The Clean Energy Ministerial (CEM) is the annual COP of energy where and clean energy solutions can hammer out what the future global energy system could and should look like. It’s a perfect chance ahead of COP29 to gather, deliberate and plan for a decarbonized planet.

WRI experts will be on the ground in Brazil all week (September 30 – October 4) sharing their expertise and collaborating with renewable energy industry leaders to advance clean energy in Latin America, a region that’s surprisingly less dependent on fossil fuels than most.

In addition to providing an opportunity to forge stronger partnerships, CEM demonstrates how WRI is well-positioned to help ensure a just and equitable future for people, nature and climate. Alex Dolan, Communications and Engagement Lead for WRI’s Global Energy Program, explores the role that South America countries will play at the conference and beyond.

Episode Guests:

  • Javier Bustos-Salvano, Executive Director for ACENOR
  • Tatsatom Goncalves, Research Fellow, WRI Energy

 

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Episode 1 Transcript

Alex Dolan, WRI Communications and Engagement Lead (00:05 – 1:10)

Hi, this is Alex Dolan with the World Resources Institute, and you are listening to the World Resources Institute's Big Ideas into Action podcast. We are going to be talking about the Clean Energy Ministerial and the global energy transition today.

This is the first of a two-part series on this year's Clean Energy Ministerial or otherwise known as CEM. For those who don't know, CEM is one of the major global convenings on the energy transition that happens in a new city every year. This year, it will be in Brazil for the first time.

And we are joined with two guests that are going to be talking about the context of Latin America as the setting for this year's CEM, why Latin America is relevant to the global energy transition, what different countries can expect to see, and what we can expect to see in terms of announcements and developments at this year's CEM, and how it relates to other major convenings like COP throughout the year.

With me, I am joined by two guests. We have Javier Bustos-Salvano, the executive director for Acenor, Javier, and thank you for joining us.

Javier Bustos, ACENOR Executive Director (1:11 – 1:12)

Thank you, nice to meet you.

Alex Dolan, WRI Communications and Engagement Lead (1:13 – 1:23)

Nice to meet you. And we also have Tatsatom Goncalves, the research fellow for the energy program here at WRI. Tatsatom, thank you for joining us.

Tatsatom Goncalves, WRI Energy Research Fellow (1:23 – 1:24)

Thank you, Alex. Happy to be here.

Alex Dolan, WRI Communications and Engagement Lead (1:25 – 1:32)

Great. So to get started, Javier, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your work in the energy transition?

Javier Bustos, ACENOR Executive Director (1:33 – 2:13)

I am the executive director of ACENOR. That's true in Chile. That's the association that represents the demand side, the largest consumers of electricity in Chile. Just to have an idea, these are firms that work on the mining and industry sector services, the transportation, and represents approximately 60% of the electricity demand in Chile.

But I have a long history in the sector, 20 years working in the electricity and the energy sector in Chile. And I used to work also for the Energy Ministry and I had the opportunity to work also with CEM, in the past, so it's a pleasure to be here.

Alex Dolan, WRI Communications and Engagement Lead (2:14 – 2:23)

So you have attended other CEMs in the past. The CEM has also been in Latin America three times.  What makes it different this year that it's in Brazil?

Javier Bustos, ACENOR Executive Director (2:24 – 3:10)

Well, it is interesting that the two countries that are advancing more, perhaps in terms of renewables and energy transition, according to international sources, is Chile and Brazil. Brazil, of course, is the largest country, not only in terms of their geography, but also in terms of the demand of electricity and the capacity of transitioning to renewables.

And in the case of Chile, we also look to Brazil for their experience. There are many market design and regulatory designs that we learned from the experience in Brazil. So for us, it's interesting always to look at what the ah big country in the south continent is doing in terms of energy.

Alex Dolan, WRI Communications and Engagement Lead (3:11 – 3:18)

Tatsatom. Can you talk a little bit about the history of the Clean Energy Ministerial and how it matters to the global energy transition?

Tatsatom Goncalves, WRI Energy Research Fellow (3:19 – 5:15)

Absolutely. So the Clean Energy Ministerial, or CEM for short, is an intergovernmental ministerial meeting that is hosted by a different country every year. The Clean Energy Ministerial was founded by the United States back in 2010, in the early years of the Obama administration, and it was initially housed by the US Department of Energy, transitioning then to the International Energy Agency, or IEA, in the mid-2010s.

And it's really an opportunity for energy ministers from around the world to share progress towards the clean energy transition, learn from each other and identify points of potential collaboration between them. Certainly very important given the global economy that we live in, where supply chains relevant to the energy sector touch on several geographies often across continents.

