Spotlight On: Energy and Economic Growth

Around the world, countries increasingly recognize the critical role affordable, reliable and sustainable energy plays in achieving low-carbon emissions targets and long-term economic growth goals. Abt excels at designing and delivering private sector-led energy solutions to meet the needs of developing and emergent nations. Our expertise and highly skilled workforce assists countries’ energy transformations, including furthering expansion of electricity access, supporting energy policy and regulatory reform, scaling energy finance and increasing sustainable development. Every day, our team of experts supports national, subnational and local partners as they build capacity to measure emissions, develop and apply analytic tools to quantify environmental and economic benefits, use data to drive efficient and effective energy planning and policy and facilitate investments in the energy sector.

Our mission is to improve the quality of life and economic well-being of people worldwide, and that applies to our work in energy. Through our proven capabilities, we:

• Create Knowledge: We advance the fields in which we work through research, publications and outreach.
• Strengthen Systems: We develop and enhance systems that generate and sustain societal benefits.
• Improve Lives: We deliver services that directly better peoples’ quality of life.

Selected Expertise:

Abt’s experts provide end-to-end support to help countries, developers, utilities, policy makers and donors achieve their clean energy, sustainability and economic development goals. Support includes:

Enhancing clients’ capacity and supporting energy systems to determine solutions that best fit their needs:

• Enhancing in-country institutional capacity on clean energy and energy efficiency
• Promoting regional energy trade and integration
• Improving power sector planning
• Building utility self-reliance and sustainability
• Promoting enhanced regional collaboration
• Developing tariff structures that accurately reflect costs and risks

Supporting the regulatory and policy environment to encourage clean energy investment:

• Increasing the energy policy capacity of in-country stakeholders
• Promoting gender equality and female and youth empowerment in the energy sector
• Creating strong, transparent legal and regulatory frameworks
• Modernizing tariff structures to encourage private sector engagement
• Researching and compiling best practices for energy policy reform

Developing innovative strategies and building partnerships to finance critical clean energy infrastructure:

• Mobilizing investment and scaling up private sector lending for clean energy
• Creating and supporting public-private-partnerships
• Developing business models to overcome barriers in emerging markets for expanding sales and investment in renewable energy and smart grid technologies

Featured Projects

Abt’s clean energy work is funded by a variety of clients, including the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the Asia Development Bank, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Millennium Challenge Corporation. Below is a description of our most recent work supporting energy projects in developing and emergent nations.

Clean Power Asia
Client: USAID

Countries in the Lower Mekong region – Cambodia, Lao PDR, Thailand and Vietnam – have grown an average of six percent per year since 2011. This growth has improved livelihoods, but rising demand for energy and dependence on fossil fuels threaten to solidify the region’s path to dangerous air quality and unsustainable growth. To help accelerate the transition to a low-carbon power sector, Abt manages the $16.3 million USAID Clean Power Asia project which is focused on four Lower Mekong countries and other Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) member states—by mobilizing at least $750 million in clean energy investments in five years, while supporting installation of at least 500MW of grid-connected renewable energy.

Climate Economic Analysis for Development, Investment and Resilience (CEADIR)
Client: USAID

Abt is the technical lead of a consortium that’s implementing CEADIR, which supports clean energy development in Latin America, the Caribbean, West Africa and Southeast Asia.

Activities include developing local banks’ capacity to navigate clean energy lending and expose them to clean energy technologies and to identify renewable energy projects for local currency investment. CEADIR has also evaluated and developed best practices for renewable energy auctions, connected U.S. renewable energy and smart grid technology suppliers with emerging economy opportunities and supported Battery Energy Storage System needs for enabling policy and in-country investment.

Building Low Emission Alternatives to Develop Economic Resilience and Sustainability (B-LEADERS)
Client: USAID

Abt worked to strengthen the Government of the Philippines’ and its partners’ capacity to plan, design and implement low emission development strategies (LEDS). The B-LEADERS project served as the anchor program to promote the U.S. government’s Enhancing Capacity for LEDS (EC-LEDS) program in the Philippines. Under this program, Abt led an economy-wide, cost-benefit and co-benefit analysis of mitigation options in the agriculture, energy, forestry, industry, transportation and waste sectors using the Agriculture and Land Use Greenhouse Gas Inventory (ALU)  and Long-range Energy Alternatives Planning System (LEAP) tools, which served as the basis for the Philippines Nationally Determined Contribution to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). We also supported the Climate Change Commission’s capacity building efforts by developing a cost-benefit analysis (CBA) modeling toolkit. Additionally, we supported the development of a one-stop shop for evaluating clean energy projects and conducted a greenhouse gas inventory study in the forestry sector.

Analysis and Investment for Low-Emission Growth (AILEG)
Client: USAID

Abt implemented USAID’s AILEG project, which helped governments, USAID missions and stakeholders integrate climate economics and investment into LEDS. AILEG strengthened government policy and economic analysis, improved climate data collection and sharing and identified high-impact investment options for clean energy, energy efficiency and sustainable landscapes. The goal is to drive economic growth, protect vulnerable people and places and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. With an emphasis on gender and social inclusion, AILEG successfully delivered four global activities and 22 technical assistance and capacity building activities across seven countries in five categories of technical assistance and local capacity development. Almost 50 percent of participants were women. Training categories covered rapid needs and gaps analyses; data strengthening; economic and financial analyses; policy analysis and recommendation; and capacity development. In Asia, Abt implemented AILEG activities in the Philippines, Vietnam and Kazakhstan.