Building resilient clean energy transitions: Does economic, fiscal, and climate policy uncertainties contribute to renewable energy consumption in United States

The study investigates the dynamic and asymmetric linkages between renewable energy consumption (REC) and policy uncertainties in the United States over the period 1988–2024, employing a Quantile VAR (QVAR) connectedness framework with rolling windows and forecast horizons, complemented by Multi-Frequency Quantile Correlation (MFQC). The dynamic total connectedness results reveal that spillovers are strongly time- and state-dependent, intensifying during crises such as the dot-com bubble, the global financial crisis, and COVID-19, with both adverse and exuberant states amplifying systemic transmission. Net connectedness analysis shows that fiscal policy (FP) and climate policy uncertainty (CPU) are persistent shock transmitters, while REC, the stock market (STM), and economic policy uncertainty (EPU) are mostly receivers, although REC's role shifts toward transmission after 2010, particularly during COVID-19, highlighting its growing systemic importance. Quantile network plots confirm these nonlinear dynamics, with CPU, FP, and REC emerging as dominant transmitters in both lower and upper quantiles, while EPU and STM absorb shocks, reflecting heightened vulnerability in extreme states. Robustness checks using MFQC further demonstrate that fiscal policy shocks are most influential in short-run extremes, EPU dampens renewable adoption in low-frequency stable conditions, and CPU consistently undermines renewables, while industrial production (INDP) supports REC in the long run. Overall, the findings highlight that renewable energy remains highly sensitive to policy and macroeconomic shocks, underscoring the need for credible and stable policy frameworks to strengthen resilience and ensure a sustainable clean energy transition.