I will also add that a lot of the heavyweights in the global economy are represented at CEM, so the United States, China, Japan, Germany, the UK, Brazil, those are all part of this ministerial meeting and all together they represent about 90% of installed renewable energy generation and capacity and 80% of global renewable energy investments -- and the majority of public research and development investment.

The mission of CEM, is very straightforward, is to accelerate the energy transition and it does so by facilitating dialogue across governments to expand the scale, and the reach in terms of sectors, as well as societal awareness of the energy transition.

The last point I'll add is that CEM in terms of operation outside of this...this annual meeting also has a series of work streams  that countries can opt to participate in, and those touch on power, transport, industry, buildings, and a couple of others as well.

Alex Dolan, WRI Communications and Engagement Lead (5:16 – 5:29)

Okay, great. And I'll turn this over to Javier. From somebody who's been to several past CEMS, who typically will come to these convenings and and historically, what's come out of them that's been significant?

Javier Bustos, ACENOR Executive Director (5:30 – 6:14)

It's a good place to discuss about the trends, the opportunities, the emerging technologies that we’re looking at for the energy transition. And particularly it is relevant because it is a place where the governments and the agencies of the different countries participate, also international organizations and that provide information, support, to the implementation of these energy policies. And also part of the private sector that participates also in the investment in generation, transmission, infrastructure in general, and new technologies in general that are supporting this energy transition.

Alex Dolan, WRI Communications and Engagement Lead (6:15 – 6:22)

How does this impact other major convenings that will happen this fall? How does this relate to COP and other convenings?

Javier Bustos, ACENOR Executive Director (6:23 – 7:17)

It's all part of the same global action in terms of reaching the goals that we have in terms of decarbonization, in terms of a future of net zero emissions. That's part of, for example, my country Chile has in the long term are a goal of becoming a net zero country. Also, it is important because all these meetings and opportunities in some way contribute to the final goal and the discussions that happens in COP and in other instance, for example, meetings of the International Agency of Energy and different opportunities that appear not only in the west side of the world, but also in other parts regarding this global effort.

Alex Dolan, WRI Communications and Engagement Lead (7:18 – 7:31)

That makes sense. And I want to touch upon that finance issue since COP 29 is set to be the finance COP . But do you expect a lot of discussions focused around appropriate financing for the energy transition?

Javier Bustos, ACENOR Executive Director (7:32 – 8:55)

That's a really good point because, for example, in terms of the demand side, when we look at what the industry, the consumers, the large consumers of electricity are looking, they're looking for supply of renewable energy, particularly electricity, but also looking for other sources of renewable energy; that could be green fuels like hydrogen or other sources that could decarbonize the uses of energy.

To finance this infrastructure, all the new capacity of generation, all the new transmissions that is important to have the distribution networks that are also very relevant for the demand side. And well, how are we going to finance on that? The majority of this has to come from private investment.

So the different ways of accessing to capital in terms of, for example, long-term contracts, in terms of PPAs [Power Purchase Agreements], in terms of certificates [Renewable Energy Certificates], for example, in terms of a different kind of asset that can move large amount of capital, sometimes from countries that are wealthy countries to more developing countries.

Alex Dolan, WRI Communications and Engagement Lead (8:56 – 9:08)

And you mentioned the private sector investment and I wanted to circle back on that. What role do you feel like the private sector has in this year's CEM? What would they want to get out of it? And who are the major players that we should look at?

Javier Bustos, ACENOR Executive Director (9:09 – 10:43)

We are looking at a lot of demand for renewables, for example, from data centers. We are looking at a lot of demand of electricity or renewable electricity in sectors like, for example, to produce steel, to produce cement, into the mining sectors. So it's going to be interesting to look at all this demand side that has to, in some way, replace the whole the old contracts they used to have, the old supply they used to have, in terms of any fossil fuels, and replace for PPAs or contracts that are based on renewables.

So something that we have learned in Chile and Brazil has also a long history in this is that long-term contracts for renewables are very important to develop the new infrastructure that is going to be needed.

And it's something that, for example, in Europe is discussed right now. Europe is not an electricity system that’s based typically on long-term contracts. But here in Latin America, we have more experience on that because we need to develop a lot of infrastructure and we have higher rates of growth in terms of the energy. So long-term contracts, PPA, how these agreements and the regulation that we need and for that in a competitive market has to be developed to attract the finance, to attract the investments that are going to be needed to develop this transition.

