Building back better: Granular energy technologies in green recovery funding programs
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Published version
Author(s)
Wilson, Charlie
De Stercke, Simon
Zimm, Caroline
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
Granular energy technologies with smaller unit sizes and costs deploy faster, create more jobs, and distribute benefits more widely than lumpy large-scale alternatives. These characteristics of granularity align with the aims of fiscal stimulus in response to COVID-19. We analyze the technological granularity of 93 green recovery funding programs in France, Germany, South Korea, and the UK that target £72.9 billion for low-carbon energy technologies and infrastructures across five emissions-intensive sectors. We find that South Korea’s “New Deal” program is the most technologically granular with strong weighting toward distributed renewables, smart technologies, electric vehicle charge points, and other relatively low unit cost technologies that are quick to deploy. The UK has the least granular portfolio, concentrating large amounts of public money on small numbers of mega-scale energy projects with high implementation risks. We demonstrate how technological granularity has multiple desirable characteristics of green recovery: jobs, speed, and distributed benefits.
Date Issued
2023-06
Date Acceptance
2023-05-10
Citation
Joule, 2023, 7 (6), pp.1206-1226
ISSN
2542-4351
Publisher
Elsevier BV
Start Page
1206
End Page
1226
Journal / Book Title
Joule
Volume
7
Issue
6
Copyright Statement
© 2023 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc.
This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
License URL
Identifier
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.joule.2023.05.012
Publication Status
Published
Date Publish Online
2023-06-09