The global renewable power support policy dataset was compiled by Sarah Hafner (Anglia Ruskin University, United Kingdom) and Johan Lilliestam (Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies (IASS), Germany) in February-July 2017 and completed during 2017. The work was led by Johan Lilliestam but each author gathered half of the data. The data was formatted and checked for internal consistency by Tim Tröndle, IASS. All non-commercial users are allowed to use and manipulate our data, but are required to give appropriate attribution. Hence, please cite this data as: Hafner, S. & Lilliestam, J. (2019): The global renewable power support dataset. Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies (IASS) & Anglia Ruskin University, Potsdam & Cambridge. Doi: https://doi.org/ 10.5281/zenodo.3371375. If you are interested in contributing to and further developing the dataset: please contact Johan Lilliestam (IASS Potsdam). The search was done in publically available sources, including but not limited to the IEA renewables policy database, res-legal.eu, Worldbank data, as well as data from the responsible national ministries. Our data holds information on 10 specific policy instruments explicitly dedicated to the support for expansion of renewable electricity generation 1990-2016; some instruments, including taxation of non-renewables or emission trading, affect other sectors than renewable power, but are mentioned in their original policy description to also be dedicated to increasing renewable power. Our data concerns national policy measures, but ignores policies enacted on higher (e.g. EU-level in Europe) or lower (e.g. state-level policies in Canada, USA) political levels. For example, the “no support” entry for the United Arab Emirates indicates that there were no national-level policies: all policies were, in this case, emirate-specific. The data exists in two versions: one version readable for humans (RE_policies_fullglobal.xlsx) and for each instrument type as .csv. The information in the two versions is identical and differs only in the way it is displayed. Please refer to the metadata file for a detailed description of the dataset and the data categories.