Omer Ahmad, Policy and Commercial Development Manager was in SE Asia earlier this month to provide his expertise on the Contracts for Difference (CfD) scheme to Government and industry representatives in the Philippines, Indonesia and Singapore.
Omer was travelling with Lewis Heather, Director at Baringa and together they provided their expertise and insights to tackle the country specific challenges in transitioning those energy markets to a net zero energy system.
This included presenting at the Global Wind Energy Conference (GWEC) in Manila where one of the main requests from renewable energy project developers was indexation of their projects.
In Jakarta, the focus of the energy dialogue was on market and auction design features of the UK CfD that could be applied to that market to bring about price discovery in future renewables auctions. Finally in Singapore, the conversation moved to new schemes such as CCUS and Hydrogen.
Reflecting on the week-long trip to SE Asia, Omer’s key takeaways were: “All of the countries I visited and officials and industry representatives I presented and spoke to individually are keen to utilise the example of the UK CfD to implement and deliver net zero energy technologies and investment frameworks in their respective jurisdictions. A lot of the policy and regulatory discussions in these SE Asian countries are very similar to the discussions we had in the UK when designing the CfD and other schemes. I learnt a lot about each country’s specific goals and challenges and I hope they gained valuable insights and new ideas from my engagement with them over the past week.
I would also like to thank Bharath Varadhan, Jowee Ortense and Atika Fanani from the Foreign Office for their warm welcome to SE Asia and invaluable local knowledge that kept Lewis and I on schedule throughout the week. ”