Mr Tumiwa joined the Asian Development Bank (ADB) in 2001, and aside from working in the office of the Director General of ADB’s Regional and Sustainable Development Department, he currently co-ordinates ADB’s overall efforts to promote clean energy and meet its target of $1 billion of clean energy investments per year, with plans to increase this investment to $2 billion by the year 2012.

1. Where does your interest in clean energy stem from?

I have always worked on development issues, first with ‘green’ environmental issues such as biodiversity conservation and national park management, and then moving on to work on ‘brown’ environmental issues such as industrial pollution prevention and control. Over the years, I realised that a large part of pollution prevention begins with energy savings, which led me to get involved in energy efficiency and renewable energy.

2. What top two steps does the industry need to take to be cost competitive with traditional energy generation? How can they be achieved?

Most energy efficiency applications, are already cost-competitive. It is surprising that more individuals and companies are not adopting energy efficiency solutions because the payback periods are short – usually only an average of 12–18 months – and any savings after that is pure profit.

The story is a little different for renewable energy. Many projects are quite close to being commercially viable, such as large wind farms, while others still have some way to become more competitive.

I think the first step is that the industry needs to work with governments to implement the right policies and regulations to attract clean energy investments. This includes proper pricing and rationalisation of subsidies. After which, we need to look to aggregate markets to increase economies of scale and bring down costs.

For example, say a country has put the right policies and regulations in place and now four or five project developers want to develop wind farms of approximately 100 megawatt (MW) in size each. These project developers will go out and look for technologies and they will each get a certain price for each of their 100 MW wind farms. However, if there was some mechanism for them to combine their procurement and seek 600 MW of wind turbines, I am sure technology providers would provide a more cost-effective price.

3. What has been the greatest achievement of the clean energy industry, or your sector, in the past five years?

With the global energy crisis two years ago, governments became more interested in energy security, which sent them looking at energy efficiency and renewable energy. This came at an opportune time as renewable energy prices have been decreasing significantly in the last five years due to improved manufacturing capacity, especially here in Asia.

4. Where do you see the renewable energy sector going in the short and long term?

I believe deployment of renewable energy technologies will only go up in the next two to three years. In the long term, it will only get better.

I say this because I know that a lot of governments are working hard to put in the right policies and regulations, which will take two to three years (and in some cases maybe more). Once in place, they should provide the right signals to the market to invest.

5. What are the top two government incentives/policy measures you would like to see implemented today? Why?

As I said, the first has to be pricing. If there are huge subsidies, then there is no incentive to do energy efficiency. Subsidies to primary energy also make conventional electricity generation very cheap so that renewable energies would never be able to compete commercially.

Second, as governments establish their policies and regulations, they must not forget that they have to also attract private sector investment into the sector. Hence, they must address their systems to ease investments, both foreign and domestic.

6. What promising project/technology is ADB currently developing or working with partners to implement?

We are doing everything. Throughout Asia, we are investing in several projects on solar, wind, waste-to-energy, biomass, biogas and so on. We have also invested in equity funds and have developed risk-sharing facilities with commercial banks to finance energy efficiency.

7. What one piece of advice would you give new entrants to the clean energy industry?

Partner with or hire a team that has done it all before. It is the quickest and most effective way to learn.