Financing Renewable Energy: Who is Financing What and Why it Matters

Mariana Mazzucato and Gregor Semieniuk

SPRU Working Paper Series from SPRU - Science Policy Research Unit, University of Sussex Business School

Abstract: Accelerating innovation in renewable energy (RE) requires not just more finance, but finance servicing the entire innovation landscape. Given that finance is not "neutral", more information is required on the quality of finance that meets technology and innovation stage-specific financing needs for the commercialization of RE technologies. We investigate the relationship between different financial actors with investment in different RE technologies. We construct a new deal-level dataset of global RE asset finance from 2004 to 2014 based on Bloomberg New Energy Finance data, that distinguishes 10 investor types (e.g. private banks, public banks, utilities) and 11 RE technologies into which they invest. We also construct a heuristic investment risk measure that varies with technology, time and country of investment. We nd that particular investor types have preferences for particular risk levels, and hence particular types of RE. Some investor types invested into far riskier portfolios than others, and financing of individual high-risk technologies depended on investment by specific investor types. After the 2008 financial crisis, state-owned or controlled companies and banks emerged as the high-risk taking locomotives of RE asset finance. We use these preliminary results to formulate new questions for future RE policy, and encourage further research.

Keywords: renewable energy nance; direction of innovation; nancial actor types; deployment; technology risk; investment portfolio (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ene, nep-net, nep-reg, nep-sbm and nep-tid
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

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Journal Article: Financing renewable energy: Who is financing what and why it matters (2018)
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