The story of our origin involves a book, a dam, and a solar cooker. It’s the story of a highly effective form of international cooperation that was born out of the thwarting of efforts to set a fundamental energy transition target. It went on to become one of the primary drivers of that very goal. In some sense REN21 is both the mother and child of the world’s attempts to transition to renewables on a global scale.
Time travel with us now back to the year 2002. The iPod has just been invented. Brazil had just beaten Germany in the FIFA World Cup in Japan and Korea. The World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) is set to begin, and most of Europe’s delegates are optimistic that they’ll leave Johannesburg with an agreement to begin the transition away from fossil fuels in the form of a global renewable energy target.
Manfred Konukiewitz, then a Deputy Director at the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), recalls that it “seemed like a no-brainer.” But he remembers when he first started to sense that the winds might not be in their favour.
He was hearing doubts from the “Global South”, and Africa in particular, about the development implications of proposals to focus on renewables.
Bear in mind that in 2002 renewable technologies were still in relative infancy. Solar panel producers were struggling to compete with cheap fossil fuels. Wind and solar accounted for less than 1% of global electricity generation. Other than in Europe, few governments were providing incentive programmes and some were outright hostile.
Greenpeace rocked up to the conference to challenge that perception with a bright yellow container with solar panels on the roof designed to deliver an example of solar business opportunities for the developing world: among them a barbershop, a laptop charging station, and a cafe offering the fruits of a solar-powered juicer or tea from a kettle powered by the sun.
“The biggest communications challenge back then was simply convincing people that solar photovoltaics worked,” said Paul Horsman, who coordinated the Positive Energy Campaign at Greenpeace. Jan Pronk, UN special envoy to the summit, got a solar powered haircut, to prove the point.
A German pilot project providing solar cookers to villagers in Africa had recently been rolled out. It was considered, in Germany, to be a compelling case study which promised massive CO2 savings once it scaled up. But a friend of Manfred’s in the South African Department of Minerals and Energy called it a bizarre project that not only wouldn’t scale, but wasn’t working. Villagers were reportedly finding the solar panels more useful as tables.
The unease grew as he realised that many of his African colleagues, when they heard an emphasis on “renewable energy” didn’t hear development opportunities: they heard continued reliance on biofuels like wood and dung, and a slow walk toward more advanced renewables.
“Renewables were not very popular, and we were taken by surprise. They were looking at them as the plaything that the Europeans were dumping on South Africa so that they themselves could keep burning coal.”
The head of the South African Department of Minerals and Energy told him bluntly “Manfred, you know, our people want the white man’s energy.”
The conference turned divisive. Emotions ran high. And the global renewable target was not adopted.
Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul, then the Federal Minister for Economic Cooperation and Development of Germany, suggested soft diplomacy. She and Hermann Scheer, former German Parliamentarian, convinced German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder to announce he would host a conference in Bonn to bring together a “coalition of the willing” to solve the impasse. It wasn’t a decision, just an announcement of intent, but according to Rainer Hinrichs-Rahlwes, at the time a Director General and Deputy State Secretary in the German Environment Ministry, it reflected the Chancellor’s frustration with being unable to position renewable energy strategically at the WSSD.
Germany had created a programme to put solar on 100,000 rooftops in 1993 and created a Renewable Energy Law introducing feed-in tariffs, which were designed to kick off a global renewable energy revolution. They had set a target of 20% renewables in the German power mix by 2020 (a target, Rainer notes proudly, they would mightily exceed). They had both an environmental and an industrial strategy that were dependent on the aggressive global adoption of the new technologies they were investing in.
The conference, which would become known as renewables 2004, was organised by a multi-stakeholder Steering Committee, chaired by Rainer and Michael Hofmann, which held regional preparatory meetings in Yemen, Thailand, and Brazil, collectively shaping the agenda, together with other governments and stakeholders and addressing issues that had stymied progress in Johannesburg.
As Rainer remembers it, “our strategy was quite crude at first, as were the technologies we were promoting. A terawatt of installed wind capacities at the time felt like a utopian fantasy, we were dealing with tens of kilowatts. But we were looking for allies willing to promote both the spread of those existing technologies and their improvement, and we held preparatory conferences in the countries that were the most enthusiastic partners.”
As the price of oil started climbing, and hurting many developing economies, the initial anxiety about the development implications of renewables began to give way to recognition of how much they could cut costs, and the conversations began to turn. Instead of focussing on a global renewable target, the preparatory conferences began thinking about a portfolio of commitments from the full spectrum of actors represented in the Steering Committee.
