Building back better: Granular energy technologies in green recovery funding programs

Granular energy technologies with smaller unit sizes and costs deploy faster, create more jobs, and distribute benefits more widely than lumpy large-scale alternatives. These characteristics of granu-larity align with the aims of fiscal stimulus in response to COVID-19. We analyze the technological granularity of 93 green recovery funding programs in France, Germany, South Korea, and the UK that target & POUND;72.9 billion for low-carbon energy technologies and in-frastructures across five emissions-intensive sectors. We find that South Korea's "New Deal"program is the most technologically granular with strong weighting toward distributed renewables, smart technologies, electric vehicle charge points, and other rela-tively low unit cost technologies that are quick to deploy. The UK has the least granular portfolio, concentrating large amounts of public money on small numbers of mega-scale energy projects with high implementation risks. We demonstrate how technological granularity has multiple desirable characteristics of green recovery: jobs, speed, and distributed benefits.