Abstract:

The world is confronted with two crises on a global scale: one economic and one environmental. Hence, we need policies that can stimulate recovery and at the same time reach the sustainability of the global economy. United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP, 2009) and many economists (i.e. Barbier, 2009; Edenhofer and Stern, 2009; Robins and al, 2009) advocate the need for a “Green Recovery”. The concept of “Green Recovery” means that the current economic crisis should be grasped by governments as an opportunity to reduce carbon dependency and put economies on a path of sustainable development. This needs the use of fiscal stimulus packages to provide green infrastructures necessary to reach a significant “greening” of the global economy. Since renewable energy is a key to a future without dangerous climate change, many papers and international reports advocate that the renewable energy sector is an obvious choice in the path of Green Recovery.

The main aim of this paper is to show how the economic crisis is an opportunity to accelerate the spread of renewable energy technologies and what kind of strategy is needed at the actual context of global crisis.