Comparative Renewables Policy

Political, Organizational and European Fields

Elin Lerum Boasson, Merethe Dotterud Leiren, Jørgen Wettestad, Elin Lerum Boasson, Merethe Dotterud Leiren, Jørgen Wettestad

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9780429582448
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Challenging one-eyed technology-focused accounts of renewables policy, this book provides a ground-breaking, deep-diving and genre-crossing longitudinal study of policy development.

The book develops a multi-field explanatory approach, capturing inter-relationships between actors often analyzed in isolation. It provides empirically rich and systematically conducted comparative case studies on the political dynamics of the ongoing energy transition in six European countries. While France, Germany, Poland and the United Kingdom opted for 'technology-specific' renewables support mixes, Norway and Sweden embarked on 'technology-neutral' support mixes. Differences between the two groups result from variations in domestic political and organizational fields, but developments over time in the European environment also spurred variation. These findings challenge more simplistic and static accounts of Europeanization.

This volume will be of key interest to scholars and students of energy transitions, comparative climate politics, policy theory, Europeanization, European integration and comparative European politics more broadly, as well practitioners with an interest in renewable energy and climate transition.

The Open Access version of this book, available at: https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9780429198144, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Part I

Setting the stage

1 Introduction

Elin Lerum Boasson, Merethe Dotterud Leiren and Jørgen Wettestad

Introduction

Europe is going renewable – radically expanding its renewable electricity production. Public policies are at the heart of this major societal change so crucial for combatting climate change. Domestic support schemes for renewables have developed and changed over more than four decades now, with the European Union (EU) playing an increasingly important role. In 2014 the European Commission (the Commission) stepped up its steering of domestic support practices and required changes in many national support schemes. That development caused uproar in some EU member states, Germany among them, but was hardly registered on the political agenda elsewhere, for instance in Sweden.

Speeches held at a major renewable energy conference in Berlin, 27 March 2015, illustrate the differences between German and Swedish renewable electricity politics and policies. On that Friday morning, the German Minister for the Environment, Barbara Hendricks, stood on the podium at the Berlin Energy Transition Dialogue, addressing prominent figures in the booming renewable energy industry: corporate leaders, ministers and researchers.¹ She said she was proud of how Germany’s extensive support of renewables had contributed to radical cost reduction and added: ‘We want to encourage other countries to follow our example’. Further, she explained to the audience that the German energy transition, the Energiewende, had not been easy: ‘We have learned some lessons’ (Clean Energy Wire 2015).

For years, German renewables support, a key element in the Energiewende, had been subject to fierce political struggles and many heated debates – with massive protests from the major electricity utilities, which claimed that Germany’s renewables support policy was a key reason why they were now on the brink of bankruptcy. There had also been tough bargaining with the Commission, in addition to legal disputes in the Court of Justice (CJEU). However, speaking in Berlin on that day in 2015, Hendricks did not dwell on all the impediments and hardships; she was proud of what Germany had achieved and pleased that representatives from many industries and countries had come to Berlin to learn.

However, even as Hendricks was speaking to delegates at the Berlin Energy Transition Dialogue, the long-established German practice of guaranteeing different renewables technologies varying fixed prices for their electricity was about to change. Under this feed-in scheme, producers of expensive renewable energy technologies, such as solar, received higher support than did producers of less costly technologies, such as onshore windpower. In the future, large producers of renewable energy would have to compete for support in auctions. Only small projects would continue to receive traditional feed-in support: large producers would no longer receive a fixed electricity price, but rather an add-on on top of fluctuating market prices for electricity.

The next speaker was Nils Vikmång, State Secretary to the Swedish Minister for Energy and the Environment. In 2003 Sweden had adopted an electricity certificate scheme, which had remained largely unchanged since then. The scheme provided the same level of support to all types of renewables, differentiated between technologies, as in Germany. In addition, all Swedish renewables producers were exposed to fluctuating electricity prices, and the support level was itself determined by the supply and demand of electricity certificates. Like Hendricks, Vikmång represented a social democratic party, and they both came from countries that had radically increased their domestic renewables production. But Germany and Sweden had opted for very different approaches to renewables support. Unlike Hendricks, Vikmång and his colleagues had not experienced domestic support practices for renewables becoming entangled in complex juridical conflicts with the CJEU and the Commission. In Sweden, renewables policy discussions at the EU level were deemed largely irrelevant to domestic political deliberations on renewables policy.

However, the big utilities had started to criticize the Swedish scheme, which, they claimed, had led to overproduction of renewable electricity, ruining the profitability of existing large hydro and nuclear plants. As many renewables technologies had become far less costly, they argued that extra support was no longer needed. But Vikmång and his allies in the Swedish Parliament did not agree. They vigorously defended the traditional approach – and one year after the Berlin conference, the Swedish Parliament agreed to prolong the national electricity certificate scheme for another 15 years. That made Sweden the only EU country with electricity certificates as its main support scheme for renewables.

