5. Actual Assessment In The Case Of Energy Projects[edit | edit source]
The previous chapter reviewed typical analysis and appraisal procedures as described by some of the most important agents in the development field, and how they relate to the five aspects included in our framework: economic, social, environmental, cultural and political.
This chapter will shed some light into what kind of assessment is actually done, by narrowing and focusing the attention on development interventions in the energy sector in which the World Bank, one of the most important development institutions, was involved.
Analysis of World Bank documents The idea is to assess the degree of importance given in World Bank interventions to each one of the five aspects. The assessment was based on the analysis of World Bank published documents for each one of the interventions included in the study.
The World Bank maintains a public database9 of development projects in which it is involved. It is organized in several sectors such as education, finance, health and other social services, industry and trade, etc. The analysis presented here focused on the energy and mining sector. At the time the information used for the analysis was updated from the 9 World Bank projects database can be accessed at www.worldbank.org 106 World Bank site for the last time, May 2005, the database showed a total of 873 records of projects under the energy and mining category.
Each project in the database is assigned a status among the following options:
proposed, active, closed and dropped. The analysis was limited only to "closed" projects,
in an attempt to guarantee that all documents related to each project were already available through the Bank's site. Limiting the search to "energy and mining" projects in
"closed" status generated a total of 521 records, with approval dates ranging from December 1984 to December 2004.
There are several types of documents that the World Bank publishes for its projects.
The most common is the Project Information Document (PID), a very brief document that provides a short overview of the project. Other typical documents are the Project Appraisal Report (PAR), Staff Appraisal Report (SAR), Environmental Assessment
(EA), Implementation Completion Report (ICR), Resettlement Plan (RPL), or Indigenous Peoples Plan (IP).
According to the Bank, the Project Appraisal Document (PAD) –Staff Appraisal Document (SAR) before 1995—includes all the information that the Bank's Board of Executive Directors needs in order to approve a project. In the Bank's web page that describes the project cycle (www.worldbank.org), it states that in the appraisal phase Bank staff review the work done during identification and preparation, often spending three to four weeks in the client country. They prepare for bank management either Project Appraisal Documents (investment projects) or Program Documents (for adjustment operations) and the Financial Management team assesses the financial aspects of the project.
After this, during the negotiation and approval phase 107 the Project Appraisal Document (PAD) or the Program Document (PGD), along with the Memorandum of the President and legal documents are submitted to the Bank's Board of Executive Directors for approval. The appropriate documents are also submitted for final clearance by the borrowing government which may involve ratification by a council of ministers or a country's legislature. Following approval by both parties, the loan agreement is formally signed by their representatives. Once this has occurred, the loan or credit is declared effective, or ready for disbursement, after the relevant conditions are met, and the agreement is made available to the public.
Regarding those documents, the Bank says The Project Appraisal Document (PAD) presents all the information the Board needs to approve Bank financing of the proposal. Before 1999, this document was called the Staff Appraisal Report. The Program Document (PGD) describes adjustment lending operations, and sets out the Bank's appraisal and assessment of the feasibility and justification for the program.
For this analysis only projects, not programs, have been considered – programs are articulated through several projects after all. Therefore the relevant documents to look at are Project Appraisal Documents, or Staff Appraisal Reports (as they were called before 1999).
Out of 521 "closed" projects in the energy and mining sector, only 127 of them have either a PAD or SAR publicly available through the Bank's web database, roughly a quarter of them. It is not clear whether this low percentage of projects with publicly available appraisal documents is due to confidentiality or transparency issues, or to lack of efficiency in the administration of the project's documents or the public database. In any case, those 127 appraisal documents, PAD or SAR, constitute the base of this analysis. 108 Aspects assessed in World Bank documents The documents were analyzed in order to assess how much attention was given in the analysis and appraisal to each one of the five aspects included in our framework:
economic, environmental, social, cultural, and political. The method used is very simple: counting pages.
The appraisal documents analyzed range from 30 to 320 pages –typically 80-150 pages—, include 4 to 7 main chapters, and several annexes. The analysis and appraisal information is provided, normally quite summarized, in one or several of the main chapters, and more extensively in one or several annexes.
Project Appraisal Documents include one chapter specifically dedicated to project analysis, called Summary Project Analysis, with subsections for economic, financial,
environmental, social, etc. Relevant typical annexes with more detailed information are Cost Benefits Analysis Summary, Environmental and Social Impact Assessment Summary, etc. Appendix 1 shows an example of the table of contents of a Project Appraisal Document.
