Sebastian is the Undersecretary for Renewable Energy in Argentina. He is the architect and primary driver of Argentina’s RenovAr program, which has attracted over $7.4 billion USD in clean energy investments resulting in more than 4.5GW of new renewable energy development in its first three years. Sebastian’s vision is to adapt this model to finance renewable energy in emerging markets that can’t currently access global capital investments.

At the heart of his success is RenovAr’s multilayered financial de-risking mechanism that Sebastian designed in order to provide the protections for renewable energy projects required by investors. He began developing this novel approach while serving as an advisor to a member of the Argentine Senate after recognizing that access to international capital markets was a major barrier to renewable energy development in Argentina. The idea seems obvious now, but after being appointed Undersecretary of Renewable Energy, Sebastian had to overcome significant skepticism and even opposition from within both the Argentinian government and multilateral financial institutions in order pilot and launch RenovAr.

We selected Sebastian for an award because he has the powerful combination of knowing how to both design innovative new solutions and how to work with numerous decision makers and stakeholders to turn his ideas into real-world programs with the capacity to operate at scale.

He has proven both that his model can work and that he is the kind of leader who can turn a big idea into historic transformative change.

Sebastian has been dogged in his pursuit of bringing renewable energy to Argentina and we are excited to help him scale his vision globally.

Sebastian will use the Climate Breakthrough Project award to adapt the RenovAr model for other emerging economies that would bring investors around the world to build renewable energy infrastructure—a strategy he calls GREENMAP (Global Renewable Energy Mass Adoption Program). His goal is to build GREENMAP into a platform that will create enabling market conditions and financing protections to support large-scale deployment of renewable energy in countries that have historically struggled to access international capital markets.

Share this: