by Peter du Pont, Mrutyunjaya Nanda, and Drishti Chhibber
Ahead of the APVIA Expert Meeting on Solar and BESS Investment in Bangkok on 31 August–1 September 2026, we look at what it will take to finance Southeast Asia’s next phase of distributed solar and storage.
The Asian Photovoltaic Industry Association (APVIA) is strengthening its role as a regional platform to advance investment in rooftop solar PV and energy storage across Asia. Since its founding in Singapore in 2011, APVIA has grown into a broad network of PV enterprises, research institutes, and industry associations spanning the region’s fastest-growing solar markets, from established hubs like China and India to the emerging markets of Southeast and West Asia. This gives APVIA a distinctive vantage point on the sector’s actual investment gaps and opportunities.
Asia Clean Energy Partners (ACE Partners) is privileged to support APVIA in this work as a facilitator and knowledge partner. We are working with APVIA to convene industry leaders, financiers, and policymakers to strengthen APVIA’s collective voice and translate it into concrete investment pathways. This blog examines what that engagement involves, why the timing matters, and what APVIA brings to the table as a regional industry association.
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In early 2026, APVIA launched a three-year initiative (2026-2028) to leverage its industry platform to drive change, build capacity, and accelerate investment in rooftop solar PV and storage across ASEAN. A central focus of APVIA’s campaign is to address one of the industry’s most persistent bottlenecks: unlocking the financing needed to scale up deployment of rooftop solar and battery energy storage systems (BESS)—from technical potential to bankable projects across the region.
Solar as the biggest force in the global energy industry
The timing of this APVIA campaign is significant, as solar PV has become a central pillar of the global energy transition. Roughly 698 GW of new PV capacity came online worldwide in 2025, lifting cumulative installed capacity to nearly 3 TW and pushing solar’s share of global electricity demand past the 10% mark. In 2025, 39 countries crossed the threshold of adding 1 GW of annual PV installations, up from 33 countries the year before.
1 It took the industry more than 40 years to install its first terawatt of capacity, and less than three years to nearly triple it!
The global investment numbers for solar are even more striking. Total global investment into energy infrastructure reached about USD 3.3 trillion in 2025, according to IEA estimates.
2 About two-thirds of this (USD 2.2 trillion) was invested in clean energy technologies and about one-third (USD 1.1 trillion) was invested in bringing oil, natural gas and coal to market. Overall, investment was concentrated in electricity: USD 1.5 trillion flowed into generation, grid and storage; roughly USD 1 trillion was for generation assets; USD 400 billion for grids; and USD 66 billion for batteries for storage in the power sector. A decade earlier, the fossil fuel supply chain had attracted 30% more capital than electricity generation, grids and storage combined. By 2025 that position had reversed, with electricity drawing 50% more.
Solar was the largest single line item in electricity sector investment. Utility-scale and rooftop solar together accounted for USD 450 billion of investment in 2025—more than any other item in the IEA’s global inventory. With the addition of USD 516 billion investment in power-sector batteries, the total investment for solar-plus-storage amounted to about USD 516 billion, which is roughly one-third of all electricity sector investment.
But scale and speed are changing the shape of the market as much as its size. The next phase of growth in solar investment will increasingly be distributed, shifting the total investment into residential, rooftop, agricultural, and commercial and industrial (C&I) systems, paired with energy storage, rather than in utility-scale plants. This shift to a more distributed model will bring a different set of investment challenges:
• Large utility-scale projects have benefited from established project-finance structures, positioning them well to attract institutional and development finance.
• Smaller distributed projects, however, face a different set of barriers: creditworthiness, collateral requirements, high transaction costs relative to project size, permitting delays, currency risk, and the difficulty of aggregating enough small projects to reach investable scale.
One of APVIA’s first public engagements was an APVIA-led roundtable on 8 June called “Next Generation of Solar Financing: The Future of Financing Solar PV and Storage” at the Asia Clean Energy Forum (ACEF) in Manila. APVIA co-organized the roundtable with ADB Ventures, as a launch event for its 2026–2028 regional engagement to drive change in Southeast Asia. The roundtable brought together more than 100 financiers, developers, national PV associations, development finance institutions, and technical assistance providers to examine the financing barriers standing between solar’s technical promise and its next phase of deployment.
Figure 1: Tetchi Capellan, Chairperson, APVIA delivering the opening remarks
APVIA’s discussions in Manila crystallized a central insight; the constraint on distributed solar is increasingly not a shortage of capital, but a shortage of bankable pipelines of smaller projects that can actually connect with that capital. This is particularly relevant in Southeast Asia where rooftop and distributed solar markets still have significant room to grow.
From identifying barriers to developing solutions
The discussions during the Manila roundtable led to a framework for action, captured in the resulting Manila Declaration. The Declaration identifies the following key priorities:
• The next terawatt needs a fundamentally different model.
• The real barrier is the “soft cost of friction”.
• The capital is there; the bankable projects are not.
• Consumer finance is the biggest untapped opportunity.
• Ambition unlocks reform: India is showing the way.
