• Sharing of resource availability data is very important to reduce some of the barriers to entry and help design innovative instruments around the development process.  The private sector can play a key role here by actively sharing such information.
• Technical assistance and policy level support play a vital part in addressing capacity constraints in some of the less mature markets.”

To read the full post from R Bhaskar, please follow the link.

Source: CIF