“I was born and raised in a country where nature is lush, but at the same time, a country with a strong oil and gas sector. A place where wind and solar resources are abundant but historically were left aside,” said Sebastián Kind in a conversation with Climate Breakthrough. “I’d say that is a tremendous contradiction.”
So he decided to dedicate his life to changing that perception and unlocking the potential of clean energy ”not only in my country, but everywhere.”
Breakthrough Idea
Create an efficient one-stop platform for developing and emerging economies to catalyze private sector investment in renewable energy by streamlining the procurement process and providing a guarantee fund to mitigate risks.
When Sebastián became Undersecretary for Renewable Energy in Argentina in 2016, he was tasked with catalyzing renewable energy development amid a deep economic crisis in a country with a wealth of renewable potential but a power sector dominated by fossil fuels.
The program he designed to achieve this objective, RenovAr, would become an international success story even though he had to overcome significant skepticism and even opposition from within both the Argentinian government and multilateral financial institutions. At the time, says Sebastián, Argentina almost did not have renewables in the mix, and now wind and solar represent around 32 percent of the peak coverage in the electricity market.
Upon receiving a Climate Breakthrough Award in 2019, he launched the Global Renewable Energy Mass Adoption Program (GREENMAP), later renamed RELP in 2023. Using RenovAr as a model, the nonprofit provides free support for governments in developing and emerging economies to create effective, transparent clean energy programs.
“I like to say that we are offering others what I would have loved to have had at the beginning of RenovAr. The world needs some great experiences to share and replicate,” says Sebastián, who loves to spend his free time snorkeling and admiring coral reefs.
Climate change is a global matter that affects us all, and the only way to address it is through international cooperation.
Sebastián KIND, 2019 Climate Breakthrough Awardee
Sebastián possesses 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.
“We need to understand that we have only one home, and we all live there. Climate change is a global matter that affects us all, and the only way to address it is through international cooperation.”
Biography
Sebastián Kind is founder and CEO of RELP, a Brussels-based nonprofit dedicated to scaling up renewable energy deployment in developing and emerging economies. From 2016 to 2018, he led Argentina’s energy transition as Undersecretary of Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency. He was the architect and primary driver of the innovative RenovAr Program, which has catalyzed billions of dollars in clean energy investments and has been widely studied as a model for renewable energy development in emerging markets.
Previously, he was the founding director of the Master of Science in Renewable Energy Program at National Technological University (UTN), and he worked closely with Argentina’s National Senate as author of the Renewable Energy National Law. He has advised on renewable energy projects for many public and private institutions around the world and has held executive positions in the private sector in Europe and Latin America.
In 2018, he was appointed as Chair of the Council of the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), and was selected as a Fellow of the Eisenhower Foundation in Philadelphia and as a Global Leader by the World Economic Forum. In 2019, he received the Clean Energy Award of the Latin American and Caribbean Council on Renewable Energy (LAC-CORE).
Sebastián holds a degree in mechanical engineering from UTN in Argentina and earned a MSc. in renewable energy from EUREC Agency in Brussels, NTUA in Greece, and University of Zaragoza in Spain. He also holds an Executive Development Diploma from IAE Business School and has participated in various executive programs at Harvard University.