National Markets and Promotion Policies for Renewable Energy Sources

Abstract

This chapter presents and analyzes government promotion of renewable energy technologies in Germany, Japan and the United States in the electricity sector. A whole range of instruments has been introduced to expand the use of renewable energy technologies in the past decades. Today however, two distinctively different designs prevail as the dominant instruments used: price-based systems and quantity-based systems. These instruments and their mechanisms have been illustrated in the previous chapter.