Renewable energy is regarded as one of the primary technology solutions to combat climate change, caused undoubtedly by continued heavy reliance on fossil fuels since the Industrial Revolution. Yet the development and commercialisation of renewable energy technologies have faced a number of significant barriers in recent times. These may be regarded as: regulatory and policy risk; uncertainty about whether governments should support renewable energy technologies as a complementary measure where they have imposed a carbon price mechanism; concerns about energy security and the ability of renewable energy to provide baseload power and barriers to entry on conventional electricity grids; and ongoing subsidies, both direct and indirect, to the fossil fuel industry.

I The Current Status of International Climate Change Negotiations

The most recent international negotiations under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (‘UNFCCC’), the second commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol and a new agreement post 2020, concluded in Warsaw in December 2013. The negotiations reinforced a number of key decisions reached at Doha in 2012, which were in themselves a last-ditch attempt to finalise arrangements for the post-2012 world, with the first commitment period (2008-12) under the Kyoto Protocol ending in December 2012. All recent negotiations have taken place amidst warnings about the urgent need to close the gap between current commitments, of both developed and developing countries, to reduce greenhouse gases (‘GHG's) and the parties’ stated goal of keeping the rise in average global temperatures, compared with pre-industrial times, at below 2°C or even 1.5°C.