CIF Grants $70 Million To Colombia For Renewable Energy Integration

The Climate Investment Funds (CIF) has decided to provide a $70 million loan to the South American country of Colombia at a low interest rate to enable the country to transition to clean energy.

With this, Colombia will become the first country to benefit from CIF. The fund was created for speedy growth of renewable energy across the world.

The funding from CIF will help Colombia build infrastructure to transmit renewable electricity to both communities and businesses. The infrastructure will include batteries based RE storage, transmission lines and green hydrogen facilities.

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The expectation is the $70 million will help attract $280 million more from multilateral development banks and carbon finance markets.

CIF itself is a leading multilateral climate finance partnership that channels concessional finance primarily through six multilateral development banks (MDBs) for both upstream advisory and downstream investment activities to support climate action. CIF claims to be one of the largest climate finance mechanisms in the world with pledges of more than $11.1 billion.

Colombia says that the CIF funding will help eliminate 1.6 million tons of CO2 which is 1% of the greenhouse gas generated in Colombia annually.

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The present funding of CIF is derived from a $300 million pot created from donations from the United Kingdom, Netherlands and Switzerland. The fund will benefit Kenya, Mali, Fiji and Ukraine also. The second in-line countries to benefit are Brazil, India, Indonesia, Turkey and Costa Rica.

At present, three-quarters of the electricity in Colombia comes from hydropower sources and the rest from fossil fuel powered  thermal plants.

Recently, the World Bank’s Board of Directors also approved a $300 million loan for Colombia to strengthen its resilience to natural hazards and technologies to tackle climate change and health emergencies.

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Colombia is making strides toward the goal of being carbon neutral by 2050. As one of nine Latin American countries working toward a target of 70 percent renewable energy use by 2030, Colombia aims to contribute 4-GW of renewable energy to its total energy mix supporting the 2030 regional goal.

Recently, the largest energy firm of Columbia, Ecopetrol and French renewable energy Independent Power Producer Total Eren will be implementing the ‘Rubiales’ solar photovoltaic (PV) park that will have a capacity of 100 MWp.