Communities are currently reliant on high-polluting and carbon-intensive electricity.
The Asian Development Bank (ADB) and Mongolian government
have signed loan and grant agreements relating to renewable energy and the
improvement of tax administration and public investment management. The total
cost for both the projects amounts to $85.6 million.
In an announcement Friday, the ADB said that the renewable energy loan would
help Mongolia develop a 41-megawatt distributed renewable energy system that
uses solar photovoltaic and wind power. It will also use advanced battery
storage technology and energy management systems. Photovoltaic refers to a way
of directly converting light from the sun into electricity.
The ADB said the project would supply clean electricity to around 260,000
people living in "remote and less-developed towns in western
Mongolia." It added that, at the moment, these communities were reliant on
expensive and "high-polluting carbon-intensive electricity."
The ADB's funding of $40 million is being backed by grant co-financing, with
$14.6 million coming from the Strategic Climate Fund under the Scaling Up
Renewable Energy Program in Low-Income Countries.
"These projects will support the government's efforts to raise the share
of renewable energy, decrease carbon dioxide emissions, and improve public
financial resource mobilization and management," Yolanda Fernandez Lommen,
the ADB's country director for Mongolia, said in a statement Friday.
Headquartered in the Philippines, the ADB was set up in 1966. Its operations in
2017 amounted to $32.2 billion, with $11.9 billion in co-financing.
In November 2017, the ADB approved a $44.76 million grant to finance the
construction of a 20-megawatt on-grid solar photovoltaic plant in
Afghanistan.
At the time, the ADB said the new facility would boost renewable energy
generation and supply in the country, producing at least 43,000 megawatt hours
of solar power.
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