Ricardo Velasco (PPRE Batch 20-22) from Colombia and currently working as Senior Renewable Engineer at Mott MacDonald attending the 15th session of the IRENA General Assembly in Abu Dhabi, while acting as an IRENA youth delegate.
Ricardo Velasco, from our 2020-2022 PPRE batch, was selected as an IRENA-sponsored youth delegate (alongside 34 other delegates out of over 57,000 applicants from all over the world) for the 2025 IRENA Youth Forum held between 9 to 16 January 2025 in Abu Dhabi, UEA. As such, he participated in workshops, round tables, debates, seminars and high-level bilateral meetings on fostering youth leadership and greater youth participation in the global energy transition towards a low carbon economy. Likewise, he attended the 15th session of the IRENA General Assembly as well as the 2025 Abu Dhabi Sustainability Week where the main take away messages surrounded:
Adaptation of policies and regulations
Development of a skilled workforce
Scale up and expand the distribution of financing
Strengthen international collaboration
Modernisation and expansion of our infrastructure (grid and storage)
Among the high-level talks Ricardo held during this electrifying experience, he exchanged words with Francesco La Camera (IRENA General Director), Dr. Martin Keller (NREL Lab Director), Riad Meddeb (Director of the Sustainable Energy Hub at UNDP), Ms. Rana Adib (REN21 Executive Director), Bruce Douglas (Global Renewables Alliance CEO) and Rachel Kyte (UK Climate envoy), among many others policy makers and advocates over the course of these very intense 8 days.
Finally, and perhaps the most exciting moment was the brief visit to the largest CSP Plant in the world – the Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum Solar Park. The largest single-site Concentrated Solar Power (“CSP”) plant in the world using a state-of-the-art combination of a Central Tower (100 MW) and Parabolic Trough (600 MW) as CSP technologies. The project has been awarded two Guinness World Records for:
Tallest CSP Central Tower in the world (263.126m).
The largest thermal energy storage plant in the world (5,907 MWh)
For future SuRE and PPRE applicants’ reference, the IRENA youth delegate selection process opens every year in September and the application process is very simple and quite open as applicants must be 16 to 35 years old by the time of application, and submission supporting documentation mostly requires an up-to-date résume, answering a couple of questions and a personal 2-min video statement outlining why you are the perfect fit for this experience.