Drivers and barriers to renewable electricity technologies: lessons from the technological innovation system approach

The challenge of climate change facing humanity requires a widespread diffusion of renewable energy technologies (RETs). Although the deployment of RETs has been quite impressive in recent times, there is still a long way to go to fully decarbonise electricity systems. Barriers to the development and diffusion of RETs need to be removed, and the drivers should be activated in order to accelerate their uptake. Therefore, insights on those drivers and barriers are required in order to implement policies which encourage the diffusion of RETs. The analysis of those drivers/barriers can greatly benefit from literature on technological innovation systems (TIS) which, indeed, has been applied extensively to analyse the drivers/barriers to RETs. Although some reviews on barriers to RETs are available in the literature, none has focused on the insights provided by the TIS approach. The aim of this chapter is to review the literature on the drivers and barriers to RETs using a TIS approach and to identify relevant insights from this literature. However, some weaknesses of the TIS approach when analyzing the determinants to RETs have also been identified, which suggest that it should be complemented with other streams of the literature and that some missing aspects should be integrated into the TIS approach in order to provide a more complete framework for the analysis of drivers and barriers to RETs.