Market forces alone will likely provide insufficient incentives for achieving the goals of the Paris Agreement; policies are thus playing a key role in accelerating this transition. As the energy sector is responsible for around two thirds of global emissions, understanding the effectiveness of existing and novel policies for the development and deployment of climate change mitigation technologies is critical.

This thesis is oriented along three key energy-related challenges: First, how can industrialised countries develop and spread novel low-carbon technologies? To that end, we develop a new approach to trace the development of scientific articles into patented technologies, relying on machine learning, various data science procedures, and econometrics (Chapter 2). With this approach, we then show – using data from 102,301 scientific publications on biofuels, li-ion batteries, solar PV, and wind energy – that open access scientific articles (i.e., those made available free of cost) are more likely to be used in patents (Chapter 3). Moreover, we demonstrate that geographical proximity between scientists and inventors and content similarity between the scientific publication and the patent reduce the diffusion time between the publication of the paper and the patent (Chapter 4). We thereby shed light on the geographic and semantic characteristics of knowledge spillovers.

Second, we investigate how industrialising countries can localise a greater part of the value chain in clean energy technologies to meet economic and environmental goals? We analyse the factors that lead to the eventual deployment of these technologies in developing and emerging economies. Using detailed country-level data on two emerging economies, South Africa (Chapter 5) and India (Chapter 6), we provide the first empirical assessment of the short-term cost and benefits of local content requirements in renewable energy auctions, using a credible counterfactual.

Third, we also investigate: how can developing countries crowd in financing for renewable energy? We provide evidence on the design and socioeconomic impacts of an internationally supported renewable energy deployment scheme in Uganda (Chapter 7) to demonstrate that de-risking policies to crowd in private sector investment are a promising alternative to current schemes.