Mitigating Through Renewable Energy: An Overview of the Requirements and Challenges

Abstract

Renewable Energy (RE) provides one of the two main means of mitigating climate change. The requirements for the successful implementation of RE projects include RE and human resources, institutional capacity, science and technology infrastructure, policy and legislation, financing and the market-readiness of the renewable energy technology (RET).

This chapter considers each of these requirements in detail in the context of the Pacific Island Countries (PICs) with the help of illustrative examples from both the developed and developing countries, and in particular the Small Island Developing States (SIDS). Developing countries are forced to resort to the device of capacity building in an attempt to make up for their deficiencies.

The chapter then addresses several challenges to the implementation of RE projects in the SIDS. Perhaps chief amongst these is the better ability developed countries have in providing for the requirements for RE implementation than their developing counterparts. This differential ability is amplified in the case of the SIDS, and in particular the PICs. Factors that discriminate against them include their remoteness, lack of manufacturing infrastructure and human resources, finance, institutional frameworks, policy and their difficulty to attract investors. Barriers to RE implementation that are specific to the PICs include the small sizes of their economies, the lack of awareness amongst their decision-makers of the importance of supporting infrastructure development, lack of funding and appropriate institutional support.

RE does not always guarantee a reduction in emissions, and a full Life Cycle Analysis is needed to assess this ability, especially in the case of biofuels.

1 Introduction: Why Renewable Energy?

The role of renewable energy (RE) in climate change mitigation can be best understood by first investigating the origins of greenhouse gases emitted to the atmosphere (also referred to simply as emissions) that cause global warming.

Man-made (or anthropogenic) greenhouse gas emissions are caused by several sources and processes, collectively called activities. In addition to sources of emissions, there may be entities that actually absorb or remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. These are called sinks, and are regarded as part of the activities.

To consider these activities further, they are divided into five groupings or sectors, consisting of energy, industrial process and product use (IPPU), Agriculture, Forestry and other Land Use (AFOLU), Waste and an Others sector (IPCC 2006). Of these sectors, the energy sector is by far the most significant, producing about 90% of the carbon dioxide and 75% of the total greenhouse gas emissions in developed countries (IPCC 2006).

The main reason for this dominant role of energy as an emitter of greenhouse gases is the high proportion of fossil fuels in the total global energy mix. As revealed in Fig. 2.1, fossil fuels make up some 78% of the global primary energy consumption today.

Fig. 2.1

Estimated renewable share of total final energy consumption, 2016. (Source: after REN21 2018)

Fossil fuels are used mainly in stationary combustion in power plants and refineries, and mobile combustion in the engines of transport vehicles. In both these processes, one of the final products is carbon dioxide, which contributes directly to greenhouse gas emissions. Reducing the percentage of fossil fuels in the global energy mix thus provides an obvious way of reducing the greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming and the resulting climate change. One mechanism for achieving this is by replacing fossil fuels by renewable energy (RE), as the various types of RE normally produce little or insignificant amounts of carbon dioxide as compared to fossil fuels.

As Fig. 2.1 shows however, RE currently provides only 19% of the total primary energy requirements of the world. It is clear that to mitigate climate change effectively, there should be a concerted effort to increase this share of renewable energy. This chapter discusses how the Small Island Developing State of Fiji can contribute to this cause through the implementation of RE projects.

The other possible method for mitigating climate change involves the more efficient use of energy (thereby reducing the total energy consumed). Such energy efficiency measures can be achieved at both the supply (i.e. production) side and demand (or use) side of energy, and the latter has been suggested as a possible contender for the Fiji NDC Implementation Roadmap (Economy, 2017).

This chapter investigates the requirements (i.e. the pre-requisites) for the successful implementation of renewable energy projects that can bring about new reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, and considers the challenges and barriers encountered by the Least Developed Countries (LDCs) and Small Island Developing States (SIDS), including Fiji in particular, in meeting these requirements.

