15 February 2012: The World Bank held a workshop on “How to Choose Appropriate Incentives to Deploy Renewable Energy and Increase Energy Efficiency” and has made the presentations available online.

The workshop was attended by public and private sector participants and convened from 30 January-2 February 2012. The main topics addressed were feed-in tariffs (FiTs) for renewable energy, trends and lessons learned in energy efficiency, renewable energy auctions and competitive procurement of energy efficiency. Tim Richards, Managing Director of Energy Policy for General Electric (GE), told workshop participants “We are in a phase of developing higher-cost renewable energy, and this is a highly policy-dependent environment,” adding that the key concept to focus on is the cost of electricity. In this respect, participants discussed FiTs—the most widespread policy incentive for renewable energy—which offer cost-based compensation to renewable energy producers. Workshop participants agreed that even though costs of wind and solar energy are diminishing, they cannot yet compete with fossil fuels without policy incentives. [World Bank News, Workshop Presentations]