Staff Appraisal Reports typically include one chapter called The Project that describes the project and briefly provides information on economic, environmental and social analysis. Commonly, another chapter called Project Justification provides additional analysis and appraisal information, especially from the economic standpoint.
More extensive information is often provided in annexes such as Environmental 109 Assessment Overview, Resettlement Action Plan, or Economic Justification of the Project.
Appendix 2 shows an example of the table of contents of a Staff Appraisal Report.
For each document the number of pages dedicated to economic appraisal or analysis
–mainly cost benefit analysis— was counted, both in the main chapters and in the annexes. This part was very easy because those pages are very explicit and typically as separate sections or subsections.
The same procedure was applied to environmental and social appraisal or analysis.
The environmental part is typically covered in separate sections, although sometimes it appears together with the social analysis. In those cases it was necessary to read through and calculate the number of pages dedicated to each aspect.
Social analysis pages include specific sections or subsections dedicated to the subject, pages dedicated to distributional issues sometimes included in the economic analysis part, sections or subsections dedicated to resettlement when it applies, and subsections dedicated in some documents to participation or participatory approach.
References to cultural analysis or appraisal were very rare, and when present they were under Indigenous Peoples or Indigenous Peoples Plan. Those pages were counted towards the cultural aspect.
And finally, the political aspect. Of course politics at all levels, from local to international, is involved in every one of these interventions, especially so if we consider that in most projects where the World Bank is involved its main partner is a national government. Nevertheless political appraisal or analysis is never present explicitly on 110 these documents. PADs always include a subsection called institutional analysis, while SARs typically include some information about the institutional arrangements of the project itself or the context in which it takes place. Although some of this information is merely descriptive, it was decided to count these pages in the documents as assessment of the political aspects –giving the benefit of the doubt.
Once the pages for each of the five aspects were counted for all documents, a percentage was calculated for each one of them. Of all the pages dedicated to analysis or appraisal, that is, the addition of the pages counted for all five aspects, we calculate the percentage for each of the five aspects in our framework: economic, environmental,
social, cultural, and political.
Let us say, for example, we have a PAD of 200 pages including 40 pages for economic analysis, 20 pages for environmental, 20 for social, 10 for cultural and 10 for political. The total appraisal or analysis pages is 100, and therefore in this example we would have a 40% of economic analysis, 20% environmental, 20% social, 10% cultural and 10% political.
These percentages were calculated for all 127 documents –PADs and SARs—, and the results were averaged for all of them. Figure 9 below shows the results obtained. 111 Political 8% Cultural 0% Social 15% Economic 53% Environmental 24%
Figure 9: average space allocated to each of the five aspects Clearly the method used can only offer an approximate idea of the relative importance given to the economic, environmental, social, cultural, and political aspects in the analysis and appraisal of projects. Nevertheless, the differences among the five aspects coming out of the analysis are so stark that they do not leave any room for doubts despite the imprecision of the method.
Figure 9 shows how more than half of the space dedicated to analysis and appraisal is used for the economic aspect alone. The environmental aspect receives almost a quarter of all the analysis pages. It is important to notice that the parts of the documents dealing with environmental aspects tend to be quite wordy because they often include references and reproductions of a country's environmental regulations or the Bank's directives regarding environmental issues. An important part of the pages dedicated to the 112 environmental aspect deal with measures to be taken to mitigate known or potential negative impacts of the interventions, and therefore do not really constitute environmental assessment. They have been included nonetheless.
The social aspect takes about 15% of the total. As explained above, this includes specific social assessment sections, distributional issues included sometimes in economic assessment sections, subsections related to participation, and those dedicated to resettlement. The latter, resettlement, has to do with the mitigation of a negative impact, involuntary relocation.
Social - Resettlement 32%
Social assessment & distribution 53%
Social - Participation 15%
Figure 10: Detailed break down of the social aspect The detailed composition of all the pages counted as social aspect is shown in Figure
- As we can see, of the already small 15% allocated to social aspects, about two thirds
can be considered genuinely so, including participation, explicit social assessment, and 113 distribution issues. One third of it is allocated to resettlement, that is, mainly mitigation measures for negative impacts.
As for the cultural aspect, only an insignificant 0.27%, not even enough to show up in the graph, is allocated to them. Obviously the cultural aspect is not a major concern in the assessment of World Bank projects.
The political aspect including, as explained above, discussions about institutional arrangements, reaches a small 8%.