2 Requirements for Renewable Energy

2.1 Discovering the Requirements

There are certain obvious pre-requisites for the production of RE for human consumption. But the nature and extent of the full set of requirements often becomes clear only after one tries to actually implement the relevant technology. The case study in Box 2.1 is an attempt to illustrate how such a situation arises.

Box 2.1: Identifying the Requirements for Setting Up a Wind Turbine

Upon advice from her friend in the US, a cattle farmer in a small Pacific Island Country (PIC) decided to invest $200K in a wind turbine to provide for the 15 kWp power needed for her farm situated in a remote rural location. Her friend had a similar farm in Arizona USA, and he had made a similar investment very productively.

She tried to find local suppliers for the technology but was unable to do so. She was finally told by an engineering firm that she would have to import the technology as none was available on the market in their island nation. As there was no import precedence for such a commodity, it took a full 9 months for the local supplier and the farmer to have the project approved by the authorities and the import documentation completed. The supplier, a local engineering firm which had no prior experience in wind technology, finally managed to have the technology delivered to her farm where they proceeded to install the turbine and storage system.

They were confronted with some apparent teething problems with the system. The power generated, for instance, was much lower than the rated capacity stated in the documentation. The owner noticed that the blades were idle or hardly turning for long periods of time.

The local engineering firm could not help her. So she consulted the internet for possible leads into the problem and finally managed to locate a company abroad who was willing to advise her. They told her the problem was probably due to the low wind speed profile for the location of the turbine. The cut-in speed (i.e. the minimum wind speed required to turn the blades) of the turbine was 4 m/s. Evidently, this was too high for the average wind speed at the location.

As no detailed wind resource assessment had been carried out for the location, the value of this parameter was unknown. Meteorology Office data gave an average speed of 5.0 m/s for the entire region, but this said nothing about the actual average speed at the location of the turbine. A quick monitoring over a week using a hand-held anemometer (purchased on e-bay) gave an average wind speed of 4.2 m/s for the location.

After more internet research, the problem was finally identified as a poor selection of the exact siting of the turbine. Although the average wind speed for the region was ostensibly sufficient, the speed at the actual location was attenuated due to its low-lying position and shading effects caused by a cluster of rain-trees some 50 m away. The final advice that the owner received from her benevolent internet adviser was to do a thorough wind monitoring study of potential sites nearby and re-locate the turbine to a place with better potential. This was going to be a costly and time-consuming task, and still did not assure a reasonable power output.

The owner had learnt the hard way that there were many more requirements to the generation of wind power than those obvious at first site. She had also become grimly aware that living in a remote PIC had many disadvantages as compared to life in a developed country such as the USA.

This simple case study demonstrates how many essential requirements for the successful implementation of a RE project can remain hidden from view till one actually begins to go through the steps of implementing the project. It also reveals the significant handicap that developing countries have in venturing into RE projects as compared to the developed nations.

In the typical case, the requirements for the successful implementation of RE projects include the availability of the relevant RE resources, the required human resources, the institutional capacity and the science and technology infrastructure. They also include the policy and legislation as well as the financing needed to facilitate the project. It is also assumed that the technology being investigated is market-ready, i.e. that it is fully developed and has been in commercial use for some time.

The rest of this section considers each of these requirements in detail.

2.2 Renewable Energy Resource Requirements

Renewable energy comprises energy occurring naturally in various forms. Solar energy, for instance, is the energy arriving at the earth’s surface from the sun in the form of solar radiation, while wind energy is the kinetic energy contained in the wind. In the utilisation of RE, such natural sources of energy are converted to other forms using the appropriate renewable energy technology (RET). In the case of wind energy for example, the kinetic energy of the wind is turned into electrical energy with the help of a wind turbine.

It is clear therefore that one of the most essential requirements for RE is the appropriate RE resource. Thus, to consider the successful implementation of hydro, biofuel and geothermal energy projects for instance, among the first requirements are the availability of flowing water at a height (called the head), edible or inedible vegetable oils and animal fats, and geothermal source of energy below ground respectively.

It must be noted that the availability of RE resources in any country depends on both the geography and geology of that country. One cannot, for instance have ample hydropower potential in a country that is non-mountainous and/or lacks water resources in the form of rivers and streams. Table 2.1 shows the relationship between the geography/geology and RE potentials for some of the Pacific Island Countries (PICs).