Alex Dolan, WRI Communications and Engagement Lead (10:44 – 11:07)

I want to take a step back and talk a little bit more about the region and where it is in the energy transition. Now, Latin America has many things going for it -- it has much of its energy already being provided by renewables. Can you speak a little bit more about where the region is in the energy transition now, and then how that relates to what's going to happen at this year's CEM?

Javier Bustos, ACENOR Executive Director (11:08 – 14:01)

Well, the region is typically more renewable than the rest of the world because we rely a lot of the time to have hydro power. That's the case in Brazil, the case in Paraguay, for example. Also in Chile, we used to have a lot, a large portion of our electricity based on hyrdropower. Colombia is still one of the largest players in hydropower, too. But with the technological change that happened in the last 10-15 years, we have seen that wind power, solar power has become the sources of new energy that are cost-effective and cost-efficient. In the terms of Brazil, we have seen a lot of wind power, windmills in the country.

In the case of Chile, Peru and also Argentina. We have seen a lot of solar panels installed in the region. In the case of Chile, the largest growth we have seen in solar power at utility-scale and also at the distributed or not distributed but small scale also. Nowadays, we have that non-conventional renewables in Chile represent almost 40% of the electricity that is produced in the country. And the other neighboring countries have the same potential to rely a lot on these non-conventional renewables.

But this transition has to be done carefully in terms of a security of supply, but also in terms of the cost of the transition, because none of the countries also want to raise their tariffs, and that happens also in all the economies and all the systems that depend a lot on the price of electricity to develop their and economies and to also consume in households on and services.

Right now, the cheapest way to expand renewables come from solar power, from wind, and that's something that is growing in all the countries, perhaps at different speeds. Some countries go faster than others, but that depends also on the access to capital, on the on conditions there were regulatory conditions of the country, how stable is the country to attract investment?

We have learned, for example, in the case of Chile, a lot in the last five years, because we have a lot of investment in renewals and that put pressure on the system, on the transmission system, on the operation system, so there is a lot to share between the countries of how we can do this in the best way.

Alex Dolan, WRI Communications and Engagement Lead (14:02 – 14:14)

Let's go take a deeper dive into Chile then. You know, what from your perspective has gone right and has gone wrong? And what are the lessons that Chile can learn from and build on?

Javier Bustos, ACENOR Executive Director (14:15 – 16:30)

In Chile, we have been very successful to attract investment in renewable capacity, particularly solar wind. We have been less successful in, for example, how we can implement all this energy transition and have a benefit and on the final price of the consumer. So the prices of the consumers, in some moments were rising and the government took the decision to freeze tariffs for a couple of years – that also impacted the profitability of some of the companies. In the country, we already have one solar plant that went into bankruptcy because of these conditions. So sometimes it's very fast how this expansion on solar and wind happens. And it's important that they are located in the best possible place for the electricity system.

What happens in the case of Chile, that the majority of these plants were installed in the north part of the country, where there is an excess of supply, and that drives marginal cost of electricity in the north on to zero, what happens also sometimes in Europe with negative prices, and also reduce the profitability of these companies while all the transmission lines drives this electricity to the center or south part of the country where the major demand is.

So there are things to learn about how to a manage the proper way of this transition that happens really fast, where the companies are closing, for example, their coal plants faster than we thought at the beginning of the decarbonization process, because they become less and less profitable when the renewables became very competitive. So it is important to learn, yes, you can attract a lot of investment, but you have to also manage well, the impacts on the systems in terms of prices, cost, and also how they first try to be managed in the proper way.

Alex Dolan, WRI Communications and Engagement Lead (16:31 – 16:53)

And you mentioned that you know there are variances in the region and there's some countries that are are further advancing into the clean energy transition than others. From your perspective, who's a good example of a country that's really moving accelerating into the clean energy transition? Who could be a model for others to follow?

Javier Bustos, ACENOR Executive Director (16:54 – 18:47)

In the terms of Chile that has a very particular geography. It's a very thin and long country; it's very different than what happens, for example, in Brazil and or countries like Colombia. But there are good things to learn about each other. We learn from Brazil how these long-term contracts are a useful tool to develop new infrastructure and renewables. We learn from Spain, for example, about their development in terms of solar power. We learn from England or the UK how the regulation has to be implemented to have a cost-effective or cost-efficient system.

We are looking also at what Australia, for example, is doing because in terms of Chile, we are similar in economic sectors, for example, mining. But also we look at New Zealand, what it's doing in terms of renewals, because they have a geography that is similar in terms of how long the country is or what California also is doing in terms of renewables, demand-side and storage.