The results shown so far were calculated giving the same weight to every single project, regardless of its size. Another calculation was done taking into account the total amount in US$ committed by the Bank to each project. Instead of simple averages of all projects for each aspect, a weighted average was calculated using the Bank's monetary allocation (i.e.the data from a $100M project is 100 times more important than the data from a $1M project).
Figure 11 shows the results obtained with this second calculation. As we can see,
there are small differences. The economic aspect still takes about half the space, while the environmental aspect grows perceptibly. This seems to reflect the fact that bigger projects, such as dams, thermal power generation plants or oil infrastructure projects,
tend to have more environmental implications (mostly negative) and are subject to more environmental scrutiny. 114 Political Cultural 7% 0% Social 16%
Economic 50%
Environmental 27%
Figure 11: average space allocated weighted by project's total $ amount The importance of the social aspect apparently remains almost the same, but a closer look at the details (Figure 12) shows otherwise. Of the already small space allocated to the social aspect (16%), only less than 40% of it can be considered genuinely so, while most of it, 60%, is used for resettlement issues.
This is related to the fact that bigger projects tend to have bigger implications in terms of resettlement of people. This is especially true for dams, but applies also to power distribution or oil and gas infrastructure projects. What is important for us is that the importance given to the social aspect is still smaller than what it appeared to be from a first look at Figure #115
The results obtained for the cultural and political aspects with the weighted averages do not change much from those obtained with straight averages.
Social Assessment and distribution 30%
Social - Resettlement Social - 61% Participation 9%
Figure 12: Detailed break down of the social aspect (weighted by project's $ amount)
We have seen how the size, in terms of money committed by the Bank, affects the relative importance of the five aspects considered in the assessment. Let us now look at whether and how the type of project influences it.
Each World Bank project is assigned a percentage value for each major sector to which it is related, and to each subcategory within those sectors. Examples of the major sectors are: agriculture, fishing and forestry; education; energy and mining; finance;
health and other social services; water, sanitation and flood protection; etc.
The energy and mining sector in which we are focusing is divided into six subcategories: general energy sector; power; oil and gas; mining and other extractive;
district heating and energy efficiency services; and renewable energy. 116 A specific project could belong to only one subcategory, for example 100% power
(energy and mining sector). Or it could belong to several of them, for example: 22%
irrigation and drainage (agriculture, fishing and forestry sector), 9% general public administration (law and justice and public administration sector), 23% power (energy and mining sector), 23% roads and highways (transportation sector), and 23% water supply
(water, sanitation, and flood protection sector).
As we know, all the projects analyzed are related to one or more subcategory in the energy and mining sectors. For each project in our set the percentages assigned to each subcategory in the sector were gathered, and used to calculate how much, for the whole set of projects, belongs to each subcategory. Figure 13 shows the results obtained.
Power 23% Oil and Gas Mining & Other 46% Extractive 5% Heating & Energy Efficiency 10% Renewable 7% Non Energy 9%
Figure 13: Projects assigned to energy subcategories 117 As the graph shows, for all the analyzed projects taken as a whole, almost half are assigned to the power subcategory, which means power generation, transmission and distribution systems. This includes mainly big hydropower generation (large dams),
thermal power plants, and power transmission lines (high and medium voltage). The rest of the energy related part is assigned to oil and gas (basically extraction and transportation infrastructure), mining and other extractive, district heating and energy efficiency, and renewable energy (only 5%). Almost a quarter is assigned to other non-
energy sectors.
We must remember that these are all the World Bank projects somehow related to energy for which there is appraisal documentation available. We can already appreciate here the huge disproportion between the use of fossil fuels and big dams, versus the use of renewable energy (big hydropower dams are included in the power section, while mini and micro-hydro is included in the renewable energy section).
