Renewable energy technologies: barriers and policy implications

Renewable energy, especially for electricity generation, has been growing at a fast pace with global renewable power capacity addition reaching two-thirds of total generation capacity added in 2018. Renewable power has become competitive with fossil fuel in many countries but renewables still face a variety of barriers to achieve their full potential. The barriers vary across countries/regions and include economic, technical, awareness and information, financial, regulatory and policy, institutional and administrative, social and environmental, and end-use/demand-side barriers, the last one a relatively new one. Integration of variable power in the grid is another new technical barrier that countries with high penetration of renewable power are facing. This paper shows that there is good experience on the identification of barriers and measures to address them. These measures include political commitment through renewable energy targets, and renewable promotion measures including support mechanisms such as feed-in tariff, auction, renewable energy certificates, renewable portfolio standards and net metering. Fiscal incentives including tax credit and incentive schemes and public financing of renewable energy are other measures taken by countries to address the barriers. For success, stakeholder consultation is an important component of barriers identification as well in deciding on measures to address the barriers.