Peter Traupmann, Managing Director of the Austrian Energy Agency (AEA) kicked off a two-and half hour event on Renewable Energy Policy and Market Development Worldwide, held at the Vienna International Centre on 22 March. Co-hosted together with REN21 and REEEP, the event highlighted a cross-section of issues relating to the wide-scale deployment of renewables.
Christine Lins, the Executive Secretary of REN21 set the stage for the day’s discussion with a comprehensive overview of the topic, drawing on the annual REN21 Renewables Global Status Report (GSR), and giving hints about the new report to be released in June.
REEEP’s Director General Martin Hiller followed with a strong plea for governments to open up their data sets in order to unleash growth in the clean energy sector. His talk included examples of REEEP projects that could have benefited from an open data policy. For example, the project on “Implementing low carbon public transport in Jakarta” actually had to compile data on population density, distribution and ridership; data that was theoretically already available. This illustrates now important opening up of data can be for triggering business activity.
Ulrike Radosch, who has the lead on Austria’s Energy in Central and Eastern Europe (enerCEE) project, outlined this initiative which aims to provide information on energy efficiency and renewable energy in CEE countries through a web platform.
Finally, Gabriela Cretu and Karolina Cegir of the Vienna-based Energy Community outlined to their organisation's efforts to assist Eastern European countries in voluntarily developing clean energy policy consistent with EU targets.
The discussion which followed also underlined the potential that could be created if governments were to more fully open their data.