In the previous calculation all the projects were assigned the same importance,
regardless of the total amount committed by the Bank to them. A new calculation was done assigning projects different weights according to the total amount contributed by the Bank. Figure 14 displays the results. The graph shows how the differences have increased, since projects in the power subcategory, especially those for power generation,
involve much bigger investments than, for example, renewable energy projects. 118 Power 21% Oil and Gas Mining & Other 3% Extractive 4% Heating & Energy 59% Efficiency 5% Renewable 8% Non Energy Figure 14: Projects assigned to energy subcategories, weighted by $ amount The next step was to analyze the effect that the category to which a project belongs has in the importance given to each one of the five aspects considered in the analysis and appraisal process. In order to do this, all the projects that had a significant component of each category (more than 30%) were selected, and the average percentage of pages dedicated to each one of the five aspects was calculated again. That is, for all the projects with more than 30% assigned to the power subcategory, the average number of pages is calculated in the economic, environmental, social, cultural, and political aspects. Then the averages for all the projects with more than 30% in the oil and gas subcategory, and so on. 119 70
60 Power 50 Oil and Gas 40 Mining and extractive %
30 District Heating and Energy Efficiency 20 Renewables 10 0 al ic al
l al ra om ci
ic t en tu So lit ul on nm
Po C Ec ro vi En Figure 15: relative importance of the five aspects by project type Consistent with the results previously shown, the economic aspect is very important for all types of projects, although it seems to be more so for those mainly related to the power or the district heating and energy efficiency subcategories.
The environmental aspect is significantly more important in oil and gas, and mining and other extractive subcategories, probably due to higher environmental concerns and scrutiny in projects related to fossil fuels.
The results for the social aspect are very interesting. Oil and gas projects give the least importance to the social aspect, while renewable energy projects give the most,
close to 20%. Renewable energy projects include mostly rural electrification projects involving distributed (local) generation based on solar systems, mini and micro hydro, 120 biomass, etc. This kind of work inherently needs much more involvement from the local people than for example the construction of a gas pipeline or a thermal power plant,
mainly managed at the level of the national government.
Cultural assessment is insignificant in all subcategories, and differences in the political aspect are due basically to the method used for measurement. As explained above, the pages counted towards the political aspect are those that refer to institutional arrangements. Those pages are normally present in projects that involve participation of institutions at a high political level, national or regional. The role of these institutions is less important in renewable energy projects, and this fact is reflected in the graph.
Assessment of alternatives So far we have looked at the importance given in World Bank's project appraisal documents to the five different aspects of development projects considered in our framework.
One of the key steps of the Objective Oriented Project Planning (OOPP) method,
explained in the previous chapter and embraced by most major development actors,
including the World Bank, is the analysis of alternatives. This process should include the generation of a list of alternative ways that can lead to the achievement of the goals, with as much involvement as possible of the stakeholders, and the selection of the best alternative following criteria based on financial, technical, economic, institutional, social,
and hopefully cultural, grounds. 121 Let us look at whether several alternatives to reach the goals of a project are actually considered and explained in the Bank's appraisal documents and, if so, how wide or narrow is the range of alternatives considered, and how significant the discussion about them.
All the Project Appraisal Documents – the Bank's standard appraisal document after 1999— include a subsection specifically dedicated to alternatives, called Project alternatives considered and reasons for rejection, typically part of the section called Project Rationale –see Appendix 1 for an example.
Staff Appraisal Reports –pre-1999– do not have a specific section dedicated to alternatives, and when there is some discussion about them it might be part of the economic analysis, environmental analysis, a section on the context or the country sector in which the project takes place, etc.
Using the same method again, the number of pages dedicated to the discussion of alternatives in each one of those documents was counted. It was found that out of 127 appraisal documents, as many as 36, almost a third, did not include any reference whatsoever to potential alternatives.
For the rest, the documents that do discuss alternatives, the average number of pages dedicated to them is about 6.5% of the number of pages dedicated to appraisal including all five aspects considered above (economic, environmental, social, cultural and political). When the calculation is made weighting the values for each project with the total amount committed by the Bank for that project, the value goes down to 5.5%. 122 These numbers are obviously too small to leave the impression that a serious and thorough consideration of alternatives is done during the appraisal of development projects. However, it is fair to say that the documents analyzed are to be reviewed and evaluated by the Board of Executive Directors of the World Bank, and it is probably not realistic to expect that they would read a lengthy explanation of all the alternatives considered, besides the selected one.
We could assume that the detailed analysis of alternatives has been done in previous stages by the teams involved in the preparation of the project, and the appraisal document is only meant to mention them and briefly describe why they were rejected.
Even under this assumption, only 30 of the analyzed documents, about a quarter of the whole set, offer a good, albeit brief, explanation of a broad range of alternatives considered and the reasons why they were rejected. An example is provided in appendix 3 for a household energy project in Chad.
