Abstract
Meeting the rising energy demand and limiting its environmental impact are the two intertwined issues faced in the 21st century. Governments in different countries have been engaged in developing regulations and related policies to encourage environment friendly renewable energy generation along with conservation strategies and technological innovations. It is important to develop sustainable energy policies and provide relevant and suitable policy recommendations for end-users. This study presents a review on sustainable energy policy for promotion of renewable energy by introducing the development history of energy policy in five countries, i.e., the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom, Denmark and China. A survey of the articles aimed at promoting the development of sustainable energy policies and their modelling is carried out. It is observed that energy-efficiency standard is one of the most popular strategy for building energy saving, which is dynamic and renewed based on the current available technologies. Feed-in-tariff has been widely applied to encourage the application of renewable energy, which is demonstrated successfully in different countries. Building energy performance certification schemes should be enhanced in terms of reliable database system and information transparency to pave the way for future net-zero energy building and smart cities.
Highlights
Energy plays a key role in both the lives of human beings and the development of economies
To further promote the development of a sustainable society, this study reviewed the development of sustainable energy policy in different countries, in the USA, Germany, the United Kingdom, Denmark and China
The key conclusion of the paper is that to move towards a sustainable energy future, governments and stakeholders need to actively increase renewable energy adoption and promote effective policy incentives and policy controls
Summary
Energy plays a key role in both the lives of human beings and the development of economies. With an increase of 2 ◦C over pre-industrial levels, a significant world climatic change is expected to occur with detrimental social, human and economic impact. To avoid such temperature increase, governments and concerned members of civil society are engaged in implementing appropriate yet practical policies and actions in response. To address the challenge of climate change, the European Union (EU) has adopted a set of quite ambitious policies to bring down greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in 2020 by 20% with respect to 1990, raise the share of renewables in final energy consumption to 20% in 2020, and realise energy savings of 20% in 2020 compared to an official baseline energy consumption level [7].
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