In order to achieve cost-effective RES-E deployment it is often argued that technology-neutral support schemes for renewables are indispensable. Against this background, RES-E support policies making widely use of technology differentiation in remuneration settings, e.g. across the EU, are...

Rapid decarbonization of whole countries requires additional research, development, and demonstration of low-carbon energy technologies. Governments support research, development, and demonstration in this area with various financing instruments. These instruments are frequently assessed by...

Moving non-incremental innovations from the pilot scale to full commercial scale raises questions about the need and implementation of public support. Heuristics from the literature put policy makers in a dilemma between addressing a market failure and acknowledging a government failure:...

Technological change and gains in efficiency of renewable power generation technologies are to a large extent driven by governmental support. Various policies that can broadly be categorized as technology push, demand pull or systemic constitute a policy mix for renewable energies. Our goal is...

We study the impact of environmental regulations on the patent activities for wind turbines between 1980 and 2008. We explicitly control for energy market liberalisation and take a potential interaction between liberalisation and policy instruments into account. We find a strong and highly...

Empirical analyses of the determinants of environmental innovations were rarely able to distinguish between different areas of environmental impacts. The paper tries to close this gap by employing a new and unique dataset based on the German Community Innovation Survey conducted in 2009. The...

This paper reviews the recent experience of Germany in encouraging innovation to reduce negative environmental impacts of economic activity. The essence of the German approach to policy-induced environmental innovation is discussed in the context of changing policy objectives, and illustrated...

This paper presents comparative data on innovation in selected climate change mitigation and adaptation technologies in the context of Africa. Such analysis informs policy aimed at encouraging international technology transfer and development of domestic innovation capacities. We present...

The report offers an outline of the main low carbon society (LCS) activities undertaken by the Italian government and of what is still missing in order to complete the transition. In detail, it provides an overview of how the debate is framed in Italy as well as the citizens' perception and...

Market-based instruments are widely used to encourage innovation and investment in cleaner technologies. Using a simple analytical framework and graphical representations, this paper provides a theoretical synthesis of the relationship between emissions prices/taxes and the firm's optimal...