Of all the projects that do discuss alternatives, at least 20 of them do not show a serious consideration of a reasonable range of alternatives, that is, there could clearly be other ways to reach the goals that are not mentioned at all. Typical examples are a thermal power generation project that only considers alternative sites for the plant,
without mentioning other potential sources of energy, or an oil or gas pipeline project that considers alternative routes, but does not mention other means of transportation for the fuel, or even other sources of energy in the destination area. 123 Overall we can see that out of 127 appraisal documents, 36 do not include any consideration of alternatives, and 20 offer a very poor and narrow discussion. That makes 56, almost half of the whole set. As for the rest, 30 of them, a quarter of the total, include a good discussion, and another quarter are at least reasonable.
Although this analysis leaves us with a disappointing idea of how seriously alternatives are considered in World Bank project, the situation seems to be improving.
At least the new standard appraisal document of the Bank, the PAD –post-1999—,
always includes a section on alternatives. Something that was not true of the older SARs.
Findings of the World Commission on Dams Having presented the results of the study of World Bank interventions in the energy sector over the last 20 years, it is interesting to contrast them with the findings of a huge and comprehensive study prepared by the so-called World Commission on Dams.
The Commission was created in 1997 with a major objective of reviewing the development effectiveness of large dams and assessing alternatives for water resources and energy development (World Commission on Dams., 2000: 30).
An important part of the work of the Commision was an extensive review of the experience with large dams. The work lasted about two and a half years between 1998 and 2000, and covered roughly one thousand large dams that were built from the 50s to the 90s. It involved several hundred people representing a wide spectrum of interests from all sides of the debate about large dams, including government agencies, research 124 institutes, private engineering companies, utilities, bilateral and multilateral agencies
(including the World Bank), NGOs, and dam affected people.
The Commission generated a knowledge base including case studies of large dams,
country reviews, thematic reviews, and a cross-check survey of existing dams, which provided the basis for their evaluation of the experience with large dams.
Relevant to the study presented here is the Commission's emphasis on how large dam projects are appraised, the decision-making process involved, and the assessment of alternatives for the provision of water and electricity services.
With regards to the different aspects considered in planning and appraisal for large dams, the Commission found it was only cost-benefit analyses and technical parameters that were important, while environmental and social impacts were left aside, even in the 1990s.
The WCD Report (World Commission on Dams., 2000: 175-76) states that
… once a proposed dam project has survived preliminary technical and economic feasibility tests and attracted interest from financing agencies and political interests, the momentum behind the project and the need to meet the expectations raised often prevail over further assessments. Environmental and social concerns are often ignored and the role of impact assessments in selecting options remains marginal.
Specifically, the Report dismisses efforts to incorporate social and environmental valuation into cost-benefit analysis, and conclude that in the application of CBA "social and environmental impacts are not valued explicitly or are only indirectly accounted for through mitigation and resettlement budgets." 125 While the Commission considers that social and environmental issues are key for a dam to be an effective development project, their study shows that environmental and social adverse impacts from large dams were not in general key factors in the decision-
making process.
Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) was adopted officially in many countries in the 1980s and in many developing countries in the 1990s in order to address social and environmental impacts but, the Report says, "EIA consists mostly of measures to compensate or mitigate the planned impacts and render them acceptable when the decision to proceed has already been taken" (World Commission on Dams., 2000: 182).
The Commission analyzed in a cross-check survey of 105 dams whether they included economic cost-benefit analyses, financial plans, risk, distributional and sensitivity analyses. Figure 16 reproduces the graph from the Report showing the results obtained. 126 Figure 16: Evolution of economic and financial assessment for large dam projects Source: Word Commission on Dams Report, 2000 We can see how CBA and financial plans have been widely used since the fifties,
while risk, distribution, and sensitivity analysis are much less common and even in the nineties they are included only in a little more than 20% of the projects.
The Commission analyzed also the use of environmental and social impact assessments in the appraisal of the same sets of dams. Figure 17, reproduced from the Report, displays the results. 127 Figure 17: Evolution of environmental and social assessment for large dam projects Source: World Commission on Dams Report, 2000 As the graph shows, the use of environmental impact assessment increased throughout the years, although it is still far from universal. Even after the nineties it is done only in a little more than 50% of large dam projects. It is importance to notice the vertical axis top value of 60%, as opposed to the 100% shown in the previous figure.
The practice of including social impact assessment is far less common and, although it has increased steadily since the seventies it reaches less than 30% of large dam projects undertaken in the nineties.
