Asia Clean Energy Partners is an international advisory firm focused on accelerating the clean energy transition across Asia-Pacific by working with governments, businesses and development organizations on clean energy policy, investment, market development and project implementation. In this Q&A Otto Gunderson speaks with Peter duPont about Sharing Perspectives to Advance Regional Knowledge on Energy Transition in Southeast Asia (SPARK), an initiative designed to support clean energy investment in Southeast Asia through confidential roundtable discussions.
Q: Can you explain how SPARK came about, what its goals are, and what lessons have been learned from the first two SPARK gatherings?
A: SPARK stands for Sharing Perspectives to Advance Regional Knowledge on the Energy Transition in Southeast Asia. As the name connotes, it is the idea of sparking ideas, sparking knowledge.
It’s an initiative that was set up by several key organizations in the clean energy ecosystem in Southeast Asia, called the Southeast Asia Energy Transition Partnership (ETP). The ETP program is operated by UNOPS, the UN Office for Project Services.
The SPARK series was modeled on something that has been taking place for the past 20 years or so at Wilton Park, a foundation in the UK that hosts regular meetings with a limited number of invited participants to discuss the big issues. They’ve held meetings on issues ranging from arms control and international affairs to chemical pesticides. I’ve attended a couple of meetings there over the years focused on the challenges of scaling up clean energy and shifting from brown energy to green energy.
ETP came up with the idea of a similar series of events focused on some of the toughest challenges in the clean energy sector and they called it SPARK. The first two SPARK meetings, as you mentioned in your question, focused on carbon markets and pricing, and on phasing down financing for coal-fired power plants in the region.
The idea behind SPARK is really to bring a limited number of people together. The target is to get five to six people per country, which gets you up to about 15 to 20 people total, along with a number of experts who have deep domain expertise in the region. They may come from the US or North America, or they may be based regionally and have knowledge that applies based on their experience in this region.
So you have about 25 people meeting over two and a half days to talk about these issues. A very important thing is that it’s under the Chatham House Rule. The Chatham House Rule is a set of guidelines for invitation-only meetings where you want to create a safe space, so that people feel like they can really speak their minds. The rule means that after the meeting, the conclusions and recommendations of the group can be shared, but statements cannot be attributed to any individual. So people have that sense that this is a safe space, and they feel free to speak their minds since they can be anonymous.
And then the important thing is, and we’ll get to it, the policy briefs that came out of the first two events are substantive documents that talk about the real issues. It’s not just a bunch of people meeting and having a conversation; the goal is to come out of these meetings with concrete ideas and policy recommendations
Q: Let’s dive in a little bit into those takeaways. When you mentioned the policy briefs, are there policy recommendations that you thought were particularly poignant or that you were particularly excited to see implemented?
A: We have a small team at Asia Clean Energy Partners that supports the ETP, the Energy Transition Partnership. ETP knows the players in each country, and the way in which their governments are set up. So you typically have five to six government officials from Vietnam, Indonesia, and the Philippines.
We also switch it up sometimes and have a mix of government officials, NGOs, and private sector participants.
The greatest benefit I observed during the first few meetings we hosted was seeing representatives from all the countries, across different government departments and agencies, come together in the same room. For example, you might have representatives from the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Energy, an agency responsible for carbon markets, and another agency focused on other aspects of capacity building. In some cases, they had never even met one another before. Although they were from the same country, this meeting was the first time they had all come together as a group.
At the country level, you’re essentially building a team. Initially, we have three round tables, one for each country, where participants get to know one another and begin to build relationships. Then, over the course of the two and a half day exercise, we move into problem-based discussions and mix the groups up, creating opportunities for participants from different countries to share experiences and lessons learned.
When it comes to carbon markets, it has become very clear that there is already a lot of activity, but the real challenge is ensuring that these markets are credible and sufficiently strengthened before they can scale up. A number of issues contribute to this, including multiple agencies
working on carbon markets, which can result in fragmented institutional mandates. You also have a lack of interoperable registry systems for measurement, reporting, and verification, as well as a broader challenge around market confidence stemming from inconsistent standards.
For example, carbon credits have occasionally faced accusations of greenwashing. One of the most high-profile cases involved South Pole, which issued a large number of credits for a reforestation project in Kariba, Zimbabwe. Those credits were later found to have significantly overestimated the amount of carbon actually being removed, raising serious questions about how carbon credits are verified and, more broadly, about the integrity of the system as a whole.
That’s less of an issue on the energy side because changes in energy use are relatively straightforward to measure and translate into greenhouse gas emissions reductions. Nature-based projects are more difficult to assess because they depend on things like avoiding deforestation, reforesting land, or preserving ecosystems that naturally sequester carbon dioxide.
So, when meeting with people from different agencies and across different countries, we were essentially discussing how to build confidence in the market, how to make carbon credits an investable asset, and how to bring banks and other financial institutions into the carbon market so that it becomes something that can actually be financed.
