Classification and effectiveness of energy policy mechanisms for the promotion of renewable energy

To handle the emissions problem and to address other issues as oil security and technology innovations, many countries have focused on renewable energy policies in combination with rapidly improving energy efficiency measures.Scholars mostly classify energy mechanism in terms of technology-push and demand pull. The literature also classifies energy policy mechanisms in terms of command-and-control and market incentive, although it doesn’t combine these mechanisms into organized categories. The objective of this paper is to review, organize and classify energy policy mechanisms in 140 countries. Furthermore, it compares the results with countries that had a variation higher than 10 percentage points in the renewable energy share of the total energy consumption between 2000 and 2015. The proposed classification aggregates the four concepts of technology-push, demand-pull, command-and-control and market incentives, according to the four quadrants policy (4QP) method developed by [1]. The results found in 140 countries show that 738 open market policies were implemented in the last decades; techno-economic, market-control and technology-control were responsible for 737, 669 and 3 policies in these countries, respectively. From 2000 to 2015, Denmark, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Iceland, Sweden, Lithuania, Finland, Italy, Germany, Uruguay, Zimbabwe had a variation higher than 10 percentage points in the renewable energy share of the total energy consumption. The share of open market policies in the world was greater than in the selected countries (34,0% against 28,6%). The reverse happens in techno-economic and market-control policies, in which the share of the world was lesser than in the selected countries, with 34% vs. 36,1% and 30,9% vs. 35,3%, respectively. Furthermore, a higher GDP per capita and government effectiveness leads to a higher policy effectiveness. The results suggest that enforced policies are more effective than market-oriented policies to promote renewable energy.