Guideline for Future Policy-making to Jointly Develop Renewable Energy in China and ASEAN

Abstract

Rapid economic and population growth of the ASEAN countries have solidly driven a solid growth in energy consumption. There is a widespread consensus in the ASEAN region that indigenous fossil fuel resources are insufficient to meet the rapid growth in energy demand brought about by the rapid population and economic growth in population, and that renewable energy is increasingly the least-cost option for energy supply, particularly for power production. To encourage development of renewable energy, most ASEAN countries had adopted supportive policies. However, it is still not clear how these policies have affected the renewable energy industry and what should be the direction of future policy-making to promote the development of the renewable energy industry. Therefore, this paper aims to analyse how current policy frameworks have affected the renewable energy development to provide guidelines for future policy-making. This is a participatory research involving collection of data from both primary and secondary sources. Primary data collection involved a survey using a questionnaire for 408 respondents consisting of government officials, researchers and entrepreneurs. It included interviews for 24 of them. Secondary data were collected from reports from the ASEAN Centre for Energy and related documents acquired from ASEAN governments. Information collected through the questionnaire were analysed quantitatively: value of Mean, Standard Error of Mean, Standard Deviation (Std.) and Variance for each question asked were calculated. Information collected from interviews were analysed qualitatively. The results showed that although governments of China and 5 middle-income ASEAN countries had national-wide policies or regulations to encourage the development of renewable energy, the accessibility, feasibility and sustainability of current incentive policies were not sufficient enough for future development of the industry. In conclusion, this paper proposed five aspects to guide future policy-making in ASEAN and China to develop the renewable energy industry and encourage cooperation between ASEAN and China.