NEWS Berkeley-Berlin (& Nairobi) team publish on sustainability in the CaribbeanMay 12, 2021

Jes­si­ca Kersey of RAEL, Phillipp Belchinger of the Rein­er Lemoine Insti­tute, and RAEL Alum Rebekah Shirley explore the path­way to car­bon sus­tain­abil­i­ty in the Caribbean with a mul­ti-sec­toral, mul­ti-meth­ods analy­sis, pub­lished in Ener­gy Policy.

For the pub­li­ca­tion, click here.

Abstract:

Accel­er­at­ing the rate of renew­able ener­gy deploy­ment in Small Island Devel­op­ing States is crit­i­cal to reduce depen­dence on expen­sive fos­sil fuel imports and meet emis­sions reduc­tions goals. Though many islands have now intro­duced pol­i­cy mea­sures to encour­age RE devel­op­ment, the exist­ing lit­er­a­ture focus­es on qual­i­ta­tive rec­om­men­da­tions and has not sought to quan­ti­ta­tive­ly eval­u­ate and com­pare the impacts of pol­i­cy inter­ven­tions in the Caribbean. After com­pil­ing the first sys­tem­at­ic data­base of RE poli­cies imple­ment­ed in 31 Caribbean islands from 2000 to 2018, we con­duct an econo­met­ric analy­sis of the effec­tive­ness of the fol­low­ing five pol­i­cy inter­ven­tions in  pro­mot­ing the  deploy­ment of  RE: invest­ment incen­tives, tax  incen­tives, feed-in tar­iffs, net- meter­ing and net-billing pro­grams, and reg­u­la­to­ry restruc­tur­ing to allow mar­ket entry by inde­pen­dent pow­er pro­duc­ers. Using a fixed effects mod­el to con­trol for unit het­ero­geneities between islands, we find evi­dence that net-meter­ing/net-billing pro­grams are strong­ly and pos­i­tive­ly cor­re­lat­ed with increas­es in installed capac­i­ty of renew­able ener­gy — par­tic­u­lar­ly solar PV. These find­ings sug­gest that the RE tran­si­tion in the Caribbean can be advanced through poli­cies tar­get­ing the adop­tion of small-scale, dis­trib­uted photovoltaics.