Climate notes: Europe's Green Funding Landscape

The impression that tends to emerge from all discussions about subsidizing renewable energy is that Germany is the only nation that has undertaken further measures to promote renewable energy in order to achieve climate goals (in addition to EU trade in emissions). On closer inspection, however, it emerges that additional incentives to invest in renewable technologies for generating power have been created in several European countries with a view to achieving national targets in terms of renewable energy as a share of gross final consumption of energy in 2020. How these additional subsidy mechanisms are designed and how they are financed differs from country to country, which is due to differing political goals. Germany has set itself the goal of developing specific technologies like photovoltaic technologies particularly fast, and has therefore introduced differentiated feed-in tariffs for different technologies. Sweden, on the other hand, is indifferent to which technology helps the country to achieve its energy goal. The country therefore offers subsidies via renewable energy certificates, regardless of the technology used to achieve them.