The Effect of Renewable and Nuclear Energy Consumption on Decoupling Economic Growth from CO2 Emissions in Spain

Abstract

This study examines the relationship between renewable and nuclear energy consumption, carbon dioxide emissions and economic growth by using the Granger causality and non-linear impulse response function in a business cycle in Spain. We estimate the threshold vector autoregression (TVAR) model on the basis of annual data from the period 1970–2018, which are disaggregated into quarterly data to obtain robust empirical results through avoiding a sample size problem. Our analysis reveals that economic growth and CO2 emissions are positively correlated during expansions but not during recessions. Moreover, we find that rising nuclear energy consumption leads to decreased CO2 emissions during expansions, while the impact of increasing renewable energy consumption on emissions is negative but insignificant. In addition, there is a positive feedback between nuclear energy consumption and economic growth, but unidirectional positive causality running from renewable energy consumption to economic growth in upturns. Our findings do indicate that both nuclear and renewable energy consumption contribute to a reduction in emissions; however, the rise in economic activity, leading to a greater increase in emissions, offsets this positive impact of green energy. Therefore, a decoupling of economic growth from CO2 emissions is not observed. These results demand some crucial changes in legislation targeted at reducing emissions, as green energy alone is insufficient to reach this goal.

The Impact of Renewable Energy, Economic and Population Growth on CO2 Emissions in the East African Region: Evidence from Common Correlated Effect Means Group and Asymmetric Analysis

“…The results are consistent with Zoundi [32], who suggests that renewable energy and GDP negatively and positively affect CO 2 emissions, respectively, and who shows findings similar to this study for population growth. These findings are also similar to those obtained by Dong et al [1] and Shuai et al [50] for the case of Africa, and are consistent with results estimated by Mariola et al [51], which showed that renewable energy negatively affects emissions, while economic growth increases emissions, in the case of Spain. In contrast, renewable energy and population growth significantly and positively affect GDP.…”

Impact of Clean Energy on CO2 Emissions and Economic Growth within the Phases of Renewables Diffusion in Selected European Countries

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