Green energy alliance with $100B goal gains new partners at COP 27

The Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet, or GEAPP, has entered a new stage a year after its launch, with the financial backing of a trio of foundations — Bezos Earth Fund, IKEA Foundation, and The Rockefeller Foundation — and the ambitious goal to raise $100 billion in public and private capital for renewable energy projects in the global south. GEAPP, which launched at the 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference, or COP 26, returned to this year’s COP 27 in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, with a new CEO, Simon Harford, a former Larry Ellison Foundation adviser. Nearly nine months after his appointment, he and his team are promoting a strategy for driving green energy investments in lower-income countries. “We’re really building the organization,” Sundaa Bridgett-Jones, GEAPP’s vice president and chief partnerships and advocacy officer, told Devex in an interview. She said the organization now has roughly 70 people on staff. She said GEAAP wants to maintain “a lean institution” and “drive this work forward.” “We don’t want to be out there creating a structure that in any way aims to duplicate what others are doing,” she added. Leveraging $10 billion in commitments from its founding partners, which include several multilateral development banks, is core to the alliance’s plan to draw more investors to renewable energy projects in lower-income countries that struggle to get climate finance dollars and risk being left behind as more nations transition to greener energy. Last week, the alliance announced it would partner with the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank to direct $1 billion in investments toward green energy transition and renewable energy projects in the public and private sectors. “Our participation in GEAPP marks yet another step forward for our Bank, in unlocking new resources through co-financing measures, to meet our ambitious climate targets and deliver value to those most in need,” AIIB’s Vice President of Policy and Strategy Danny Alexander said in a statement. The alliance also last week joined a committee of African leaders, CEOs, and “carbon credit experts” to launch an initiative to expand Africa’s participation in voluntary carbon markets by 2050. Voluntary carbon markets allow nations to offset their emissions by investing in projects that could remove or reduce greenhouse gasses from the atmosphere. The announcements come in addition to a series of individual commitments the alliance’s trio of philanthropic founders made toward their own goals at COP 27. The Bezos Earth Fund and The Rockefeller Foundation joined another coalition with the U.S. government, major corporations, and other philanthropies that also seeks to attract $100 billion in corporate financing for the shift from fossil fuels to clean energy by the end of this decade. Also separate from the alliance, IKEA Foundation said it would deploy an additional €600 million, roughly $620 million, in funding for initiatives to help reduce emissions by 2030. A progress report COP 27 is an opportunity to show potential investors how the alliance can help change the outlook for the global south through partnerships and collaborations, IKEA Foundation Chief Communications Officer Truus Huisman told Devex. GEAPP members see this conference as “a moment to show global leaders, the business and finance world and the development banks present at COP the achievements that the Global Energy Alliance has been able to make and to raise more interest and excitement,” she said. Key to this effort is showing the impact the alliance has had and the development of its governance structure, including its recently formed Global Leadership Council, an advisory body that includes government leaders, the United Nations, foundation heads, the World Bank, and other development banks. In recent months, the alliance has also launched initiatives in African countries, including conflict-affected Ethiopia, where it partnered with the government to build the first solar minigrid-powered large-scale irrigation systems for farming. “We have a program called Distributed Renewable Energy Agriculture Modalities (DREAM) that we just launched with nine mini-grids and irrigation systems and this is kind of a nexus between the energy work and the agriculture work as well,” Bridgett-Jones said. The alliance and the African Development Bank have partnered on the project, investing $13.75 million and $6.75 million, respectively, to bring the total funding to $20.5 million, according to a Rockefeller Foundation spokesperson. Ethiopia is a “challenging space” and getting the project off the ground hasn’t been easy, Bridgett-Jones added, referencing the country’s ongoing civil conflict that has hindered efforts to deliver food and other humanitarian aid to vulnerable communities. Despite that, the alliance has found a way to build a relationship with the government on sustainable agricultural development and make “really important gains.” Much of that is because The Rockefeller Foundation has already established relationships and programs on the continent, which the alliance is scaling up through this project and others, she said. Also on the continent, it recently launched a partnership with Malawi to help increase electricity access. About $27.6 million has been committed to the project, so far, an alliance spokesperson said. Next steps Bridgett-Jones and many other staffers came to the alliance from Rockefeller Foundation, which served as the incubator for the initiative before it was formally spun out into an independent nonprofit organization with its own leadership and board this year. She said the alliance has increased staffing and is planning to add more board members “to ensure that we will have the kind of diversity and representation on our board that will reflect the thought leadership from the Global South, in particular.” The alliance currently has about 12 country programs, including in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Haiti, India, Indonesia, Myanmar, Nigeria, Puerto Rico, Sierra Leone, South Africa, and Uganda. It received “a couple of dozen” applications in response to an application call, and is looking to add at least seven of those countries next year, she said. They include Bangladesh, Burundi, Pakistan, and Vietnam. Part of the internal conversation happening right now is “how many more countries can we consider collectively as an alliance, and I think that’s part of our strategic thinking with our alliance partners now,” she said.