Reinforcing Advanced Energy Systems in Bangladesh

USAID and NREL provide technical assistance to the government of Bangladesh to support renewable energy development with a goal of stimulating private sector investment, spurring economic development, and meeting growing energy demand through domestic energy resources.

The Reinforcing Advanced Energy Systems Project

Building on past and ongoing work in Bangladesh, USAID and NREL launched a project titled Reinforcing Advanced Energy Systems in May 2021 to provide unique, world-class technical support for scaling up and deploying advanced energy systems and support Bangladesh's transition to a sustainable, secure, and market-driven energy future.

Key to supporting this transition is creating robust energy policies, plans, and practices that can be effectively deployed. To enable this, with input from Bangladeshi stakeholders, USAID and NREL designed activities to:

  • Improve the use of data-driven decision making for energy policies and practices
  • Increase the adoption of best practices and advanced approaches to energy planning and policy making
  • Improve robustness of in-country analytical capabilities for energy decision making.

Activities span these thematic areas:

  • Renewable energy development in economic zones
  • Grid modernization and power system flexibility and resiliency
  • Distributed energy resource integration
  • Cross-border electricity trade and cooperation
  • Renewable energy procurement
  • Energy efficiency and demand response
  • Promotion of institutional partnerships.

More information about the USAID-NREL Partnership's work in Bangladesh can be found on the USAID ClimateLinks blog titled From the Ground Up: Building Bangladesh's Wind Energy Market or by reviewing the Clean Energy Transformation in Bangladesh fact sheet.

Activities

The Reinforcing Advanced Energy Systems program resulted from several years of successful wind energy focused work in Bangladesh. Collaboration with the government of Bangladesh started in 2011 when the USAID-NREL Partnership began providing technical assistance to promote the development of wind energy markets and projects. With funding from USAID and in partnership with the government of Bangladesh, NREL led an assessment with in-country partners to quantify the wind resources in Bangladesh, called the Bangladesh Wind Resource Mapping Project. This project included collecting multiyear wind measurements and validating a wind modeling effort for high-quality nationwide wind estimation at various hub heights. The project culminated in the report Assessing the Wind Energy Potential in Bangladesh as well as providing Bangladesh wind data made available through the Renewable Energy Data Explorer tool. As a result of this project, data has become available to stakeholders for decision making for clean energy policy and planning.

A man in a hardhat installs a sensor on a tower high above the ground.
A wind sensor boom being installed on an 82-meter meteorological tower (one of seven installed across Bangladesh) in Sitakunda by NREL's subcontractor team, led by Harness Energy. Photo by Harness Energy

The Reinforcing Advanced Energy Systems program resulted from several years of successful wind energy-focused work in Bangladesh. Collaboration with the government of Bangladesh started in 2011 when the USAID-NREL Partnership began providing technical assistance to promote the development of wind energy markets and projects. With funding from USAID and in partnership with the government of Bangladesh, NREL led an assessment with in-country partners to quantify the wind resources in Bangladesh, called the Bangladesh Wind Resource Mapping Project. This project included collecting multiyear wind measurements and validating a wind modeling effort for high-quality nationwide wind estimation at various hub heights. The project culminated in the report Assessing the Wind Energy Potential in Bangladesh as well as providing Bangladesh wind data made available through the Renewable Energy Data Explorer tool. As a result of this project, data has become available to stakeholders for decision-making for clean energy policy and planning.

Group of people sit around a table talking and laughing while reviewing documents.
The USAID-NREL Partnership conducted workshops in Bangladesh to facilitate stakeholder discussion about the challenges and solutions to wind power market entry in the country. Photo by Carishma Gokale-Welch, NREL

To better understand the wind power development challenges, researchers from the USAID-NREL Partnership hosted private sector roundtables in April and October 2019 to gather feedback about barriers to the nascent domestic wind industry.

In conjunction with further governmental and donor agency engagement, insights from these groups emerged about the challenges of the request for proposals bidding process for wind power projects. The USAID-NREL Partnership, in collaboration with the Sustainable and Renewable Energy Development Authority, used this feedback to develop a  to guide wind developers through the necessary steps to develop and interconnect wind projects at the utility scale. The guide includes information such as:

  • Relevant laws and regulations
  • Land acquisition considerations
  • Permitting requirements
  • Template power purchase agreements
  • Interconnection requirements and processes.

The government of Bangladesh used information and resources provided in the one-stop service document to inform the Wind Power Project Installation Guideline they released in 2021 for public comments.

In March 2022, the Reinforcing Advanced Energy Systems team kicked off electric vehicle (EV) support through a workshop on the building blocks of EV deployment and presented common best practices and emerging solutions that countries can adopt as they deploy EV technologies and scale up their domestic EV industry. As a result of this training, participants understood key concepts, challenges, and opportunities for large-scale EV deployment in Bangladesh.

Building Blocks of Electric Vehicle Deployment in Bangladesh: Day 1

Building Blocks of Electric Vehicle Deployment in Bangladesh: Day 2

In October 2022, the Reinforcing Advanced Energy Systems team hosted additional workshops in Bangladesh with the Sustainable and Renewable Development Authority (SREDA), the Dhaka Power Distribution Company (DPDC), other government agencies, and private companies that covered charging standards, charging station business models, fleet electrification, and EV grid impacts in greater detail.

Through the Reinforcing Advanced Energy Systems program, NREL launched a grid integration study and complementary capacity building efforts to assess the impacts of higher penetrations of wind and solar in the Bangladesh grid. The goal of this activity was to build stakeholder confidence that the country’s renewable energy and energy security goals can be met while ensuring reliability and affordability. In June 2022, USAID and NREL held a workshop for utilities, system operators, and policymakers that provided a deep dive into the variable renewable energy grid integration study framework and discussed stakeholder expectations.

The Reinforcing Advanced Energy Systems team developed course materials to use in the inaugural Energy Fundamentals Course organized by the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology in October 2022. Approximately 30 postgraduates and working energy sector professionals participated in the 4-day course. The course materials were intended to be general primers that can be used for similar purposes by other universities or organizations but were not intended to be comprehensive of all related concepts.

Explore the course materials:

Fundamentals of Electric Vehicles (2022)

Fundamentals of Energy Security and Resilience (2022)

Fundamentals of Energy Storage (2022)

Fundamentals of Wind Energy (2022)

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