ACE Partners is now working with APVIA’s member associations and regional stakeholders to move from problem identification to co-creation. Specifically, APVIA is convening industry stakeholders and experts to identify and design practical financing approaches and identify investment opportunities. The goal is to bring market experience into the discussion, support stakeholder engagement, and develop knowledge products that inform APVIA’s regional advocacy.
From Manila to Bangkok
The next milestone is the APVIA Expert Meeting on Solar and BESS Investment, which will take place in Bangkok on 31 August and 1 September 2026. ACE Partners is supporting APVIA in the event design, with the aim of curating an invitation-only meeting with 30–40 practitioners (“experts”) working across solar project development, finance, business-model innovation, and policy. The focus of the discussion will be on funding and financing models that work and can be replicated, adapted, and scaled across the region.
In Bangkok, we will shift the conversation from identifying financing gaps to examining what is already working. Participants will present, share, and dig into proven business and financing models for residential and small commercial solar, agriculture and C&I projects, and battery energy storage. Using our highly interactive “fishbowl” session design, we will ask the experts what made these approaches viable, and what it would take to replicate them across other Southeast Asian markets. The meeting will also examine the policy and regulatory conditions that have allowed distributed solar to scale, with the goal of identifying practical pathways that APVIA and its partners can take forward with banks, investors, and development finance institutions.
Building the investment evidence base
The work does not end with the events themselves. ACE Partners is collaborating with APVIA in translating these discussions into practical knowledge and sustained regional engagement. The discussions will feed into an APVIA knowledge series on Solar Investment in Asia, which will include success stories, investor profiles, and country-level investment landscapes. The knowledge series will be designed to give investors, policymakers, and developers more practical evidence on what it takes to finance distributed solar and storage.
Further engagement with ASEAN political and business leaders. The findings will be presented at an APVIA-led event on Solar and Storage Investment at the ASEAN Energy Business Forum (AEBF) in Manila on 6 October. AEBF is held alongside the ASEAN Ministers at Energy Meeting. The Solar and Storage Investment event will include three sessions (a) technology and investment trends, with a focus on distributed scale solar and storage; (b) how to bridge perceived and actual investment risks across residential, commercial, and industrial solar markets, drawing on examples from Australia and elsewhere; and (c) success stories of financing rooftop solar and storage.
The day before, on 5 October, APVIA will convene its first major session on grid resiliency at AEBF, covering cross-border interconnection, battery storage standards, and the pathways to higher renewable shares on the region’s island and isolated grids — the grid-side conditions that distributed solar and storage ultimately depend on. ACE Partners is supporting the design of both sessions.
Creating the conditions for scale
Southeast Asia’s next phase of solar growth won’t be decided by technology or market demand alone: key ingredients for success must include financial and policy frameworks that can work in an increasingly distributed project landscape. Closing that gap is precisely what APVIA’s three-year campaign (2026–2028) is designed to do. As the region’s principal solar industry platform, APVIA is uniquely positioned to convene the developers, financiers, and policymakers who together determine whether rooftop solar and storage move from pilot projects to mainstream infrastructure across ASEAN.
That is why the APVIA initiative in Southeast Asia is focused on a single, practical question: what funding and financing models already work, and how can they be replicated, adapted, and scaled across Southeast Asia’s diverse markets? For distributed solar and storage specifically, answering that question means strengthening bankable project pipelines, reducing transaction costs, expanding access to consumer and aggregator finance, and building the regulatory and institutional conditions that let good models travel from one market to the next.
We at ACE Partners are proud to support APVIA in this work as a facilitator, knowledge partner, and ecosystem builder. We are supporting design and facilitation of convenings, curating data and evidence, and engaging in deep dialogue with finance practitioners to draw on these financing models to develop replicable resource guides and playbooks. This APVIA-led campaign can curate and create a durable link between Southeast Asia’s fast-growing solar opportunity and the capital needed to realize it at scale.
1 International Energy Agency (IEA) Photovoltaic Power Systems Programme (IEA-PVPS), Snapshot of Global PV Markets 2026 (13th edition), May 2026.
https://iea-pvps.org/snapshot-reports/snapshot-2026/
2 International Energy Agency (IEA), World Energy Investment 2025, Executive Summary, 2025,
https://www.iea.org/reports/world-energy-investment-2025/executive-summary.
Sources
1. International Energy Agency, World Energy Investment 2025, Executive Summary, June 2025.
https://www.iea.org/reports/world-energy-investment-2025/executive-summary
2. Institutional Investors Group on Climate Change (IIGCC), “World Energy Investment 2025 Highlights Electricity Demand and Energy Security as New Drivers,” 10 June 2025.
https://www.iigcc.org/insights/world-energy-investment-2025-highlights-electricity-demand-and-energy-security-new-drivers
3. IEA Photovoltaic Power Systems Programme (IEA-PVPS), Snapshot of Global PV Markets 2026 (13th edition), May 2026.
https://iea-pvps.org/snapshot-reports/snapshot-2026/
4. “Solar approaches 3 TW, but the industry faces new challenges,” pv magazine, 14 May 2026.
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2026/05/14/solar-approaches-3-tw-but-the-industry-faces-new-challenges/
