Authors: REN21, 2013

Date: June 2013

(Full paper available here) 

What is it about? The Global Status Report on renewable energies, published regularly by the Renewable Energy Policy Network for the 21st Century (REN21), summarises key facts and figures related to the development of renewable energies across the globe. The 2013 report addresses these developments in six sections, (1) global market and industriy overview, (2) market and industry trends by technology, (3) investment flows, (4) policy landscape, (5) rural renewable energy, and (6) system transformation. As complementary information, there is also an interactive world map available (http://www.map.ren21.net/)

Key developments identified in 2012 are:

• a shift in investment patterns that led to a global decrease in clean energy investment;
• continuing growth in installed capacity due to significant technology cost reductions and increased investment in developing countries;
• renewables progressively supplementing established electricity systems, demonstrating that the implementation of suitable policies can enable the successful integration of higher shares of variable renewables;
• the emergence of integrated policy approaches that link energy efficiency measures with the implementation of renewable energy technologies.

Chapter 4 on policy landscape is obviously of particular relevance to the question of enabling environments. It shows that the number of specific renewable energy policies has further increased, with now 127 countries applying different RE policies. This assessment also shows the increasing attention of developing countries towards. renewable energies. The chapter provides further details on the policy landscape.

Why we recommend reading this. The work programme on long-term finance also addresses matters such as public policy and financial instruments for the effective deployment of climate finance. The chapter 4 provides a good overview of the employment of quantitative renewable energy targets, issues related to global energy subsidies, power generation policies, heating and cooling policies and transport policies, inter alia. It also addresses linkages between renewable energies and energy efficiency. A table gives an overview of the different types of policies applied as well as the way these are financially supported (e.g. through fiscal incentives and/or public finance). It can therefore also serve as a basis to consider how the climate finance could support the implementation of these policies, including in the context of the ADP Workstream 2 discussions to scale-up near-term action.