Inhaltsangabe:Introduction: The rapid adoption of wind energy in the renewable energy mix can be seen in many industrialized nations in the past decade, in particular the need to agreed greenhouse gas reduction and stable energy supply are seen as a sound vision for a sustainable energy policy . In an emerging market such as South Africa there are abundant renewable resources including wind energy, however there is low adoption observed to date. This study aims to investigate barriers to entry in the South African wind energy sector and what the priorities are to remove such barriers for successful deployment of wind technology. Therefore, it was required to examine successful deployment of wind energy in the European Union and how such barriers were removed; this was set in the current status of the renewable energy sector and existing barriers in South Africa. It was necessary to gain insight of the inter-related issues on opening a traditional fossil fuel based energy market to a transitional implementation of renewable energy provisioning, also considering the current utility monopoly based energy landscape in South Africa. Chapter one considers the global shift for the need to implement renewable energy and highlights key issues such as security of supply, carbon reduction linked to climate change. Section three looks at the global benefits of renewable energy within the energy mix. Section four highlights key policy shifts and wind energy potential and section five gives an overview of South Africa s renewable energy policies. Chapter two looks at the research question of the need to answer what barriers exist and how to remove these in South Africa. Section three and four describe the qualitative research method applied and the setting of sampling. Section five, six and seven look at the tools used for telephone interviews. Section eight and nine describe the literary research applied, the key institutional papers reviewed and barriers identified. Chapter three describes the lessons learned in a global context on policies for renewable energy to deploy wind energy successfully. Section three looks at the background on European lessons learned with key European wind markets focused on such as Denmark, Germany, Spain and UK. Sections four to thirteen look at the barriers to entry, key mechanism such as feed-in tariffs, tendering, effectiveness of support schemes in various EU markets and conclusion on support schemes. Sections [...]