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.