Building low-carbon economies

WHAT IT AIMS TO ACHIEVE

The Global Energy Storage Program (GESP) is a funding window under the Clean Technology Fund. It delivers breakthrough energy storage solutions at scale in developing countries. The program makes the Climate Investment Funds the world’s largest multilateral fund supporting energy storage. Building on over $400 million in existing storage support, GESP funding is expected to mobilize an additional $2 billion of public and private investments for these vital technologies.

This first-of-its-kind investment program has the following aims:

Help develop new storage capacity in developing countries;
Accelerate cost reduction;
Support the integration of variable renewable energy into grids; and
Expand energy access for millions of people.

HOW IT WORKS

GESP is a global partnership of governments, multilateral development banks, and private corporations committed to delivering on a climate-smarter future through energy storage technologies. They include the following entities:

Climate Investment Funds,
World Bank,
International Finance Corporation,
Inter-American Development Bank,
African Development Bank,
Asian Development Bank, and
European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.

Concretely, GESP concessional finance — finance with substantially below-market terms and conditions — supports these areas:

Solar, wind, and hybrid power projects with storage for grid services;
A wide range of technically and economically viable storage systems, including, but not limited to, gravity-based technologies, thermal storage, and electrochemical batteries;
Large-scale demonstration projects supporting less mature, but technically viable, long-duration storage technologies;
Mini-grids and distributed energy applications;
Policy and regulatory reforms that promote
- Participation of the full range of energy storage services and fair compensation for them,
- Environmentally friendly storage technologies, and
- Battery recycling programs; along with
International cooperation to address key research, development, and knowledge gaps hindering the long-term sustainable deployment of energy storage, including through piloting or testbeds of new technologies.

Delivery Challenges

Although progress is being made, barriers to a climate-smarter future persist. In particular, renewables, such as wind or solar power, are prone to intermittency, as they provide electricity only when the wind is blowing or the sun is shining. In order to generate round-the-clock clean power and narrow the global energy access gap, many countries, especially emerging economies, need an efficient, reliable, scaled, and affordable means of integrating energy into the electrical grid.

MEASURING SUCCESS

The Global Energy Storage Program (GESP) window tracks results from deployed energy storage solutions and policies supported. In addition, GESP benefits from its own real-time learning initiative, which is designed to enhance knowledge and evidence from energy storage investments throughout the course of the program’s implementation.