Barriers to low-carbon investment may be financial, structural or technical. Financial barriers include fossil fuel subsidies, and the unpriced carbon externality. These discourage local businesses, project developers, vendors, technology providers from offering low carbon solutions to the market, and hamper institutional and market financing mechanisms enabling such businesses to grow. Structural barriers include network effects (need for flexible and sufficient grid capacity), fragmentation and transactional costs due to smaller scale of low carbon technologies and simply „status quo bias‟. These affect the viability and economic attractiveness of low carbon options. Finally, neither policy nor financing will achieve much.
