A major feature of environment mitigation strategies is the transition toward renewable energy, particularly in emerging economies where energy demand is rapidly increasing. India, the third-largest energy consumer globally, has increasingly relied on environmental taxation and environmental policy instruments to promote a cleaner energy transition. Despite their policy relevance, empirical evidence on the effectiveness of these instruments in promoting renewable energy consumption remains limited for single-country time-series studies. This study examines whether environmental taxes and environmental policy stringency stimulate renewable energy consumption in India during the period 2000–2022. Using annual data obtained from CEIC and related databases, the study employs the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) bounds testing approach to estimate long-run and short-run relationships. Dynamic ARDL simulations are used to analyse the adjustment paths following policy shocks, while the Quantile ARDL method explores heterogeneous policy effects across different levels of renewable energy consumption. The findings confirm the existence of a stable long-run relationship between renewable energy consumption, environmental taxation, environmental policy stringency, carbon emission intensity, financial development and economic policy uncertainty. Environmental taxes and environmental regulations exert positive effects on renewable energy consumption, while policy uncertainty negatively affects renewable energy consumption. The quantile ARDL results reveal that policy impacts become stronger at higher levels of renewable energy penetration. These findings suggest that environmental fiscal and regulatory instruments can support the renewable energy transition in India when implemented consistently and complemented with supportive financial and institutional frameworks.
Bahl et al. (Wed,) studied this question.