Our activities in the last two months were dominated by an energy hearing in Guyana on March 14-15 and the launch of the first e-Parliament Election Index on May 8th but we have also made good progress on our forests and supergrid initiatives.

For background on any of these stories please see our previous update here.

March-May 2009

The Guyana Hearing

The fourth international parliamentary hearing in the series on Energy Access for the Poor took place in Georgetown Guyana on March 14 and 15. The hearing was attended by 17 legislators from throughout the Caribbean. Key points:

• Prime Minister Sam Hinds had booked to attend the opening session but was so impressed that he stayed for the whole day on Saturday. President Bharrat Jagdeo attended the final session on the Sunday.

• President Bharrat Jagdeo arriving at the hearing in Guyana.

  The legislators heard that 90 percent of power in the region is currently generated using fossil fuels  – despite many countries having a wealth of renewable resources.
• Guyana has a potential for 7000 MW of hydropower (equivalent to seven nuclear power plants) which is hardly being used at all.
• Meanwhile the island of Nevis is soon to construct a 50 MW power plant to take advantage of its geothermal resources and has plans to expand this plant and export power to neighbouring islands via undersea cables.
• The legislators also heard how high voltage cables between many of the islands could help nations share and trade in renewable resources.
• The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) sent a representative, Kevin Deveaux, to attend the hearing. Deveaux, who is the Parliamentary Development Adviser at the UNDP, is now following up with Caribbean legislators – helping them to engage other individuals in their home parliaments.
• The legislators produced a final communiqué for the press which itemized ten clear objectives. The event was widely reported in the local press: the Starbroek News, the Guyana Chronicle, Guyana national radio and TV.
• The e-Parliament Secretariat was represented in Guyana by programme officers Kitty Garden and Susana Guerreiro and by Executive Director Jesper Grolin. We would like to thank both the European Commission and the Swedish Development Agency (Sida) for their continued support in funding this project.
• For a report on the hearing and links to expert PowerPoint presentations please click here.

Future Energy Access hearings

The next hearing in the Energy Access series will be for parliamentarians from Southern Africa and will take place in Mozambique on September 19-20.

An interregional hearing for parliamentarians from the three regions involved in the process (Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific Islands) is planned for November 7-8 and will take place in Vanuatu. Originally Fiji had been selected as the venue but this has been changed due to the continuing political problems in the country.

Film-maker Mariel Brown interviewing Ambassador Kellman in Tobago.

Videos of previous Energy Access hearings

Videos of previous Energy Access hearings in Kenya, Ghana and Tobago are now available on the e-Parliament website. To go directly to the video page click here.

We have also set up an e-Parliament channel on YouTube. Here you will find videos of the hearings but also videos from external sources about solar thermal power. We are hoping to collect more of these ‘favourites’ in the near future.

The Forests Initiative

Preparation for a hearing in Costa Rica on June 6-7 is now well-advanced.  The hearing, which is being funded by SwedBio and organised by e-Parliament programme officers Susana Guerreiro and Kitty Garden, will be held at the Earth University, a couple of hours drive from San José. It will be aimed principally at legislators from forest-rich countries in Latin America, and West and Central Africa, plus India and Indonesia. The legislators will have a chance to see at firsthand how Costa Rican legislators have managed to save the remaining rainforest and reforest much of the country through laws to introduce Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES). In doing this they have also supported the economic development of people living in or near the forests.

We are delighted that a group of excellent presenters at the event are now confirmed: Norbert Henninger of the World Resources Institute (WRI), Sven Wunder from the Centre for International Forestry Research (CIFOR), Grettel Ortiz (the Costa Rican MP who originally presented the PES concept at our hearing in South Africa in April 2008), Jorge Rodriguez, Director  of Costa Rica’s National Forestry Financing Fund (FONAFIFO), Alice Ruhweza of the Katoomba Group (a network sharing and promoting expertise on PES schemes), Diane Sheinberg  of the United Nations Development Programme, and Sanjay Kumar of the Indian Forestry Service.

Susana and Kitty report that we have been getting great interest in the hearing from legislators – particularly from Latin American MPs but also from West and Central Africa where there have been very few attempts at PES. For a summary of the Costa Rican legislation, prepared for us by the WRI, please click here.

The Supergrid Initiative

Nicholas Dunlop, secretary-general of the e-Parliament, and Jasper Bouverie, Communications Director, have continued to meet with politicians and business leaders to promote the idea of clean energy supergrids - and all have expressed considerable interest. Among those who have recently signed the Call for Clean Energy Supergrids is Danish MP Steen Gade, Chair of the Danish Foreign Affairs Committee, former Director of the Danish Environmental Protection Agency, and former member of the governing body of the European Environment Agency. To add your signature please click here.

Part of the e-Parliament's Supergrid Strategy is to encourage the formation of cross-party groups in national parliaments to work on getting supergrids built. In April, Nicholas Dunlop, secretary-general of the e-Parliament, presented the e-Parliament Supergrid Initiative in a first meeting of a group in the German Bundestag which was convened by German legislator Hans-Josef Fell to explore policy options. Hans-Josef Fell expressed his intention to draft an amendment to Germany's Renewable Energy Law to include special feed-in tariffs for renewable energy imports from outside the EU.

Another such meeting took place earlier this week in the Finnish Parliament, convened by Finnish MEPs Sirpa Pietikainen and Satu Hassi. A group is of course already active in the European Parliament and we hope that one will be forming in the UK Parliament soon.

Professor Steve Fish presenting his findings to an international audience via videoconference. From left: Professor Bhaskar Rao of the Centre for Media Studies in Delhi; Greg Dalton of the Commonwealth Club in California; and Professor Fish of the University of California, Berkeley.

Index on Democracy

One of the decisions made at our democracy hearing in Bali in December 2007 was that the e-Parliament should commission an election index: a comparative study on the democratic credentials of parliamentary elections worldwide. The first e-Parliament Election Index, produced by Professor Steve Fish of the University of California (Berkeley), together with a group of scholars from around the world, was officially launched in an international video conference on May 8 with participants in Delhi, Johannesburg, London, Brussels and San Francisco.

The Index has received widespread coverage in the media. We have seen articles on the web targetted at audiences from Brazil to Portugal, Qatar, Romania, Russia, South Africa and Venezuela. To read more about the Index please click here.