1. News
  2. Interview with Francesco La Camera, DG, IRENA

Interview with Francesco La Camera, DG, IRENA

2024_OFQ4_Francesco La Camera.jpg

A global crisis requires a global response. Climate Solutions Week — an OPEC Fund initiative — took place in April 2024 and gathered senior representatives of partner institutions to discuss a range of pressing issues. Among the high-level delegates was Francesco La Camera, Director-General of the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), who features in the interview below.

 

What are IRENA’s priorities for the next few years, in light of the 2030 Agenda?

IRENA led critical discussions in the run-up to COP28, with a view to tripling renewable energy and doubling energy security — which came from IRENA analysis. Naturally we now feel like the custodians of this call, so for us the priority is to make the promise become reality. Our work covers knowledge products, activity on the ground and financial facilities, including renewable energy partnerships in Africa. So we are trying to push all our member states in performing their duties.

How important is innovation to IRENA — not just in terms of new technologies but also new policies and processes?

Innovation is everywhere. Firstly, we’re not talking about invention. We’re mainly talking about making the best use possible of existing technologies. The future will no longer be about fuels. The future will be about the technology we use to harness the inputs from the environment — sun, wind, geothermal and hydropower. Innovation is how to use this technology and how to make the grid more interconnected, flexible and balanced. It is about how to make a decentralized system work in an orderly way. 

Speaking of integrated approaches, how important are partnerships, for example, between IRENA and OPEC Fund in terms of complementarity in achieving the SDGs?

We are indeed working together. The OPEC Fund is part of our Energy Transition Accelerator Financing and the goal of the agreement and collaboration is to build a good pipeline of projects to be funded and also to participate in the funding of this project. We have also started to consider how we can collaborate on a clean cooking initiative. So there are many streams of work, on which we’ve been working effectively with the Fund and we look forward to continuing that.