Table 2.1 Availability of renewable energy resources in the PICs

Note that the location of these nations within the tropics ensures that solar energy is available in abundance to all. Also, note the irregular distribution of geothermal energy (which depends on the geology) and hydro (which is only available in mountainous countries).

For the successful utilisation of a renewable energy (RE) resource, it is essential to obtain a quantitative assessment of its availability. As the resources usually vary with time, such measurements must be carried out over suitable time periods. RE resource monitoring projects of this nature form integral parts of the feasibility studies of RE projects. To take the example of hydropower, the output power of an installation is approximated quite well by the expression

$$ \mathrm{Power}\ \left(\mathrm{kilowatts}\right)=10\times \mathrm{Q}\ \left(\mathrm{cubic}\ \mathrm{metres}\ \mathrm{per}\ \mathrm{second}\right)\times \mathrm{H}\ \left(\mathrm{metres}\right) $$

where Q is the volume flowrate of the water and H is the head (Twidell and Weir 2015). The Head is fixed for any location and thus needs to be determined once only. The volume flowrate Q of the water flowing through the turbine will, however, depend on the rainfall, and will therefore show a temporal (in particular seasonal) variation. This parameter must therefore be monitored throughout the four seasons for at least 1 year. As the seasons themselves vary in intensity over time either randomly or due to predictable effects such as the El Nino/Southern Oscillation, it becomes necessary to extend the monitoring period to several years.

The flow rate may be either measured directly using a flowrate meter, or inferred from other data such as the rainfall data which has been collected and maintained by the meteorological office over extended periods of time for the region. Measurement techniques for the flowrate include the simple (or bucket) method, the refined method, the sophisticated method or the Weir method (Twidell and Weir 2015). For spot checks of the flowrate, a flowrate meter is quite adequate.

2.3 Human Resource Requirements

No human endeavour can proceed without the input of human effort. In any initiative of national scale, human resources will be required at all stages of policy/decision-making, development and implementation. In the case of the implementation of RE projects, the human resources requirements may be conveniently partitioned into human input for the design and production of the technology, and that for its acquisition and use as an economic commodity.

Examples of human input for the technology development include project managers, scientists, engineers and factory floor workers for the design, implementation and evaluation/testing of the product. The trade and marketing of the technology considered as an economic commodity will require, amongst other things

• The services of customs agents, legal firms, specialised commercial bank staff for the import/export of the technology, as well as

• Human resources for the transportation and distribution of the commodity.

The nature of these human resources required by a country will clearly depend on whether the technology is developed/manufactured locally or imported from abroad. As much of the human capacity discussed above is available locally in developed countries, they are more likely to opt for manufacturing rather than importing the technology. The developing countries (in particular the LDCs and the SIDS) are largely reliant on the developed world for the supply of the technology, and require human resources mainly for importing, distribution, installation and maintenance of the renewable energy technology (RET). Their human resource requirements are therefore likely to vary significantly from those of developed nations.

2.4 Science and Technology Infrastructure

Most of modern technology, including RET is dependent on the results of scientific research and device fabrication, and their manufacture relies heavily on manufacturing technology. A science and technology infrastructure is therefore needed for the design, development and manufacture the RET. It typically consists of

• The physical infrastructure such as research laboratories, materials production and fabrication laboratories and the scientists needed to run these laboratories; and

• Governing institutions (an example being the Australian Research Council (ARC 2015)) that oversee the research and development in science and technology.

This requirement has been assessed to be the weakest link in the development chain for RE in developing countries (Singh 2012).

As an example of the role of science and technology in the RE sector, consider the Solar Photovoltaic (PV) system for energy generation. The components of a typical solar PV system consists of several components including an array of solar panels, an inverter, charge controller, battery storage system and the balance of plant. The solar array is constructed from individual solar panels connected together electrically. Each panel in turn is built from several solar cells that collect light energy for conversion to electricity.

