Designing Successful Renewable Energy Targets in Africa: Key Principles and Insights (Webinar)

12 April 2016

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PresentationIntroduction to the webinar and panelists

Presentation—Toby Couture: Designing Successful RE Targets in Africa: Key Principles

TranscriptWebinar audio transcript

The Clean Energy Solutions Center, in partnership with E3 Analytics, hosted this webinar on Designing Successful Renewable Energy Targets in Africa.

Renewable energy targets are now found in over 160 countries around the world, making them a defining feature of the global energy landscape. In recent years, the most rapid growth in renewable energy targets has occurred in Africa, as jurisdictions across the continent begin to draft laws and energy strategies that include explicit targets for the share of renewable energy in the electricity, transport, or heating and cooling sectors. As this trend continues, jurisdictions from across Africa have the opportunity to draw on some of the key lessons from the last 40 years of designing and implementing renewable energy targets and to learn from one another as they draft more effective policies to achieve them.

The webinar was presented by one of the lead authors of a major global report recently published on the topic by the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) and one of the experts who provide assistance via the Clean Energy Solutions Center’s Ask an Expert service. The main objective was to focus on what policymakers and regulators across Africa can do to design more effective targets as they seek to scale up the share of renewable energy in the mix and attract private investment, drawing on examples from within Africa as well as from around the world.

The presentation was followed by an interactive question and answer session with the audience.

Presenter

Toby Couture Toby Couture

Toby Couture is Founder and Director of E3 Analytics, an international renewable energy consultancy based in Berlin, Germany. He works on a wide range of topics in renewable energy including policy and regulatory analysis, market research, strategy consulting, and finance. He has worked extensively with policymakers and regulators on renewable energy strategy and has advised over forty national governments around the world. He is the author of several reports on renewable energy policy, and has partnered with several leading international organizations working to support the scale-up of clean energy, including IRENA, the IEA, GIZ, UNEP, UNIDO, as well as the IFC. Prior to founding E3 Analytics in 2009, Mr. Couture worked as Energy and Financial Markets Analyst at the U.S. National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL) in Colorado. Toby is a previous recipient of the Fulbright Scholarship, has studied renewable energy finance in France and obtained a Master’s degree in Environmental Policy from the University of Moncton in Canada, as well as an MSc. in Financial and Commercial Regulation from the London School of Economics in the UK. He currently lives in Berlin.