For example, one thing that we're looking at a lot is what happened with the storage in Australia and California. And right now we have, for example, in the last five years, a huge amount of investment on renewables. Now we are having a lot of investment in storage. And this has happened really fast. We are hoping to have in two or three more years, two or almost three gigawatts of storage in long-term batteries of three or four hours of storage. And that's why I changed the how the market works really fast.

Alex Dolan, WRI Communications and Engagement Lead (18:47 – 19:05)

Thank you. um I'm going to switch this over to Tatsatom and wanted to get a sense from, from your point of view, as somebody who's representing the World Resources Institute, what is WRI looking to do at CEM this year and how has the organization participated in past CEMs ?

Tatsatom Goncalves, WRI Energy Research Fellow (19:06 – 22:18)

Thanks, Alex. So WRI, we're no strangers to CEM. We have been regular participants, especially in recent years. We see CEM to be a pivotal moment in the annual road to COP, which often happens a few months after CEM, because conversations that take place during CEM often can carry on to COP or may lead to announcements about collaborations during COP. CEM is a way for WRI to stay abreast of the climate and energy narrative and help shape that narrative to reflect greater ambition and inform it based on the best available science.

This year, WRI will be on the ground all week and will be sharing our expertise through panels on clean energy investment, grid resilience, urban transportation, as well as roundtables with the public and private sector and several other topics.

Our WRI delegation, if you might call it so, we'll be meeting with several local and regional representatives from the renewable energy industry, with financial institutions as well as corporate buyers. Certainly value collaboration and partnership, in Latin America specifically. We recognize this as a region that has kind of flown under the radar in recent years and especially given, you know several other developments around the world in Asia with a constant...with the already large economies and population both at increasingly large numbers. There have been a lot of policy developments in the United States and in Europe with for incentives and regulations on clean energy.

I think this will be a year, the next 12 months will be a chance for Latin America to claim its space again in the global stage through not only the Clean Energy Ministerial, but also G20 summits later this year and COP30, which will be taking place at the end of 2025 in the city of Belém, which is the gateway city to the Amazon.

So I think WRI would like to leverage that this global attention in Latin America to create a coalition within Latin America that would help advance the policy enhancements that are needed to advance clean energy. But also, as Javier mentioned, facilitate this exchange of lessons that are learned in several different countries and make sure that they are, you know, there's cross-pollination across the region.

And I will say there's also and not only lessons to be learned across the region, but also from others, other countries. So in Asia, for example, we, WRI is one of the co-hosts for the Asia Clean Energy Coalition, or ACEC, and there are certainly lots of lessons that we have drawn from that initiative that could be valuable for Latin American context.

Alex Dolan, WRI Communications and Engagement Lead (22:19 – 22:35)

I'd like to loop back to Javier. You talked a little bit about some of the opportunities for policy makers and regulatory entities. Where do you feel like were the regulators fit into this year's CEM?

Javier Bustos, ACENOR Executive Director (22:36 – 24:58)

Well, one of the major things that is evolving is how we want to develop the flexibility in the electricity systems, for example, to incorporate all these renewables that are variable in essence. So what happens is that when we look at countries that have more than 30% for example of variable renewables in their electricity mix, we see a lot of challenges that that we haven't seen before. And what happens there is, OK, perhaps we can manage this with the storage. Well, how are we going to finance that investment in storage? What is the business model of storage? This is not a regular business model like generation, for example. So this is a challenge of how we're going to create flexible markets for the renewables that we are going to be incorporating in the electricity mix.

How are we going to pay for this infrastructure? How are we going to give the incentives to make the infrastructure that we're going to need in a way that this technology can be adapt, sorry, adopted at the right time and the right place? Where are the locational signals, for example? Not all the countries have locational prices for example and right now we are looking at not only large-scale utilities that are producing renewables, but competitive small units that are closer to the consumer places. So how [to move] this distribution of generation closer to the demand is going to be another challenge.

I think for many of our countries, we still rely on the old paradigm of the electricity sectors, where you have big generation, you have long transmission lines, and there was a passive role for the demand. And now we are having storage, we are having a distributed generation all around, and we are having a demand that is becoming more active and also more responsive to what is happening in the electricity sector.

Alex Dolan, WRI Communications and Engagement Lead (24:59 – 25:10)

One of the topics that is expected to come up this year is industrial carbonization. How do you expect that to come up at CEM and what are the opportunities?

Tatsatom Goncalves, WRI Energy Research Fellow (25:11 - 27:07)

I'll start that question by mentioning that a good portion of my work is focused on actually not in Latin America, but in Asia and particularly Southeast Asia. And a lot of those countries are home to large portions of global supply chains, um many of which rely on industrial processes that require heat, sometimes very high temperatures to manufacture the products they're providing for the rest of the world. So a lot of those countries, and those include China, India, Indonesia, Vietnam as well, those countries are in their journey to decarbonize and are very interested in solutions that will address that heat requirement.

