NEWS FIRST-OF-KIND ENERGY ACCESS RESEARCH AND OUTREACH PROJECT LAUNCHEDMarch 31, 2016

FIRST-OF-KIND ENERGY ACCESS RESEARCH AND OUTREACH PROJECT LAUNCHED

University of California, Berkeley and the Power for All Campaign

Join Forces to Accelerate Energy Access

March 31–San Francisco–Today the University of California, Berkeley’s Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory (RAEL), an energy research and international deployment center, and Power for All, a global campaign to advance decentralized renewable energy (DRE) technologies in order to accelerate energy access for the 1.1 billion people living without power, announced a new partnership to build the Platform for Energy Access Knowledge (PEAK).

PEAK is an interactive information database designed to help aggregate and repackage the best research on energy access—from a range of organizations such as the U.S. government initiative Power Africa, REN21, IRENA, the World Bank, academic institutions such as UC Berkeley, non-governmental agencies and community groups—into compelling data-driven stories for a range of target audiences including policymakers and investors.

PEAK, a joint project of RAEL and Power for All, compiles and synthesizes data on energy access and distributed renewables to ensure maximum visibility, usability and discoverability of that information by individuals, organizations and communities working to make energy services accessible to all.

PEAK’s first phase will focus on enabling the Power for All campaign and its partners to leverage critical evidence and create compelling visualizations of the sector’s findings. Phases two and three will serve the broader community with an open-source tool for rapid response and surfacing powerful, data-based evidence that proves we can achieve energy access faster and far more cost-effectively via decentralized renewables than conventional wisdom predicts.

“Achieving universal energy access is not only one of the most pressing issues of our time—but also one of the most solvable,” said Professor Dan Kammen, director of RAEL and recently appointed U.S. Science Envoy for the U.S. State Department. “If we enable entrepreneurs, civil society organizations and governments to quickly and easily access the best science and research on distributed renewables in emerging markets, we believe we can help accelerate universal energy access.”

PEAK is coordinated by Dr. Rebekah Shirley (Post-Doctoral Researcher, UC Berkeley) and Dr. Peter Alstone (ITRI-Rosenfeld Post-Doctoral Fellow at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory)—both of whose doctoral studies were advised by Professor Kammen—and a team of graduate student researchers at UC Berkeley.

Several well-known institutions and resources are conducting important research on the role of decentralized renewable energy in accelerating energy access. However, many reports and the associated data sets fail to reach key audiences. In one example, a 2014 World Bank study found that nearly one-third of their PDF reports had never been downloaded, and 40 percent of their reports had been downloaded fewer than 100 times. PEAK is designed to improve this equation for all critical energy access research. PEAK will be previewed at the Clean Energy Ministerial (CEM 7) parallel program, EnergyAccessX, on June 1 in San Francisco.

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About the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory

Professor Kammen founded and directs the Renew­able and Appro­pri­ate Energy Lab­o­ra­tory (RAEL) is a unique new research, devel­op­ment, project imple­men­ta­tion, and com­mu­nity out­reach facil­ity based at the Uni­ver­sity of Cal­i­for­nia, Berke­ley in the Energy and Resources Group and the Depart­ment of Nuclear Engi­neer­ing. RAEL focuses on design­ing, test­ing, and dis­sem­i­nat­ing renew­able and appro­pri­ate energy sys­tems. The laboratory’s mis­sion is to help these tech­nolo­gies real­ize their full poten­tial to con­tribute to envi­ron­men­tally sus­tain­able devel­op­ment in both indus­tri­al­ized and devel­op­ing nations while also address­ing the cul­tural con­text and range of poten­tial social impacts of any new tech­nol­ogy or resource man­age­ment system. Learn more at www.rael.berkeley.edu.

RAEL Media Contacts:

Professor Daniel M. Kammen: kammen@berkeley.edu, +1 510 642 1640

Twitter: @dan_kammen

About Power for All

Power for All is a global campaign to accelerate the market-based growth of decentralized renewables as the key to achieving universal energy access. The campaign serves as a collective voice for businesses and civil society focused on off-grid renewable solutions, including decentralized solar, hydro, biomass and wind. Distributed renewables are the fastest, most cost-effective path to modern energy services in emerging markets; a potent growth engine for economies and jobs; and an impact multiplier that creates more resilient, self-sufficient and healthy communities. Learn more at www.powerforall.org

Power for All Media Contacts

Susie Wheeldon: +44 7903 701 343, susie@powerforall.org

William Brent: +34 684 314 268, william@powerforall.org