The guide highlights the ground-level regulatory and policy questions that must be answered by electricity regulators, rural energy agencies, and ministries to promote commercially sustainable investments by private operators and community organizations. Among the practical questions addressed is how to design and implement retail tariffs, quality of service standards, feed-in tariffs, and backup tariffs. The guide also analyzes the regulatory implementation issues triggered by donor grants and so-called top-up payments.

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This section discusses how existing PPP projects can manage technological change that may occur during the project implementation phase.¹

This Section is also supplemented with helpful resources.

Subsections

Technology is consistently innovating and developing. However, during recent years the pace of technological change has been accelerating rapidly across the global economy. Disruptive technologies can open up unprecedented opportunities for all infrastructure sectors, in particular with regard to digitalization and decarbonization. At the same time, innovative technology has the potential to displace established business models or supersede existing technologies within a short timeframe, thereby creating winners and losers within infrastructure markets.

The objective of the Disruption and PPPs Section is to help governments of emerging economies to better understand the increasing impact of disruptive technologies on PPP infrastructure projects, and to provide guidance on how to manage existing and design future PPP contracts.

The five case studies below illustrates how different categories of technology disruption and disruptive events were dealt with in various PPP projects and what good practices might entail. These practical examples are drawn from different sectors and from both developed and developing countries globally.

Enhancing “Innovation Resilience” and the Adoption of Disruptive Technology throughout the PPP Project Cycle

We are living in a world of transformative changes. Technological advances together with the transition to a carbon-free future revolutionize the way we live and interact with the world and could have immense implications for infrastructure PPPs.

What Is Disruptive Technology?

Technological developments have always transformed lives and disrupted old ways of doing things. Older technologies, like the telephone, developed gradually, over decades. In contrast, new technologies, like the cell phone, scale with ever-increasing speed across the global economy. Often a few different new technologies (e.g., artificial intelligence, IoT, 3D printing, robotics) come together to create something entirely new.

Renewable energy projects can provide governments with an additional source of revenue, see examples below. 

Context

Building modern, sustainable, affordable, and resilient infrastructure is critical for meeting the rising demands of billions of people around the globe, while addressing global threats such as climate change.