EEG acts as the Secretariat of the Roundtable Initiative on Strategic Energy Planning, which works with major development partners and technical institutions to improve the support they provide for energy planning in developing countries.

Strategic energy planning is an essential part of policy and decision-making in the energy sector. Good planning can help enable the scale-up in investment needed to meet economic and social development goals. However, strategic energy planning is also a complex process requiring the coordination of multiple sectors and governance levels, numerous stakeholders, and often complex models and decision support tools.

The Roundtable Initiative’s objective is to improve the coherence of support to strategic energy systems planning and the effective use of evidence and analysis by decision-makers in developing countries. It has four focus areas:

1. Roundtable Principles for Supporting Strategic Energy Planning: defining and promoting the adoption of common principles for supporting energy systems modelling and planning in developing and emerging economies. Read more...

2. Capacity building: improving strategic energy planning and modelling capacity of key national institutions (both technical and political). Read more...

3. Community platforms: fostering an ecosystem where data, evidence models and other decision support tools are transparent and easily accessible. Read more...

4. Data, models, and standards: improving the quality of energy models and the evidence behind them, including through the definition of common standards. Read more...

Key milestones for the initiative are its regular Roundtable Discussions that are held on the back of major international events and are used to share knowledge among the Roundtable group and advance the initiative’s agenda. The Roundtable Discussions held so far are:

• First Roundtable Discussion – London, 29th November 2017 during the ESMAP Knowledge Exchange Forum

• Second Roundtable Discussion – Lisbon, 4th May 2018 during the SE4All Forum [Download the synthesis report]

• Third Roundtable Discussion – Cape Town, 1st February 2019 during the Energy Modelling Platform for Africa 2019 [Download the synthesis report]

• Fourth Roundtable Discussion – Trieste, 28th June 2019 during the Summer School on Modelling Tools for Sustainable Development [Download the synthesis report]

• Fifth Roundtable Discussion – Abu Dhabi, 10th January 2020 during the 10th IRENA Aseembly

• Sixth Roundtable Discussion – 1 July 2021 on the fringes of the annual (virtual) Joint Summer School on Modelling Tools for Sustainable Development [Download the synthesis report]

• Seventh Roundtable Discussion – 12th December 2021 as an online event [Download the synthesis report]