The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2017

34 JULY-AUGUST 2017 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL up with an innovative competitive model to spur public-private cooperation. DOE pledged $25 million over five years to fund three consortia with the best proposals to advance break- throughs in solar energy, biofuels and energy-efficient buildings. The Indian Ministry of Science and Technology matched the U.S. investment. Because consortia had to commit their own financial resources (equal to the combined public bilateral commitment), they attracted labs and academic institutions working with companies seeking to commercialize cutting-edge innovations within a relatively short timeframe. All told, the $25 million con- tribution of each government leveraged a three-part, $100-mil- lion collaborative research program involving scores of organiza- tions and companies from both countries. As this competition got underway, a nongovernmental organization (NGO) approached Embassy New Delhi to voice concern that the expertise of Indian environmental organiza- tions was not sufficiently included. The NGO was prepared to go public with its condemnation; but instead, we enlisted its aid to spread the word about the funding opportunity. That ultimately induced many more Indian stakeholders to sign on as consor- tium partners. A remarkable 27 consortia competed for the awards. While we could only fund three of the groups, the remaining 24 built up relationships with one another that did not exist before. Four years later, U.S. and Indian officials announced they would extend the existing consortia for another five years and launch a new, fourth consortium to focus on smart grid and energy stor- age technology. This willingness not only to keep the program going, but also to expand investment in cooperative clean energy R&D reflects the durability of the collaborative model PACE cre- ated. Diplomacy in Action The success of the R&D prong is perhaps even more appar- ent in the proliferation of finance and deployment initiatives of PACE. Since its inception, multiple new finance mechanisms have been initiated to complement the original Clean Energy Finance Center. These include a finance coordination hub, a finance task force, and investment facilities for everything from large-scale power purchase agreements to smaller-scale financ- ing to improve energy access, rooftop solar uptake and rural micro-grid development. For its part, the PACE-D team helped develop the regulatory frameworks, skilled labor pool and business models needed to scale up rooftop solar projects and promoted adoption of energy-efficient building standards, since much of India’s infrastructure has yet to be built. India has since deployed some 230 million energy-efficient lights and is setting global lighting test standards. This extensive joint engage- ment has enabled emerging American clean energy companies to expand their markets, while contributing to a shared clean-energy mission. It is no accident that the same U.S. company that installed India’s first grid-connected commer- cial solar power plant has now installed about one gigawatt of solar capacity (comparable to that of a The Titagarh Generating Station in Kolkata, built in 1983, is a 240-megawatt coal-fired power plant. About 75 percent of India’s electricity is produced by coal-fired plants. WIKIMEDIACOMMONS/BISWARUPGANGULY