The Government of India has ambitious renewable energy targets, but limited financial resources to meet those targets. CPI examines how much it would cost the government to reach its renewable energy targets, by comparing the levelized cost of electricity from renewable energy to a baseline fossil fuel in absence of any subsidies – whether explicit or implicit; estimating the total cost of support for renewable energy under accelerated depreciation to determine which is the most cost-effective of existing policies; and investigating federal policy options to make this support even more cost-effective. The paper is organized in five sections. After the first section of introduction, section 2 discusses the selection of imported coal as the baseline cost of electricity for comparison with renewable energy. Section 3 forecasts and compares the levelized cost of electricity from renewable energy and the baseline of imported coal. Section 4 examines the cost of government support for renewable energy under different policy pathways. Section 5 presents policy implications.
The most comprehensive inventory of climate finance to-date, The Global Landscape of Climate Finance 2014, finds that global climate finance flows have fallen to USD 331 billion – far below even the most conservative estimates of investment needs. It also provides a detailed overview of the methodological challenges involved in tracking global climate finance flows. In addition to that, this report supports serious debate on these key questions by drawing together climate finance data from numerous sources to present policy makers with the most comprehensive information available about the scale, key actors, instruments, recipients, and uses of finance supporting climate change mitigation and adaptation outcomes.
Indonesia’s desire to drive economic growth and reduce climate risk is reflected in the sweeping policy reforms it has introduced in recent years to meet targets announced in 2009 to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In this report, CPI identifies which public actors are investing in Indonesia, through which instruments, and what they are investing in to provide a baseline against which to measure progress and plan scale up. The landscape reveals investment patterns that allow decision makers to pinpoint where the biggest barriers and opportunities are.
California is both one of the largest economies and one of the largest emitters globally, making its climate change policies some of the most important in the world. They are also some of the most ambitious. In particular, California’s Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006 (AB32) set a series of policies and programs across all major business sectors to return California emissions to 1990 levels by 2020. A key component of this set of policies is the Cap and Trade Program, which caps greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from key business sectors in California. With the Cap and Trade Program in its second year of full operation, CPI studies how firms make business decisions in the presence of a carbon price — whether abatement options that have been identified as technically feasible prove to be attractive in practice, or whether barriers prevent firms from pursuing otherwise cost-effective abatement options.