Electricity production from renewable sources, excluding hydroelectric (kWh)_

Event_Log

1. 012016JCPOA Implementation DayAssociation

   IAEA certifies Iranian compliance; US, EU and UN lift nuclear-related sanctions on oil, banking, shipping and other sectors, unlocking roughly $56bn of previously frozen assets.

   Why this link: Non-hydro renewable electricity output, which had bounced around 30-290 million kWh/year through 2007-2017 with no clear trend, jumped to 831.7 million kWh in 2018 and continued rising to 1.07 billion (2019), 1.13 billion (2020) and 2.82 billion (2021) -- more than a tenfold increase from the pre-2018 range -- plausibly reflecting solar and wind projects developed by European and other foreign firms during the 2016-2018 JCPOA sanctions-relief window (when FDI briefly recovered, as documented in this database's FDI chart) that then came online over the following several years even as the broader sanctions environment returned.

   Caveat: Iran's own domestic renewable-energy feed-in-tariff policy (established by SATBA, the Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Organization, in the mid-2010s) is at least as plausible a driver as the JCPOA sanctions-relief window specifically, and is not itself a dated row in this project's timeline -- confidence is kept low given this ambiguity, and continued growth through 2019-2021 despite the JCPOA's collapse suggests domestic policy momentum mattered at least as much as the brief foreign-investment window.

   Lag: 2-5 year lagSource: OFAC — JCPOA Implementation Day actions