Uneven Rates of Renewable Energy Deployment: Cannibalization, Stranded Assets, and Policy Iteration

The present study reviews the challenges associated with renewable energy (RE) project development and implementation in an era of rapid technology advancement and of progressively declining equipment prices. Dynamic policy support and institutional strength have helped high-income countries derive the benefits of the economies accruing both from product improvements and process improvements; lower-income, climate-vulnerable countries appear not to have derived such benefits. Study investigates the relationship between RE deployment and socio-economic factors such as the population size, previous fossil-fuel use, and economic growth for member countries of the Climate Vulnerable Forum. While these factors have played a significant role in RE deployment in high-income countries, the present study finds that they have no significant correlation with either boosting or impeding RE deployment in the short run for climate-vulnerable countries. Therefore, there might be merit in strengthening external intervention and enhancing support for rapidly building institutional capacity within the "climate-vulnerable" countries to assess context-specific factors and for testing business models that incorporate long-run risk mitigation and management measures so as to promote expeditious RE deployment as a climate adaptation measure within climate-vulnerable countries. Received: 23 July 2025 | Revised: 10 October 2025 | Accepted: 13 February 2026 Conflicts of Interest The author declares that he has no conflicts of interest to this work. Data Availability Statement The data that support the findings of this study are openly available in IRENA at https://www.irena.org/Publications/2025/Jul/Renewable-energy-statistics-2025. Author Contribution Statement Sunderasan Srinivasan: Conceptualization, Methodology, Validation, Formal analysis, Data curation, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing, Visualization, Project administration.