Geopolitical risk and renewable energy consumption: distributional patterns, innovation, and energy-exporter heterogeneity

Purpose This paper aims to examine how the relationship between geopolitical risk and renewable energy consumption varies across the conditional distribution. It also assesses renewable-energy innovation as a partial channel and energy-exporter status as a moderator. Design/methodology/approach This study uses an annual panel of 42 countries from 1990 to 2021. The empirical strategy combines two-way fixed effects, system generalized method of moments, method-of-moments quantile regression, cross-sectional augmented distributed lag, augmented mean group, and common correlated effects mean group estimators, complemented by cross-quantile tests, a bootstrap innovation-channel decomposition, and exporter-specific marginal effects. Findings Geopolitical risk is negatively associated with renewable energy consumption across all estimators, with a stronger association at the upper quantiles. It is positively associated with renewable-energy patenting, although patenting is negatively related to consumption from the middle quantiles onward. The bootstrap decomposition indicates a significant but limited indirect association, consistent with an innovation–deployment gap. Energy-exporter status partly cushions the negative association, but this buffer weakens at higher quantiles. Originality/value This research identifies significant distributional heterogeneity in the geopolitical-risk association, distinguishes technological response from renewable-energy use, and shows that the buffering role of energy-exporter status varies across quantiles.