Comparing Socially-Equitable Renewable Energy Budget Allocation MDP Policies in Mature and Emerging Economies

The paper models socially equitable renewable-energy budget allocation as a Markov Decision Process and evaluates the same policy families in eight U.S. cities and West Java, Indonesia, using a shared solver interface. Receding-horizon value iteration performs best across both settings. In the U.S., it reaches 66% renewable penetration and reduces the underserved low-income population by 96% relative to a random baseline. In West Java, it closes the low-access gap while attracting the most private capital. A market-chasing heuristic that is only mildly suboptimal in the U.S. can underserve every low-access region in Indonesia.