Renewable Energy Sources: Comparison of Their Use and Respective Policies on a Global Scale

Introduction

Renewables excluding large hydro accounted for 9.1% of world electricity generation in 2014, up from 8.5% in 2013 with a corresponding increase of 17% in global investment ($270.2 billion invested in 2014 in renewable power and fuels excluding large hydro-electric projects) (Frankfurt School-UNEP Centre/BNEF, 2015). The reason behind this is the concern for sustainability resulting from factors including but not limited to the depletion of natural resources, life-threatening levels of pollution, global warming, climate change and the ever-increasing worldwide energy consumption (Komor & Bazilian, 2005; Apergis & Payne, 2010). The effective utilization of renewable energy is critical across the world, where 1.3 billion people still do not have access to modern sources of energy (WEF, 2013). Societies have much to gain from the effective use of renewable energy with certain issues to consider while making this happen (see Table 1).

In order to make use of these advantages stated in Table 1 and to address the critical issues, countries have developed government policies and adopted respective regulations to ensure the production and use of renewable energy and promote the respective new investments. This has been realized both individually and also as a part of global organizations and networks such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), European Union (EU), United Nations (UN) and International Energy Agency (IEA) (Arioglu Akan et al., 2014).

Gökmen & Temiz, 2015.