But did you know that with over 10 million residents still off the grid and leaders aiming to maximize gas exports, Russian renewable energy could be a huge boon to the country?

Now we have to convince the Russians—starting with their new president.

Russian Renewable Energy: The OECD Plan

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, is a grouping of the most prosperous nations on the planet. The OECD is a useful reference point to measure relative wealth, social progress, and increasingly it is a barometer for movement towards clean energy standards.

In 2003, OECD researchers prepared a 120-page report called Renewables in Russia: From Opportunity to Reality.

At the time, senior U.S. diplomat William Ramsay told the International Energy Agency, "Russia is the sleeping giant of renewable energy potential."

It may be a giant, but Russia isn't sleeping.

Neither is the Moscow leadership, which is now being shuffled.

Russia's President-elect Dimitri Medvedev takes power May 7, assuming the role of his mentor Vladimir Putin, who in a parliamentary shuffle will become the country's prime minister.

Putin has concentrated on wrangling Russia's traditional energy away from the Oligarchs who bought fossil fuel stakes from Boris Yeltsin's government at super-cheap prices, back in the early-mid 1990s.

Putin's stewardship of Russian oil and gas through national monopolies is credited by Russians and outsiders alike with sparking impressive 7.3% annual economic growth on average from 2003-2007.

But in order to maximize output of natural gas (Russia is the largest exporter and holds the world's biggest reserves), coal (Russia ranks #2 in recoverable reserves) and oil (the country's output often surpasses Saudi Arabia's), renewable energy should be exploited to the fullest extent for domestic use.

And aside from the hydrocarbons, Russian experts say there's plenty of wind, solar, geothermal, and hydroelectric potential there, too.

270 Million Metric Tons of Coal Equivalent

The OECD report cites Russian energy researchers estimates that the amount of economically recoverable comes to over 270 million tonnes (metric) of coal equivalent.

That's just below the 314 million tonnes of raw coal actually produced there, and due to the fact that fossil fuel prices have skyrocketed since the original report in 2003, we can assume that "economically recoverable" renewable potential has shot up when seen through the prism of fossil fuel.

What's more, OECD figures point out the irony of an actual energy deficit in East Siberia and the Russian Far East, incredibly energy-rich regions that end up exporting so much they are not even self-sufficient.

In some of these regions, where poverty is widespread, half of regional budgets are spent on fuel, leaving little to spread around sorely needed services and infrastructure.

So the task for international renewable energy investors is to find the companies capitalizing on the renewable energy progress Russia has made to date, and the ones pushing Medvedev and Putin forward with cooperation and market-based incentives.

Denmark's Vestas, the world's largest wind turbine manufacturer, is one of the companies nudging Moscow.

Interestingly, it's not in the far reaches of Siberia but the isolated Kaliningrad region (formerly East Prussia) on the Baltic Sea where Russian-Danish cooperation has taken hold.

There are already around two dozen wind turbines operating both onshore and off the region's coast, and Vestas has the jump as Copenhagen and Moscow officials frame this market opportunity in terms of binational energy assistance.

After all, it doesn't hurt Denmark to make friends with the Russian gas giant.

From a green standpoint, though, we're keeping an eye on developments in Russia. In fact we have contacts on the ground there who say recognition of clean energy is spreading from Europe into Russia's big cities, meaning there are more market opportunities on the way.

You'll hear first when the time to capitalize on Russian renewables is here.

Regards,

Sam Hopkins