To increase the share of RES-E, governments have designed and implemented promotional policies which provide direct and indirect financial aid to RES-E adapters and developers. These promotional policies include several instruments and support schemes. Different countries, and in some cases different governments in a country, use different combinations of these support schemes to promote different renewable technologies. In this work, we study support schemes that have been implemented since the late 1990s or early 2000s in five countries: the UK, Germany, Italy, Spain and Australia. We provide an overview of these schemes and their timelines for the following RES-E technologies: onshore wind, offshore wind, utility-scale solar PV, rooftop solar PV and solar thermal. In addition, it is important to evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of support schemes in promoting these RES-E technologies. We tackle these two values and provide specific discussions on each country, support scheme and technology.