The results obtained by the World Commission on Dams in their study of large dam projects confirm and reinforce the outcome of our own study of energy projects. The 128 economic aspect continues to be the main one considered in the planning and appraisal of development interventions, with the environmental aspect being increasingly included,
although mostly in order to define mitigation measures rather than as an important input in the decision-making process. The social aspect has very little importance in planning and appraisal and is mostly used to design mitigation measures related to resettlement of affected populations.
As for the assessment of alternatives in the planning and appraisal of large dam projects, the Report states:
Many sectoral planning studies from which projects emerged were narrow technical and economic studies, aimed at least-cost supply solutions for providing a single service such as irrigation water or electric power. When dams were contrasted with alternatives, they were typically only compared to other potential dam projects or, in the case of hydropower, with alternative large-scale thermal power generation options (World Commission on Dams., 2000: 178).
The conclusions of the Commission are partly based on eight case studies carried out worldwide on big dams using the same methodology and approach, and intended to provide information on the development effectiveness of large dams. Table 11 has been adapted from the Report and illustrates the type of narrow consideration of alternatives commonly practiced and the predominance of economic criteria in the assessment of alternatives.
According to the Commission, seven out of eight dams included economic criteria in the assessment (three of them exclusively). Only one of them included environmental and social dimensions. The political dimension was present in three of them (one of them exclusively). The alternatives considered regarding the water component of the project 129 were limited to alternatives sites, and in one case alternative delivery methods (irrigation by gravity or pumping). The alternative for the power component, when considered, was always thermal power.
The findings of the Commission regarding options assessment also confirm the results obtained from the study of World Bank energy projects. The consideration of alternatives to the main option proposed for the project, when it exists, includes only a very narrow spectrum of options, often having to do only with different locations for the same kind of solution. 130 Table 11: Examples of analysis of alternatives in large dam projects Source: Word Commission on Dams Report, 2000, p. 178 131
6. Final Considerations[edit | edit source]
The main motivation for this thesis was an interest in finding the answers to three questions regarding technological choices made in development interventions. When are those choices made? Who makes the decisions? Following what criteria?
There is an additional question that was not explicitly part of the first design of the thesis: what decisions are being made? The idea was to consider first development interventions in general, looking at institutional procedures as defined by the agents involved, without any restriction to any specific sector or type of project. But once it came to the analysis of actual projects, limiting the study to the energy sector, the answer to this question surfaced immediately.
Trends in development interventions for the energy sector For the energy sector, let us consider potential choice between energy generation technologies: fossil fuels, big hydro (big dams), and renewable technologies. As we saw in the previous chapter, projects in which the World Bank participated in the last twenty years in the energy field show a disproportionate preference for energy generation based on fossil fuels or big dams (technologically complex, big investments, centralized control), and by contrast a very small interest in renewable energy (technologically simpler, smaller investments, more distributed control).
It is worthwhile to present here some relevant information regarding this subject that was gathered during the preparation of this thesis from the Creditor Reporting System 132
(CRS online) database of the OECD10, regarding investments by OECD countries in development aid. The database reports investments in aid activities by OECD members in developing countries and less developed countries, mainly channeled through bilateral aid agencies and export credit agencies of each member country, the World Bank, and/or regional development banks. Data for investments in the energy sector was collected and organized by year, and by energy generation technology in three groups: non-renewable
(fossil fuels), hydro (big hydro), and renewable (including mini and micro-hydro). Figure 18 shows the results in terms of total investment (in 2002 US$) per year for each one of the three groups. Figure 19 shows the same results in a different format to clarify the evolution of total investments per year.
As we can see in the graphs, the results follow a pattern similar to the one shown for World Bank projects in the previous chapter: a disproportionate preference for big hydro and fossil fuel based generation in detriment of renewable energy. Indeed the investments in renewable energy are very much insignificant until 1994, when they appear in the picture, although still at low levels.
From 1997 until 2000 there is an important decrease in total investments in energy,
which coincide with a steep decline in investments in big hydro projects. This reduction of big hydro is also noted in the study of the World Commission on Dams, and is related 10 The data was collected on December 2004 from OECD's CRS online database at www.oecd.org/dac/stats/idsonline 133 to the exhaustion of sites economically suitable for big hydro around the globe –basically most river areas suitable to be dammed have been already dammed.
Starting in year 2000 total investments in energy start increasing again, but virtually all growth is in non renewable sources, essentially fossil fuels.
Totals per Year (x1000)
4000000 Non-Renewable 3500000 Hydro Renewable 3000000 2500000 2000000 1500000 1000000 100 50
- Alternatives In An Appraisal Report 154==