The manufacture of these solar cells requires advanced research and development, including the production of ultra-high purity silicon and the fabrication of the solar cell device. Such research and development is only possible at dedicated research labs that only large established companies are capable of supporting. The same is true for the design and manufacture of the electronics used in the other components of the system. Because of these high technology demands, the manufacture of the basic components of solar PV systems normally remains confined to developed countries and other technologically advanced economies such as China and India.

2.5 Institutional Capacity

The production and use of RET requires support from several different types of institutions from within the public and private sectors. These institutions include

• Government institutions involved in facilitating and regulating the local production and use of the RET as well as its import;

• Policy institutions (usually affiliated with the government) needed to oversee and formulate policy;

• Financing institutions, including banks and other lending agencies, to provide for the financing of RE projects; and

• Training institutions (universities, technical and vocational institutes) needed for the training and development of the appropriate human resources.

Table 2.2 below lists some training institutions in Fiji that offer various levels of RE training.

Table 2.2 Some RE training institutions in Fiji and what they offer

2.6 Policy and Legislation

Policy and legislation are needed to guide and facilitate the development of the RE sector of a country or region. Quite often however, they also arise from the nation’s commitments to regional or global goals.

The motivating factors for the development of renewable energy policy include

• Implementation of global agreements (e.g. UN’s Climate Change agreements commencing from the Earth Summit and ending recently with the Paris Agreement; the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

• Regional development goals (e.g. the Framework for Action on Energy Security in the Pacific (FAESP) (SPC 2011)

• National development goals (e.g. the Fiji National Energy Policy) (FDoE 2013)

Usually the most immediate reason for developing RE policies is the need to provide adequately for the energy needs of a nation. Developing countries, especially the PICs, are heavily dependent on imported fossil fuels for their energy requirements, as a result of which a large component of their import bill are due to fuel imports (SPC 2012). The need to reduce this dependency provides a natural motivation for the introduction of the relevant energy policy.

RE policies are usually integrated into the country’s National Energy Policy (NEP) framework. This is true for the policies of both developing and developed countries such as Fiji and Germany.

A National energy policy is usually stated in terms of a vision, mission and goals, and is enacted through an Act of Parliament. The basic structure and terminology of National Energy Policies include the following key concepts:

• Vision, mission, aims and goals;

• Energy sectors;

• Key priority areas;

• Energy targets;

• Energy strategies;

• Energy implementation plans;

• Monitoring and evaluation; and

• Energy Indicators.

Table 2.3 below highlights some of the salient features of Fiji’s National Energy Policy.

Table 2.3 Fiji’s National Energy Policy – overview of the Targets for Fiji’s energy sector (FDoE 2013)

Policy and legislation are powerful drivers in bringing about change in a country’s RE sector. This is brought out well in Germany’s Renewable Energy Sources Act 1991 (Singh 2012). Like many of the PICs, Germany has, in the past, been almost totally dependent on imported fossil fuels from its neighbours for its energy needs. Prior to 1991, the country was largely reliant on coal and nuclear energy for its power generation.

In 1991, motivated by concerns for nuclear safety after the1986 Chernobyl disaster and the country’s commitment to climate change initiatives, the country passed the Electricity Feed-in Act to encourage the renewable energy to be fed into the grid (Leiren and Reimer 2018). Under this Act, grid operators were to give priority to renewable energy power providers, and a feed-in tariff was introduced for the first time to incentivise RE providers.

The 1991 Act had to face some legal challenges, resulting eventually in its replacement by the Renewable Energy Sources Act of 2000. Since its inception at the turn of the century, this Act has been highly successful in supporting the entry of renewables into the German grid system. As a result of this Act, the renewable energy share in total energy consumption tripled between 1998 and 2008 (Singh 2012). The Act has been revised several times, with the latest review occurring in 2017 (LSE 2019).

2.7 Finance

The availability of funding is a determining parameter in the success of a renewable energy project. Obtaining funding is rarely a straight-forward task of filling in a form with the necessary details. It is a complex process, and success usually depends on several key variables. They include the availability of opportunities, and knowledge and understanding of the mechanisms and instruments for obtaining financial assistance from the available sources.

