Políticas de geração distribuída e sustentabilidade do sistema elétrico

Policy-makers are increasingly in search for evidence-based solutions for meeting contemporary challenges of energy services that are both low carbon and sustainable. One of the emerging trends are policies and regulations that incent distributed or decentralized generation. The question that this article addresses is: what is the current state of study on these policies or regulations in the Americas? The focus on the Americas was chosen because the article is part of a larger research project that explores the Brazilian and Canadian regulations for distributed generation. This article uses a non-traditional means for synthesizing academic work, entitled systematic literature review, SLR, which is also understood as a meta-analysis methodology to explore the current state of peer-reviewed publications on the subject. The SLR is a means of transparently locating, evaluating and synthesizing information to avoid bias in data collection. Keyword searches were conducted in English, Spanish, Portuguese and French. In total, 87 articles were included in the analysis and information was extracted regarding a set of defined characteristics and codes. Climate Change is the main driving force for distributed generation, as identified in the articles. However, when the papers were sub-divided into South versus North America, some interesting differences were noted. Job creation or the green economy was cited as a motivating factor more strongly in North America. While in the southern countries, the issue of diversifying the energy mix and avoiding infrastructure costs was more pronounced. Many articles dealt with the issue of mechanisms for incenting distributed generation (27%), and over half of these focused on aspects of Feed-in-tariffs, FITs. The findings show that there is little emphasis given in previously published works to understand social impacts and benefits of distributed technologies, an issue that policy makers will have to address if policy interventions to mitigate climate change can be fully realized. Additionally, specific urban challenges and governance at the local scale for distributed generation is not widely investigated, pointing to a need for future study that considers such institutional considerations. 6 Proposed publication for journal submission: Renewable & Sustainable Energy Reviews (A1 Qualis ranking for Ciências Ambientais)