This paper describes how a panel of global experts on renewable energy (RE) was convened to anticipate the big opportunities and major challenges facing the scale-up of RE to meet sustainable development and climate goals. The panelists participated in a Delphi process through which their views and perceptions were shared, aggregated, and analyzed. The Delphi analysis was a part of a comprehensive, multimethod evaluation (RE evaluation) that was carried out by the Independent Evaluation Group (IEG) of the World Bank Group. The primary purpose of the RE evaluation was to assess the institution’s performance in supporting the development of renewable energy from 2000 to 2017, examining how well the Bank Group is positioned to help clients overcome emerging challenges and seize future opportunities for scaling up various renewable energy technologies. It is an important global development consideration, since the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Agreement on climate change expect that renewable energy will be a key solution in an anticipated clean energy transition. The Delphi panel specifically helped contextualize the future of rapidly evolving RE markets, against which the Bank Group’s readiness to help clients could be assessed. By doing so, the Delphi panel also identified critical barriers that, when triangulated with results sourced from other methods, charted a pathway for scaling up RE for achieving global energy and climate goals. The paper is organized as follows:

Chapter 1: Background and Context. This chapter sets out the energy sector context under which the overall multimethod evaluation was carried out.

Chapter 2: Rationale for Undertaking Delphi. This chapter explains the strategic rationale for opting to apply a Delphi method with a global panel of experts on renewable energy, and how it strategically fit with and contributed to the overall multimethod evaluation.

Chapter 3: Designing and Planning for Delphi. This chapter describes the strategic planning and design undertaken before administering the Delphi process.

Chapter 4: Administering the Delphi Feedback Process. This chapter details how the Delphi process was administered in the case of the global expert panel on renewable energy, highlighting how the feedback process was managed to ensure integrity of the approach and credibility of the results. This chapter is the most relevant to evaluation professionals who may want to conduct a Delphi exercise.

Chapter 5: Analyzing Results. This chapter presents the analyses of the raw data, delving into issues confronted by energy practitioners to identify key sector findings. It provides a sector narrative that arises from the Delphi panel results.

Chapter 6: Formulating Conclusions. This final chapter highlights important findings from the Delphi process and illustrates how they were triangulated with results from other applied methods to draw conclusions in the broader multimethod RE evaluation.