Sources of funding consist of both global/regional financing agencies, such as the World Bank (WB), the Asian Development Bank (ADB), and more recently the Green Climate Fund, as well as national financial institutions including local development banks, commercial banks and other lending institutions. These institutions use specific financial mechanisms and instruments to evaluate and administer applications for funding. They also often provide mechanisms that are designed to facilitate loan approvals by other institutions. Making successful bids for funding depends on your understanding of how these institutions operate together, the nature and requirements of the financial mechanisms and instruments, as well as your skill in writing a successful funding proposal.

A financial mechanism for RE loans that was introduced by the Fiji Department of Energy in association with the Global Environment Fund (GEF) was the Sustainable Energy Financing Project. Box 2.2 below provides an account of how this scheme operated.

Box 2.2: The Sustainable Energy Financing Project (SEFP): An Example of an Enabling Financial Mechanism for RE Projects

Part of the requirement for obtaining funding for RE projects is a loan guarantee (or collateral) given to the loan provider. Any financial institution providing loans for RE projects will require assurance that someone (the guarantor) will pay back your loan in case you are unable to. A common difficulty with most Medium and Small to Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) is finding such guarantors, with the result that the application process ceases in mid-stream.

To alleviate this problem, the Global Environment Facility (GEF) in conjunction with the World Bank (WB) set up the SEFP (World Bank, 2019). This is a “Risk Sharing Facility (RSF) which is channelled through approved Participatory Financial Institutions (PFIs)” for making available 50% of guarantees to encourage financial institutions to provide loans for RE and EE investments.

The stated aim of the SEFP was

“to increase the adoption and use of RE technologies and more efficient use of energy through a package of incentives to encourage local financial institutions to participate in sustainable energy finance” (Sur 2017).

The project, which was initiated in June 2007 for Fiji, had the Fiji Development Bank (FDB) and the Australia and New Zealand (ANZ) bank as the starting PFIs. The technologies that were supported were

• 1. Solar Photovoltaic (Solar PV)

• 2. Pico-hydro

• 3. Coconut oil as replacement of diesel fuel in diesel gensets and transportation vehicles.

The Fiji Department of Energy (FDoE) was given the Executive Authority to implement and monitor the project (FDoE n.d.). ANZ was assigned the part of Fund Manager.

The FDB’s role was to execute the primary function of the scheme, which was to issue loans for the prospective investors in Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency (RE and EE) projects (FDoE n.d.).

Outcomes:

In 2011, the FDB began making loans of up to $FJ1.0m at an interest rate of 5% to MSME’s. Successful projects funding applications included

• Eco-tourism retreats for Fiji’s tourism industry, and PV power systems in the 100–300 kW range for

  • A Mariner

  • Poultry farm

  • Garment factory

  • Supermarket

  • Tourism resort

By 2015, the FDB had made 26 loans totalling $FJ5.6 m. The overall outputs of the project included

• US$21.5 M in loans for RE and EE equipment

• 4.3 MW supply of RE power for over 100,000 people

• More than 13,500 units of solar PV

• 11 biofuel generators and 1 biofuel mill

In 2018, the SEFP was extended to include the Pacific Island Nation of Vanuatu, and the life-span of the project was increased to 31st December 2022.

The above example is a demonstration of the enabling effect that a carefully-designed financial mechanism can have in facilitating the implementation of renewable energy projects in the PICs.

3 Capacity Building

We saw above that developing countries lack several of the important requirements for facilitating the utilisation of their RE resources. These capacities therefore need to be developed for the specific needs through a process of capacity building.

This is conveniently performed in the PICs via capacity building projects, usually funded by Development Partners (i.e. countries and international organisations actively involved in the energy development of the PICs). Table 2.4 below provides a list of EU-funded energy capacity-building projects that were implemented in the Pacific over the past two decades.

