A comparative study on renewable energy policies between Japan and Malaysia

The world relies heavily on fossil fuels for energy generation, thereby leading to global warming and regional climate change. Renewable energy (RE) is one of the realisable solutions to tackle the drastically increasing energy demand. As the global push for RE culminates within the coming years, energy policies will be the key driver in promoting RE deployment. Japan as a developed country aims to achieve a 36-38% share of RE in the energy mix by 2030, whilst Malaysia being a developing country has set a goal of achieving 31% RE mix by 2025. This paper presents a comparative study of RE policies between Japan and Malaysia, with the RE policies of both countries being analysed and presented chronologically. Moreover, the factors that contributed to the effectiveness of the policy and the measures that can be taken to overcome the shortcomings of the policies are elaborated. It is observed that both countries have been actively implementing a series of RE policies since the 21st century, especially Japan after the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011. Japan has shown an outstanding achievement where it achieved 20.8% of RE mix in 2020 while Malaysia is still far behind its target at approximately 2% in the same year. Hence, the Malaysian government should follow Japan's footsteps in adopting and enforcing RE policies, and at the same time increase civil awareness regarding RE and stimulate participation from various stakeholders.