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Scenario planning is a useful approach that helps policymakers to better understand the complexity and uncertainties that lie in the future and to choose the right policy mix to support the development of renewable and affordable energy sources. In this regard, this paper aims to present renewable energy (RE) development scenarios in Iran in the horizon of 2030.

Following the intuitive logic school and the Global Business Network model, the authors identified seven driving forces, according to the expert’s judgment, by brainstorming techniques which influence REs development in the horizon of 2030. By prioritizing driving forces based on their importance and uncertainty, “sustainable and green economy” and “emerging technology development” are the most instrumental uncertainties and the authors formed a two-axis scenario matrix with each representing an axis.

The results suggest four main scenarios of “Transition to Sustainability with Green Gold,” “Towards Sustainability with Green Gold,” “Productivity with Black Gold” and “Desperation with Black Gold.” They include a wide range of possible situations of energy basket in the future ranging from dominance of fossil fuels to dominance of REs. The “Productivity with Black Gold” and the “Towards Sustainability with Green Gold” are the most probable scenarios of RE development by 2030 in Iran.

This paper indicates that the dominance of oil and gas resources would impede or at least slow down the development of renewable and affordable energy sources. Although the economic and environmental potentials and the inevitability of REs are well-understood, path dependence created by fossil fuels in Iran’s energy regime, either partially or fully, hinders the widespread development of REs which is the case in other resource-based countries as well.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the social acceptance of renewable and non-renewable energies in Iran using the social acceptance pyramid.

Today, social acceptance is considered a very important phenomenon in the development, implementation and achievement of energy policy goals. Low acceptance will make it difficult to achieve energy development goals; therefore, social acceptance must be taken into account when making policy. Firstly, the model criteria, using data obtained from questionnaires, are weighted by the Shannon entropy method and, finally, four sources of fossil, nuclear, wind and solar energy were ranked by means of VIKOR, Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS).

The results show that, in Iran, the social acceptance criterion and trust sub-criterion are the most important criteria for energy acceptance. The results of the ranking of options based on multiple-criteria decision-making (MCDM) techniques show that, given Iran's specific energy requirements, social acceptance of fossil energy is higher than wind, solar and nuclear, and wind, solar and nuclear energy come later in the rankings.

This research contributes to the literature in two ways: Firstly, social acceptance is considered a very important phenomenon in the development, implementation and achievement of energy policy goals; thus social acceptance must be taken into account when making policy. The results of the ranking of options based on MCDM techniques show that, given Iran's specific energy requirements, social acceptance of fossil energy is higher than wind, solar and nuclear, and wind, solar and nuclear energy come later in the rankings. Also, the social acceptance criterion and trust sub-criterion are the most important criteria for energy acceptance in Iran.

This paper aims at identifying knowledge creation and diffusion challenges and explaining their causal relationship in renewable energy technologies in Iran.

By reviewing literature of renewable energy technologies development, key knowledge creation and diffusion challenges are extracted. Then, the decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory method is used to investigate the cause-effect relationships as well as the influence structure of aforementioned challenges in Iran.

The results indicate that lack of specialized higher education and research institutions (C4), limited international product development and technological cooperation with international pioneer firms (C8), insufficient international research interactions of institutions and academic research centres (C6), tight and temporary subsidies to domestic institutes (C13), limited and non-systematic government grants (C14), insufficient tax incentives with low impact on investment (C12), weak enforcement of intellectual property rights (C5), low number and relatively poor performance of NGOs and scientific and trade associations (C19) and the limited number of conferences, workshops, meetings and specialized journals (C15) are among the most instrumental challenges of knowledge creation and diffusion of renewable energy technologies development in Iran.

This paper identifies knowledge creation and diffusion challenges of renewable energy technologies development in Iran, which is applicable for other developing countries. It also analyses the interrelationship and causal effect between challenges which is a neglected issue in the literature and has beneficial theoretical and policy implications.

This study aims to to provide a model based on the context and conditions of the regions in Iran for monitoring regional innovation systems (RISs).

In the first stage, after reviewing the literature, interviewing the experts, and then thematic analyzing the content of the obtained data, initial Dimensions and indicators were identified. Then, a fuzzy Delphi technique and a seven-scale questionnaire were used to test the results and expert opinion. Finally, after the extraction and correction of the indicators to evaluate the RISs, a comprehensive model was identified in 5 dimensions, 16 indicators and 176 sub-indicators. In the next step, the importance weights of the main 16 indicators were determined using the analytic hierarchy process method.

The proposed RIS assessment model consists of firms’ behavior and regional interactions, economy, human capital, innovative outputs, locational features, that each dimension has its own indicators and sub-indicators, each one is discussed in the paper.

The research contribution is that the proposed RIS model of this research is the first model that is appropriate to the context of Iran.