Table 2.4 EU-funded renewable energy capacity building projects in the Pacific (EDD 2014)

3.1 Market-Readiness of Technology

Perhaps one of the most important requirements for the utilisation of RE is the renewable energy technology (RET) itself. This must meet certain minimum quality standards. In particular, the technology must be

• Mature (i.e. tested through use and shown to be working and reliable); and

• Market-tested (i.e. been in the market as a commercially-available technology for some time).

Arguably one of the most mature RETs is hydro. This has been generating electricity successfully in various forms for more than 100 years (iha n.d.). During its early history (before electricity was discovered) hydropower was harnessed by waterwheels to perform mechanical tasks such as operating flour mills.

Photo-voltaic (PV) power generation has an encouraging history. The technology was developed several decades ago when solid state semiconductor devices first began appearing on the market. Up till a few years ago however, this RET was too expensive because of the price of the solar panels (also called modules) which provide the basic building block of these power systems. But the (relatively) recent entry into the energy market of China has helped to drive prices down, and as a result this technology is now widely used in all sizes, from roof-top solar systems to large solar farms, all over the world.

Among the least mature RETs are wave energy and Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion (OTEC). While several devices have been tested and show promise, many are still at the Pilot Project stage of their development. In the case of wave energy, the Oscillating Water Column (OWC) device has been tested at the 296 kW grid-connected Mutriku Power Plant in Spain since 2011 (Torre-Enciso et al. 2009), while the Pelamis Wave Energy Converter developed in Scotland (EMEC n.d.) has attracted considerable attention as a potentially viable wave energy device.

In the case of OTEC, an experimental power plant has been running on the Kona Coast in Hawaii for some time (Clancy 2016). Interest in the technology has been re-kindled in Korea more recently, and the Korea Research Institute of Ships and Engineering (KRISO) is in the process of developing a 200 kW plant to become operational in Kiribati from mid-2019 (Trauthwein 2016). While these developments are taking place however, both wave energy and OTEC fall short of the full status of market-readiness required of commercial technologies.

4 The Challenges

4.1 Differential Ability to Meet the Requirements

In the previous section, we have seen several examples where developing countries are unable to provide the requirements for the implementation of RE projects while their developed counterparts are much better equipped to do so. This differential ability between the rich and poor nations to meet the requirements is a key issue in the implementation of RE projects. And the situation is exacerbated by the fact that this disparity tends to depend on the nature of the developing country.

Human resources, infra-structure and finance, for instance, are generally lacking in all developing countries. These countries are not able to develop the science and technology infrastructure and are confronted with unique barriers in their efforts. The Small Island Developing States (SIDS) however have additional issues due to their remote and/or isolated nature. This is especially important in the case of the PICs such as Fiji.

Remoteness leads to supply chain issues, seriously affecting the availability of resources and technology with consequent mounting costs. The lack of manufacturing infrastructure means that developing countries face enormous problems in producing the RETs themselves. This forces them to import the technology as the only option. This in turn requires them to establish a whole new import industry with its own infrastructure requirements.

A challenge that is non-discriminating between the rich nations and poor relates to the observation that not all RE resources will yield net emissions reductions in all situations. Some RE technologies, such as biofuels for transportation, may produce emissions during their production and use that are close to or may even exceed the emissions (from fossil fuels) they are trying to avoid. It thus becomes essential to obtain a careful assessment of these additional emissions.

To summarise, some of the major challenges and barriers encountered by the SIDS in implementing RE as clean energy to facilitate carbon emissions reductions include

• The lack of infra-structure, human resources, finance and institutional and policy frameworks;

• The difficulty in attracting investors; and

• Assessing the suitability of a particular renewable energy to produce net reductions in carbon emissions.

These issues are considered in more detail below.

4.2 Lack of Capacity

The lack of capacity in meeting the RE requirements noted above has a debilitating effect on developing nations in their pursuit for the adoption of the renewable energy option. What is of concern is their (sometimes) extreme difficulty in overcoming such deficiencies.

In the case of science and technology infrastructure, for instance, their attempts to redress the issue is often thwarted by the lack of a starting base, the relevant human resources as well as their physical remoteness from the developed countries. This is especially true of the PICs, which do not benefit from economies of scale due to their small populations.