I think for this CEM, we can expect Brazil to be aware of that, that need not only from among the Asian countries, but also other parts of the world. And I think we can expect Brazil to promote technologies and energy sources of economic interest to the country. I think primarily that includes hydrogen, but also biofuels, both of which entail various caveats, right. For hydrogen, it's a technology that is growing but still has limited commercial viability. For biofuels, there are multiple considerations around ecosystem impact and land use implications that need to be taken into account.

But I think regardless of these, how Brazil chooses to make these pitches to the world and how they are received by other countries should give us an early indication of what that conversation will look like and will evolve over the coming years in major other forms that gather a lot more attention than this wonky energy summit right, like the G20 and COP.

Alex Dolan, WRI Communications and Engagement Lead (27:08 – 27:28)

I remember over the last week or so, Al Gore said something to the effect of, you know the commitments at COP were similar to New Year's resolutions where they're easy to make and hard to keep, or I'm paraphrasing. Do you feel like the commitments made at CEM, the real challenge we'll be seeing if they actually manifest?

Tatsatom Goncalves, WRI Energy Research Fellow (27:29 – 28:13)

So this will be the first clean energy ministerial to happen since the Triple Up and Double Down campaign, which actually calls for a tripling of renewables and doubling of energy efficiency rates on a global scale, which is language that made its way to the COP agreement last year. So I think that narrative will still be top of mind for people and it will still be...a lot of the sessions during CEM will be focused on how we actually drive this into implementation, how do we actually deliver on that pledge?

We shall see on the on the outgoing episode of this series know how much of that came about.

Alex Dolan, WRI Communications and Engagement Lead (28:14 – 28:23)

Well, and to that, as we as we start to wind down, what what are the things that you feel like we should watch out for at this year's CEM? And I guess I'll ask Tatsitama first.

Tatsatom Goncalves, WRI Energy Research Fellow (28:24 – 29:35)

Yeah so, I think, you know as a Brazilian myself, I'm very curious to see how Brazil will project its image on the global stage. And I have a few guesses about that. So we mentioned earlier that Latin America has a grid that's cleaner than most of the rest of the world, and you know if you look at Brazil, you have less than 20% of the power mix coming from fossil fuels. That's largely thanks to hydropower in the 20th century, but also solar and wind during the present century.

That statistic is somewhat mirrored in several other countries in the region and so I think we can expect Brazil to bring attention to this and presents itself as an example with lessons for other countries to follow. I also think that, as I mentioned earlier, we can expect Brazil to promote specific technologies that are emerging in the global debate, which include hydrogen, or green hydrogen specifically, and biofuels, both of which you know have several considerations to take into account, but I think will be a recurring topic during this Clean Energy Ministerial.

Alex Dolan, WRI Communications and Engagement Lead (29:36 -  29:41)

And Javier, same question to you. What should we expect to see come out of this year? Or what are you what are you watching for?

Javier Bustos, ACENOR Executive Director (29:42 – 31:02)

Well, I'm looking very interested in what's going to be the discussion and the topics about supplements that we need for the energy transition in terms of infrastructure of storage. We have seen that the cost of renewals went down very fast very soon. We are seeing the same pattern with batteries. That could be a major change on the energy transition. It's going to be very interesting to know how the countries are managing this, how the international organizations and the private investors are looking to it.

Also, it's very important of how the discussion on long-term finance of these investments on how we manage to do all this transition in the most cost-efficient way, particularly for countries in Latin America that usually have restrictions of capital, budgets that sometimes cannot afford a large investment and they need to attract private investment.

That's going to be the two parts that I think are going to be interesting to look at in the CEM.

Alex Dolan, WRI Communications and Engagement Lead (31:03 – 32:07)

I'd like to thank both of my guests for joining today. That includes Javier Busto-Salvano and Tazatome Gonzalez from WRI. Again, we were talking about the Clean Energy Ministerial. This is the first of a two-part series on this year's CEM. We will reconvene after CEM wraps for a wrap-up on what happened at this year's Clean Energy Ministerial and how that plays into other convenings, especially COP 29 happening at the end of the year.

For more information on the WRI Energy Program, you can go to wri.org/energy. For more information on our podcasts, you can go to wri.org/podcasts.

This episode was produced and edited by Daniel Baker. For my colleagues at WRI, my name is Alex Dolan. Don't forget to leave us a five-star rating on whatever podcast streaming platform you listen this on. Every review counts, and thank you for listening.