Socio-Political Feasibility of Rapid Expansion of Renewable Electricity

An essential element of low-carbon energy transitions is replacing fossil fuels by renewables in electricity generation. Despite the impressive growth over the last two decades, renewables still do not expand sufficiently fast to reduce the power sector’s emissions in line with the Paris climate targets and the socio-political feasibility of accelerating this expansion is still poorly understood. It is particularly important to understand whether it is feasible to accelerate the uptake of renewables in developing economies where the bulk of electricity use in the 21st century will occur. Here we explore three challenges to socio-political feasibility of the worldwide uptake of renewables. The first feasibility challenge is the formation of a viable techno-political regime supporting sustained growth of solar and wind power. We show that such regimes are formed when renewables reach about 1% of electricity generation, the ‘take-off’ threshold which has not yet been achieved in countries with the combined population of 2.6 bln people, including all major fossil fuel exporters. The feasibility of the future rapid take-off in these regions is primarily the function of the speed international policy and technology diffusion. The second feasibility challenge is maintaining high growth of renewables after their take-off. We demonstrate that the initially accelerating growth reaches its peak in most countries and that in most developing and emerging economies this peak growth rate is smaller than the demand growth rate which means that renewables do not displace conventional (including fossil) fuel sources. We identify demand growth and quality of governance as the main factors affecting the maximum growth and analyse the possibility that this growth will accelerate in emerging economies. The final feasibility challenge is avoiding slow-down or saturation of renewables at low levels, a phenomenon which is currently observed in several European countries such as Spain,Greece, Italy and Portugal as well as New Zealand. Due to the low number of data points we can only tentatively identify causal mechanisms behind this slow-down and provide initial recommendations for research that can advance constructing a feasibility space for high penetration levels in the future.