The wind turbine example of Box 2.1 illustrates how the absence of a science and technology base can have a lasting effect on the implementation of a simple RE project. An issue that would plague that project through its entire lifetime would be service and maintenance of the turbine system. The only ostensible solution would be for the local engineering firm to acquire the relevant knowledge. This however would mean going through a steep learning curve for very marginal returns, a situation which provides little incentive to the prospective supplier to develop the service.

Among the specific barriers and constraints encountered by SIDS in their efforts to develop their RE sector are

• The small sizes of their economies which cannot grow or sustain the required research and technology structures and human capacity;

• The lack of appreciation by national decision-makers of the importance of such supporting infrastructure to development (Singh 2012);

• Lack of funding; and

• The lack of institutional and policy support that can facilitate such development of a science and technology base.

Table 2.5 shows how the SIDS, and in particular the PICs, compare with the developed nations in their ability to satisfy the requirements for the successful implementation of RE projects.

Table 2.5 Major differences between the rich and poor countries in their abilities to implement RE projects

In the wake of the launching of the UN Secretary-General’s Sustainable Energy for All (SE4ALL) initiative in 2011, the Fiji government carried out an analysis of its own energy access needs. Table 2.6 summarises some of the key gaps and barriers to ensuring energy access to all citizens of Fiji that were identified by the government in this study that concluded in 2014 (Government of Fiji 2014). It provides specific examples of the difficulties faced by the PICs as noted above, and also reveals the importance of relevant and complete data and information on energy needs as an additional requirement.

Table 2.6 Typical gaps and barriers to ensuring energy access for all in Fiji (Government of Fiji 2014)

4.3 Attracting New Players

Rising power demand and the need for rural electrification in the PICs has created an urgent demand for more power generation in the region. Such development however cannot proceed without additional funding. In the case of Fiji, almost all electrical power is produced by Energy Fiji Limited (EFL – previously FEA), the country’s only national utility, which has limited capacity to cope with this extra burden. The only perceivable solution would seem to be sharing the additional generation burden with Independent Power Producers (IPPs) who are capable of sourcing their own funding.

While this solution might sound simple in principle, it has proven difficult to implement in Fiji’s case, where the national utility has, over the years, only been able to acquire the services of two providers (the Fiji Sugar Corporation (FSC) and Tropic Wood) to share the grid load (FEA 2017). Part of the reason was the existence of several barriers to such an IPP strategy. In an effort to remove these barriers, the Fiji Department of Energy introduced the Fiji Renewable Energy Power Project (FREPP) (see Box 2.3 below) in 2011.

Box 2.3: The Fiji Renewable Energy Power Project

The Fiji Renewable Energy Power Project (FREPP) was a GEF-funded project implemented by the Fiji Department of Energy (FDoE) in partnership with the UNDP which aimed to remove barriers (including policy, regulatory, market, financial and technical barriers) to grid-connected power generation in Fiji. The project was initiated in 2011 and lasted till the end of 2014.

It consisted of four main components, addressing specific categories of barriers (EDD 2014):

• 1. Energy Policy & Regulatory Frameworks (including a power development plan for Fiji);

• 2. RE Resource Assessments and RE-based Project Assessments (including feasibility studies of new power generation from various RE sources)

• 3. RE-based Power Generation Demonstrations, and

• 4. RE Institutional Strengthening (including a framework for IPP procurement for large-scale power generation, connecting small-scale RE technologies to the grid and transfer of regulatory functions for the power generation sector to government).

FREPP was expected to facilitate investments in RE-based power generation in Fiji, which would support the socio-economic development of the country, make use of its RE resources and reduce GHG emissions. By the end of the project in 2014 however, while some investors had signed MOUs with the grid-owner, no new power was being provided by IPPs apart from that produced by the two existing IPPs.

The situation had changed only slightly by 2018, with the addition of the 12MW rated capacity Nabou Biomass Power Plant operated by the Nabou Green Energy Ltd. in 2017 (Nabou Green Energy Ltd 2018). EFL has since noted the prospects of a 3–5 MW Solar farm in Western Viti Levu (FEA 2017), while discussions continue with other potential IPPs on new hydro generation in the interiors of Viti Levu and Vanua Levu. The totality of the power produced by all these new sources however, will fall very short of the country’s power needs and the expectations of the country’s NDC Implementation Roadmap (Fiji Ministry of Economy 2017).

