Blog

After many years of partnering with the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE's) national laboratories on various energy sector studies and programs, the United States Agency for International Development's (USAID's) mission in India realized an opportunity to coalesce these initiatives into an interlaboratory consortium.

• 12/02/2021
• Isabel McCan

There is growing momentum in the international community to ramp up climate finance for mitigation and adaptation actions. Undoubtedly, a focus on climate change adaptation in the developing world must be a priority for the financing.

• 09/08/2021
• Mohamed Bakarr

Improving energy efficiency is an integral but often-overlooked part of low-emission development (LED) strategies that can help countries reach their climate targets while meeting growing demands for energy.

• 05/05/2021
• Andrew Fang, Michael McNeil, Katie Koerper

When women are able to fully participate and lead in the workforce, we know that businesses prosper. Research shows that gender and ethnically diverse companies outperform industry standards by 25 percent.

• 03/08/2021
• Corinne Hart, Hayley Samu

This is the final of three blogs examining the lessons and implications of the COVID-19 pandemic for sustainable landscape programs.

• 02/12/2021
• Eric Haxthausen

Kelo Uchendu, a mechanical engineering student at the University of Nigeria, founded the Gray2Green movement in 2018. Grey2Green raises awareness about climate justice and works on student-led engineering projects to innovate new sustainable technology.

• 02/04/2021
• Ruby Rorty

My passion for entrepreneurship started when I was pursuing my Bachelor’s degree in Clothing Textiles at Egerton University. I started a shop to sell soft furnishing for fabrics such as bed covers, curtains, baby sets etc. This business however did not go as smooth as I had earlier imagined.

• 01/14/2021
• Stella Sigana

Smallholder rubber plantations represent a threat and an opportunity for carbon stock and biodiversity in Indonesia. A threat because poor agriculture and forestry practices lead to overuse of pesticides and fertilizers, water and river pollution and deforestation; and an opportunity because smallholder rubber plots hold a much higher biodiversity and carbon stock than their most common alternative: palm oil monoculture.

• 08/28/2020
• USAID Green Invest Asia 

Implementors of international development projects as well as countries around the world increasingly recognize the private sector as a key partner to meet development and policy goals. But in order to make these collaborations most effective, there are best practices that all parties should follow, such as having a shared objective, equally investing in the relationship, and setting clear expectations.

• 06/24/2020
• Jennifer Park, Jonathan Schwarz

Less than half of Nigeria’s 186 million people have access to electricity. But in the rural village of Gbamu Gbamu, newly installed utility poles and wires act as markers of a brighter future, powered by a new solar minigrid. The grid, an effort of local developers Rubitec Solar and Winrock’s USAID-funded Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Project (REEEP), is empowering citizens and their enterprises, providing them with a better quality of life and more stable sources of income.

• 06/17/2020
• Winrock International

An irrigation system with solar photovoltaic energy at the Ramon Rodriguez farm, in Dominican Republic, provides resilience to drought using renewable energy. This system was installed in May 2017 under the USAID Climate Resilience and Index Insurance Program for Small Farmers in the Dominican Republic, executed by the REDDOM Foundation.

• 06/10/2020
• Climatelinks

When the government of India set a goal of deploying 175 gigawatts of renewable power by 2022, they understood that changes to their power system's operations were needed to achieve that level of renewable power on the grid. India decided to work with USAID and the United States Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) to develop a comprehensive grid integration study identifying operational pathways that would enable India to efficiently meet its renewable energy target.

• 02/20/2020
• Isabel McCan

With the climate changing in fast and uncertain ways, getting the right information for infrastructure design is becoming more challenging. USAID spends over a billion dollars a year building infrastructure across our humanitarian assistance and development portfolios, so it’s important that the Agency get it right. Infrastructure matters to international development. How the world grows, advances, and develops is (literally) built on a foundation of infrastructure.

• 02/03/2020
• John Pasch

The USAID-NREL Partnership developed a suite of resources within the Grid Integration Toolkit that provides information about the role that battery energy storage systems (BESS) play in integrating variable renewable energy, such as wind and solar, into large-scale power systems.

• 10/17/2019
• Isabel McCan

Hanzel Cubangbang first learned about the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in college. It became his dream to one day see the campus and conduct the types of research he was studying firsthand.

• 10/11/2019
• Isabel McCan