The green economy policy discourse has devoted a lot of attention to the design of public policy addressing low-carbon technologies. In this paper the researchers examine the impacts of public R&D support and feed-in tariff schemes on innovation in the wind energy sector. The analysis is conducted using patent application data for four western European countries over the period 1977–2009. Different model specifications are tested, and the analysis highlights important policy interaction effects. The results indicate that both public R&D support and feed-in tariffs have positively affected patent application counts in the wind power sector. The (marginal) impact on patent applications of increases in feed-tariffs has also become more profound as the wind power technology has matured. There is also some evidence of policy interaction effects in that the impact of public R&D support to wind power is greater at the margin if it is accompanied by the use of feed-in tariff schemes.
The Green Economy (GE) paradigm aims to reconcile environmental and socio-economic objectives. Policies to deploy renewable energy (RE) are widely perceived as a way to tap the potential synergies of these objectives. It is, however, still largely unclear whether the potential of simultaneously achieving both environmental and socio-economic objectives can be fully realized, and whether and how multiple objectives influence policy design, implementation, and evaluation. The paper aims to contribute to this aspect of GE research by looking at selected country experiences of renewable energy deployment with respect to the socio-economic goals of job creation or energy access. Across the cases examined, the reseachers find the following implications of relevance for the GE framework: First, they confirm the important role of governmental action for GE, with the specific need to state objectives clearly and build monitoring capacity. Second, consistent with the “strong” green growth variant of GE, some of the cases suggest that while renewable deployment may indeed lead to short-term socio-economic benefits, these benefits may not last.
The 2015 EU Energy Union Package proposes integrating renewables into the market, just as the UK has moved away from Premium Feed-in Tariffs (FiTs) for renewable electricity supply (RES-E) to something closer to the standard FiT, which, when auctioned, demonstrated a 3% real fall in the weighted average cost of capital (WACC). The UK, which has experimented with nearly all forms of RES-E support, offers the evidence base for designing the Energy Union’s RES-E support. Innovation needs a further redesign to deliver adequate funding, best done through country contributions to an EU-wide innovation competition.
This 5th edition of the Global Green Economy Index (GGEI) is a data-driven analysis of how 80 countries perform in the global green economy, as well as how expert practitioners rank this performance. This new GGEI presents one such framework, offering an integrated performance assessment of climate change, the environment, efficiency sectors and investment to better understand where nations stand today and what they can improve on or leverage to do better in the future.
The performance index of the 2016 GGEI is defined by 32 underlying indicators and datasets, each contained within one of the four main dimensions of leadership & climate change, efficiency sectors, markets & investment and the environment.
This report provides an overview of the newest GGEI results from the 5th edition, as well as more detail on how GGEI's research and data can enrich the work of others in this space.