As revealed in Box 2.3, the outcomes of FREPP have been far from satisfactory. Among the probable reasons for the lack of interest shown by investors, the most obvious is the lack of monetary incentive. The feed-in tariff rate of FJ$0.33 per kWh appears to be still too small. Overall, it is clear that there is a continuing need to improve the enabling framework that is needed to facilitate the development of the RE industry in Fiji.

4.4 Assessment of RE as a Mitigating Agent

Under what conditions does the utilisation of RE contribute to mitigation? To answer this question, one must first note that the production and use of RE itself produces emissions of greenhouse gases. RE only qualifies as a mitigating agent if it emits less greenhouse gases per unit energy produced than fossil fuel.

To assess the actual emission reduction potentials of various forms of renewable energy, one must note that RE projects invariably require fossil fuel use at some stage of their project development life cycle. The RE resources can be divided into two categories:

• Resources which do not lead to emissions except for certain phases of their life cycles, including those that have embedded emissions (i.e. emissions during their manufacture) only. The analysis of these resources and technologies can be easily dealt with using the concepts of carbon debts and their “payback periods”.

• Others that produce emissions in a variable manner, depending on the exact production/use pathway chosen. The net emissions here can become quite significant, and may even become positive (Flugge et al. 2017; Hofstrand 2019). These need a comprehensive quantitative evaluation of the emissions (e.g. the carbon emission).

A Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) (Muralikrishna and Manickam 2017)is needed to carry out the assessment of the actual emission reduction potential of the RE resources. To facilitate this, it is convenient to picture the RE utilisation as a process in which a renewable energy fuel is converted using a renewable energy technology (RET) to produce the final useful form of energy. Note that the RET may involve either a single (one shot) energy conversion (e.g. solar PV cells) or several stages (e.g. biomass power generation, involving the burning of biomass in a furnace to produce heat, which is then converted sequentially to mechanical and electrical energy).

Emissions are possible from the following stages of this energy cycle:

• (i) Fuel cultivation/preparation/transportation (e.g. biofuels);

• (ii) Technology fabrication (e.g. embedded emission during the manufacture of solar PV cells); and

• (iii) Technology installation (e.g. hydropower civil works, technology transportation and installation).

An LCA enables a quantitative evaluation of the emissions from RE relative to fossil fuels. A quick qualitative evaluation can, however, be obtained even without the use of the LCA technique. Table 2.7 shows how such an analysis can provide a useful assessment of the emissions from a RE source.

Table 2.7 Comparison of life cycle emissions from various RE sources with fossil fuel emissions

The table reveals that whereas the total emissions per unit output energy remains small in comparison with fossil fuel emissions for solar, wind and hydro, it can become significant, and indeed exceed that for fossil fuel in the cases of biomass power generation and biofuels for transportation. Extreme care must thus be exercised in the manner in which these latter RE fuels are produced and used.

5 Summary and Conclusions

• The energy sector is by far the most significant contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. Most of the emission is produced from the fossil fuel component of the global energy mix, of which renewable energy (RE) makes up a mere 19%;

• Climate change can be mitigated by increasing the share of RE in the global energy mix. The implementation of new RE projects thus plays a vital role in climate change mitigation;

• The key requirements for the implementation of RE are the RE resources, human resources, the science and technology infrastructure, institutional capacity, policy and legislation, finance, and the availability of market-ready technology;

• Developed countries have better capacity for the production, distribution and installation of renewable energy technologies (RETs) than developing countries. They face less challenges in meeting the requirements for the implementation of RETs than their developing counterparts, and are better-placed to cope with any challenge;

• Developing countries are faced with several challenges in meeting the requirements for the implementation of RE; and

• Developing countries are unlikely to have the resources for the production/manufacture of the technology, and usually have no alternative but to import from developed countries.