The evolutionary renewable energy and mitigation impact in OECD countries

Although renewable energy has been emphasized to mitigate carbon emissions, energy policies may require rearrangement. This paper aims to suggest the possibility of needs in energy policy rearrangement by revealing if the mitigation impact of the renewable energy supply has been diminished with a case study on Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries. Adopting the idea of the environmental Kuznets curve hypothesis, the study investigates the nonlinear relationship between the renewable energy supply and carbon emissions. We collected the longest panel data possible for 34 OECD countries from 1971 to 2019. While the cointegrating equation results suggest that renewable energy has contributed to carbon mitigation, nonlinear estimation and quantile regression propose that the marginal mitigation impact from renewable energy might be weakening. 1% increase in renewable energy supply and the share of renewable in energy mix has mitigated carbon emissions by 0.134% and 1.260%, respectively. The empirical results insist that policymakers discover alternatives to decarbonize the energy sector, other than renewable energy expansion. Options to achieve carbon neutrality include heat expansion via unused heat, that is, national energy system innovation towards wasted energy utilization.