The International Solar Alliance (ISA) was officially launched on 11 March in New Delhi, India, where, together with France, it hosted the first Alliance Summit. The initiative, which has been in place since 2015, aims to facilitate the development of an additional 1,000 GW of solar power plants by 2030, which would represent a fivefold increase in current global capacity. To achieve this, the initiators, including the United States and China, intend to mobilize 1,000 billion $s by 2030.
Pt this first founding summit, 36 countries responded to the call for expressions of interest and participated in the ASI consultation on their priorities in the fields of solar energy for agriculture and rural areas, mini-solar grids, rooftop installations and electric mobility: 100 priority projects were put forward to launch a first phase of funding mobilization.
The International Solar Alliance is an intergovernmental alliance created at COP 21 in December 2015 by Paris and New Delhi with the aim of overcoming barriers and accelerating the deployment of solar energy. It was born out of the observation that countries close to the equator enjoy an average of 300 days of sunshine per year, but do not always have the technology, financing or expertise to exploit it to the full. Between 20 % to 50 % of their populations do not have access to electricity. The objectives pursued are therefore multiple: to massively reduce the cost of solar energy, to meet the high energy demand in developing countries and to contribute to the fight against climate change.
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The Allliance works through cooperation between rich and developing countries. It is based on a treaty of 121 "sun-rich" countries that lie wholly or partly between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn. Their switch to solar energy should therefore help reduce the use of fossil fuels and combat climate change.
To achieve this, the Alliance will establish a platform for cooperation between developed countries with solar energy technologies and countries of the South. The latter, despite having a significantly more abundant solar resource, so far produce only 23% of the solar electricity consumed globally, a share that could be increased with greater access to technology and financing. Therefore, ASI member countries are committed to aggregating and harmonizing their demand for financing, technology and innovation to create a "common market" to lower costs, strengthen quality control, better tailor products to needs, and improve technologies.
To make solar energy affordable to the poorest, the Alliance stresses the importance of channelling capital, reducing costs through financial mechanisms, promoting universal access to energy and assisting in the creation of common standards to ensure adequate product quality in the use of products by member countries. To achieve its objectives, the Alliance aims to implement financial instruments to mobilize more than $1 trillion of investment in solar energy by 2030.
The platform will mainly be used for the publication of calls for tenders and guarantees by poor countries, in the expectation of participation by private investors, under the supervision of the World Bank, in order to help especially the poorest nations, as well as small island states such as Fiji, Tuvalu and Nauru or the Comoros. For them, the main obstacle to solar energy is first and foremost the cost of financing.
"The battle for renewable energies is also a battle for "empowerment": the empowerment, given to each State of the Solar Alliance to succeed at home, to make a place for everyone, to allow its citizens to build their place and thus to be trained to build jobs in these sectors. », said Emmanuel Macron, who co-chaired the launch ceremony. He also announced that France will devote 1 billion euros, through its development agency, to achieving the objectives of the initiative: Emerging economies will benefit from 700 million euros of aid from France, in the form of loans and grants, in addition to the 300 million euros that the country had already committed in 2015 at COP 21.
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