Island regions and iso­lat­ed com­mu­ni­ties rep­re­sent an under­stud­ied area of not only clean ener­gy devel­op­ment but also of inno­va­tion. Caribbean states have for some time shown inter­est in devel­op­ing a region­al sus­tain­able ener­gy pol­i­cy and in imple­ment­ing mea­sures which could help to pro­tect its mem­ber states from volatile oil mar­kets while pro­mot­ing reliance on local resources. Here we exam­ine four case stud­ies of renew­able ener­gy advance­ments being made by pub­lic util­i­ty com­pa­nies and inde­pen­dent ener­gy com­pa­nies in the Caribbean. We attempt to locate renew­able ener­gy advances in a broad­er his­tor­i­cal frame­work of ener­gy sec­tor devel­op­ment, indi­cat­ing a few pol­i­cy lessons. We find that dif­fer­ent degrees of reg­u­la­to­ry and leg­isla­tive sophis­ti­ca­tion have evolved in dif­fer­ent islands. Islands should have spe­cial­ized pol­i­cy focus, con­trast­ing the ad-hoc nature of cur­rent region­al ener­gy pol­i­cy dis­cus­sion. We also con­duct a cost ben­e­fit analy­sis which shows that these ear­ly, inno­v­a­tive alter­na­tive ener­gy projects show them­selves to be both prof­itable and sig­nif­i­cant sources of emis­sions reduc­tion and job cre­ation. This lends sup­port to the poten­tial ben­e­fits of region­al ener­gy policy.