Bloomberg New Energy Finance

The world needs to spend a massive USD5 trillion a year on infrastructure to keep up with transport, energy and water needs, says a coalition of institutions including the OECD and World Bank. That’s equivalent to the combined GDPs of the France and the UK, each and every year. But finding the cash isn’t the only challenge, warn the authors of the report Green Investment, who presented their findings at the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos – the world`s largest annual jamboree for business and politicians — last week.

With the world’s climate negotiators gathered for the UNFCCC COP18 conference in Doha, a white paper published by Bloomberg New Energy Finance shows that just USD8 billion flowed from developed to developing nations to foster deployment of large-scale clean energy power generation and biofuels production in 2011. This constitutes 8 percent of the USD100 billion per annum total cross-border investment (CBI) promised by developed countries during the 2009 COP talks in Copenhagen by 2020. That commitment was reaffirmed at subsequent COP meetings at Cancún and Durban.

The development of wind and solar projects in Japan will generate highly attractive returns under the feed-in-tariffs recently proposed by the Japanese government, according to clean energy market research provider Bloomberg New Energy Finance. This is despite much higher costs for solar in Japan than elsewhere in the world. Since the Fukushima nuclear crisis Japan has been grappling with the need to diversify its energy mix. One of the policy measures adopted by the government, a renewable feed-in tariff (FiT) programme, starts July 2012

The growing size and importance of the clean energy sector has been emphasised with the launch of three new stock indices focused on companies in that sector. In an expansion of the NYSE Euronext and Bloomberg New Energy Finance partnership, the three new regional indices launched are the NYSE-BNEF Asia Oceania Clean Energy Index, NYSE-BNEF Europe, Middle East and Africa Clean Energy Index and NYSE-BNEF Americas Clean Energy Index.

Hong Kong-based CLP Holdings topped the list of non-US users of renewable energy in 2010 according to the Corporate Renewable Energy Index (CREX) launched recently by wind turbine market leader Vestas.