2015 Clean Energy Investments Project Summaries

While ADB’s renewable energy investments were slightly under a billion dollars in 2015, the overall renewable energy market is healthier than ever. Bloomberg New Energy Finance, through an analysis of the levelized cost of electricity for onshore wind and solar photovoltaic energy, has stated that these two renewable energy sources are fully competitive with coal across the lifetime of a power plant, with onshore wind being the cheapest source of electricity in Germany. A cycle where new renewables slowly out-compete fossil fuel generation, and create a market where it becomes more economical to develop renewables and less economical to back fossil fuel plants, may have already begun. The countries of developing Asia and the Pacific region have a roadmap for the future, and while difficult challenges of policy, questions of economics, and limitations of technology may slow progress, it will not stop the region’s continuing, and growing, development of clean energy solutions. Beyond its financing targets, ADB pledges to aid the developing countries of Asia and the Pacific region in overcoming any and all of the barriers preventing greater adoption of clean energy.