Presented at USAID organized webinar series. See the recording here (RE Zones presentation starts from minute 29)
https://www.usaid.gov/energy/sure/system-planning-webinar
The topic of this webinar is the development of renewable energy (RE) zones. RE Zone is a best practice for accelerating the development of RE projects and attracting private sector investments to the deployment of renewable energy plants. It is especially useful in conducting successful RE auctions. The webinar will describe a methodology for creating RE Zones. The methodology specifies the following: parameters that should be used to qualify the zones, ranking scheme for grading zones along each parameter, and scoring scheme for determining the most favorable zones. The first phase of the methodology is based on desktop analysis with GIS tools and datasets that are mostly available in the public domain. Subsequent phases of the methodology include RE resource measurement campaign, grid integration studies, environmental impact studies, logistics study, land availability assessment and others. RE Zones developed using this methodology would result in successful and competitive auctions because most of the risks to bidders has been reduced.