In 2002 what seemed like an uphill battle was becoming, as the conference date approached, something that looked like it might succeed, in large part because the German government had created a collaborative design process for the conference which brought together a wide range of stakeholders and a diversity of geographic interests. “The preparatory process was robust, and we never had any fear about attracting enough participants. We had plenty of delegates. What we didn’t know was what the outcome would be,” said Rainer.
Bear in mind that the German ministers who had joint responsibility for the conference, Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul and Jürgen Trittin, were from the Development Ministry, and the Environment Ministry. They were more accustomed to competition than cooperation. All the tensions which pull the term “sustainable development” in different directions were inherent in their joint responsibility for the summit’s success. Rainer looks back on his most important role in the conference as simply keeping the two of them “working in unison for a successful conference, rather than competing for responsibility and visibility.
But he cites so many people as having been a part of the success. “Steve Sawyer was everywhere, Jennifer Morgan, Norbert Gorißen, Arthouros Zervos, Karsten Sach, David Hales, Sheila Oparaocha, and Klaus Töpfer, and so many others. It was an extraordinary show of cooperation.”
Li Jungfeng of China was at the preparatory meeting in Bangkok and over the years was extremely supportive of REN21 and renewables. And Rainer recalls a fun fact: he and Li Jungfeng were among the first interviewees to sit on the iconic green couch which debuted at the South African International Renewable Energy Conference in 2015 and now travels to seemingly every energy gathering.
“That was a conference that so many remember for the extraordinary gala,” said Rainer, “where the music was actually danceable and at one point Tina Joemat-Pettersson, the South African Energy Minister, took the hand of the German State Secretary Rainer Baake and danced him around in a Polonaise which swept up the entire room. That felt like a fitting image of the cooperation that was born in Bonn.”
The conference in Bonn was attended by over 3600 participants and had three main outcomes
- A commitment to ramping up renewables
- The International Action programme which set out voluntary contributions to increase renewable capacity
- The creation of a multi-stakeholder policy network dedicated to renewables — what would become REN21.
But it was only late in one of the last meetings of the Steering Committee that the innovation of creating an “Issue Network” suddenly emerged.
There were different ideas floating around about how to institutionally embody a renewables champion, and an agenda item was set to decide the matter as one of the last orders of business. One proposal that had been popular at a parliamentarian’s parallel event was one championed by Hermann Scheer and Hans-Josef Fell to create an intergovernmental body dubbed “IRENA,” which would eventually be founded by 75 governments in 2009.
“My boss, Michael Hofmann, and I had followed the successful work of the World Commission on Dams, a multistakeholder effort, and we were quite sceptical that an intergovernmental body was the answer,” says Manfred.
“Michael was reading a book by Jean-François Rischard, then World Bank Vice President for Europe, titled High Noon: 20 Global Problems, 20 Years to Solve Them, and he was quite excited by this idea of a matrix solution which brought together governments, non-governmental organisations, academia, science, and industry into coordinated action.”
The author made a compelling case that issue networks were more flexible, more nimble, and because they had no legislative or normative power they could move more freely. But most importantly, Manfred notes, “they could name and shame, which an intergovernmental organisation simply never does.” This seemed a more fitting model to apply to a planetary emergency.
Manfred and Michael started speaking to other members of the Steering Committee about the idea. Many were enthusiastic. Christopher Flavin, the President of the Worldwatch Institute, listened intently, and told Manfred that if the BMZ wanted to propose it, he’d support it. But Michael and Manfred got sidetracked with other priorities. They hadn’t spoken of it beyond agreeing it was a good idea, when suddenly the agenda item was upon them. Manfred dashed over to Christopher and told him that if this thing was going to happen, he’d have to propose it now. “And that’s what he did. Within ten minutes. He laid out the rationale. And a lot of people felt this was the best way forward. The Steering Committee agreed, and I was quite happy.”
And that was how, in the words of Jennifer Morgan, who was with Worldwide Fund for Nature in 2002 and is now Germany’s Special Envoy for International Climate Action, REN21 came into the world to become “one of the most unique and effective accelerators of global action on renewables, turning the values, interests, and expertise of so many into a driving force for a thriving, sustainable future for all.”
This is one in a series of stories we will be telling in 2024 to celebrate the 20-year anniversary of REN21. Got an anecdote, a picture, a memory, a story you’d like to share? Know a colleague who does? We would welcome hearing from you: community@ren21.net
