Policy Matters : Regulatory Indicators for Sustainable Energy
Sustainable energy is at the heart of the global development and climate change agenda. Reaching the targets set by the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goal 7 (SDG7) will require a rapid increase in energy access, renewable energy and the e...
| Main Author: | |
|---|---|
| Format: | Report |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2018
|
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/553071544206394642/Policy-Matters-Regulatory-Indicators-for-Sustainable-Energy http://hdl.handle.net/10986/30970 |
| Summary: | Sustainable energy is at the heart of
the global development and climate change agenda. Reaching
the targets set by the United Nation’s Sustainable
Development Goal 7 (SDG7) will require a rapid increase in
energy access, renewable energy and the efficient use of
existing energy resources. Public debate centers on securing
adequate finance to meet these global targets, but evidence
demonstrates that policy can often be a prerequisite for
mobilizing finance. RISE 2018 demonstrates that progress on
sustainable energy outcomes has often been preceded by
long-term efforts to strengthen policy and regulatory
environments. Precisely because policy matters, it is
important to track how well countries are doing in creating
the regulatory environment needed to accelerate achievement
of sustainable energy goals. RISE provides such a global
scorecard which summarizes countries’ regulatory
environments. It does so by tracking the adoption of
good-practice policies with respect to energy access, energy
efficiency, and renewable energy at the country level as of
December 2017, scoring them on a scale from 1 to 100, and
classifying the strength of a country’s policy environment
according to a “traffic light” system with green for
advanced, yellow for intermediate, and red for early stage.
Poor creditworthiness of utilities undermines the
sustainable energy agenda. Power utilities are among the
central actors in the energy sector in most countries, and
their financial health is critical for the viability of
investments across the sustainable energy agenda. As of
2016, however, only about half of all power utilities met
several basic creditworthiness requirements. Moreover,
performance on almost all dimensions of credit-worthiness
has deteriorated since 2012. The situation is particularly
acute in low-access countries, where the number of utilities
meeting basic creditworthiness criteria has dropped, falling
from 63 percent in 2012 to 37 percent in 2016. Good
institutions and enforcement are also necessary elements to
achieve sustainable energy results. Adopting good practice
policies will not yield results without strong institutions
and consistent enforcement. RISE 2018 has incorporated proxy
enforcement indicators to provide some sense of the level of
attention that countries are giving to enforcement issues. |
|---|