Germany and Sweden represent two contrasting approaches to renewables support in Europe: the technology-specific and the technology-neutral. Technology-specific mixes for renewables support create a broad range of differing support levels: costlier renewables technologies receive more support; and decentralized, small-scale projects often receive more support than centralized, large projects. The technology-specific approach also allows support to vary across geographical areas, fostering a wide range of renewables technologies and helping to underpin new industry developments and local energy security. By contrast, the technology-neutral approach is more aligned to the business models of big electricity producers operating in liberalized electricity markets. This approach favours large-scale investments in the most profitable technologies, with limited support for small-scale renewables sources.

The sheer number of actors involved in shaping policy and enabling these two countries, Germany and Sweden, to embark on different renewables policy paths is daunting. Even more confusingly, similar actors took strikingly different positions in the two countries. For instance, the Social Democratic Party in Germany promoted a highly technology-specific support scheme, whereas the Swedish Social Democrats promoted technology-neutrality. In order to understand how the two countries ended up with differing support-scheme mixes, we need to grasp how a broad range of factors and actors have interacted over time. Neither country developed its domestic policies in isolation from developments within other European countries or EU steering, but the roles played by what we refer to as the larger ‘European environment’ have differed greatly.

Challenging the many technology-focused accounts of the development of renewables support, this book takes a deep-dive into the political and social dynamics, developing a new analysis of this policy area as well as a new approach to policy studies in general. In addition to examining the cases of Germany and Sweden, we scrutinize and systematically compare the development of renewable electricity mixes in four other EU/European Economic Area (EEA) countries: France, Norway, Poland and the UK. Our overarching research question is: What explains the differences and similarities in renewables support-scheme mixes across countries and over time?

Germany, the UK, Poland and France all have technology-specific renewables support mixes; Norway and Sweden have technology-neutral support mixes. Some of these countries have had rather stable renewables support mixes; others have shifted over time. The UK and Poland switched from technology-neutrality to technology-specificity after 2010. Around that time, Germany and France started to expose new renewables projects more to market prices and competition than before, but without dropping technology-specificity. Countries in both groups have adopted a mix of support schemes, but whereas Germany, the UK, Poland and France offer technology-specific support to both small- and large-scale renewables projects, Sweden and Norway have adopted more technology-neutral schemes for both categories.

Renewable electricity production is central to climate-change mitigation. Globally, as well as in the EU, the combustion of coal, natural gas and oil for electricity and heat is the largest single source of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions (EPA 2019). In 2017, the energy-producing industries, primarily producing electricity, were responsible for 28% of total GHG emissions in the EU (Eurostat 2019). Renewables support schemes play an important role in strategies for climate mitigation, although other measures, such as carbon pricing, energy-efficiency standards and improved public transport, also contribute. By clarifying the factors and actors that shape the development of renewables support, this book furthers a better understanding of the political dynamics of climate-change mitigation in general.

Like many other climate-policy issues, renewables support mixes are shaped by complex interrelationships involving several parallel and partly intertwined societal processes. Economic liberalization, Europeanization, climate mitigation and technological change have underpinned the emergence, change and staying power of domestic renewables policies across Europe. Various strands within the political science literature – including EU implementation research, policy diffusion studies, policy process frameworks and historical institutionalism – may help us to assess and understand parts of the policy process, but none of these alone can adequately capture the dynamic interrelationships between the many decision-making bodies and actor-groups involved. Combining these political science literatures in new ways, and adding elements from sociological institutionalism and economic sociology, in this book we develop a dynamic multi-field approach.²

The multi-field framework

Whereas usual practice has involved analysing a few actor groups in isolation, exploring their positions and actions within limited time-periods, the multi-field framework can help us to identify the links between differing groups of actors and how political dynamics develop and unfold – features too often overlooked in studies of public policy, comparative politics, Europeanization and energy transition. The multi-field framework facilitates comprehensive analysis of organizational and political factors and how they interact and change over time.

Social scientists from a range of disciplines emphasize the role of fields, but the concept goes under various names, such as ‘segments’, ‘policy systems’ or ‘policy monopolies’ (Baumgartner and Jones [1993] 2009; Bourdieu 2005; Fligstein and McAdam 2012; Kluttz and Fligstein 2016). Fields distribute power among actors and shape values, identities and interests. ‘Social fields’ are circumscribed spheres of political and social life with particular constellations of actors (Boasson 2015: 1). Each field has an identifiable social architecture: a distinct distribution of resources and particular cultural-institutional beliefs and logics. Fields are issue- or industry-specific configurations of governmental and private organizations, and their importance for policy development results partly from the structural interrelationships and cultural-institutional unity between these organizations (Fligstein and McAdam 2012). Fields are not actors with defined objectives and strategies: they should be seen as socially distinct constellations of actors, with varying degrees of internal coherence and unity, more or less impenetrable boundaries and varying autonomy.

Modern societies can be seen as consisting of multiple fields. All fields are embedded in complex, multi-dimensional webs of dependence with other fields (Fligstein and McAdam 2012; Kluttz and Fligstein 2016: 192). As Scott (2017: 862) notes, most organizations ‘simultaneously operate in multiple fields and hence host multiple logics as well as alternative relational systems’. Examination of how multiple fields interact and change over time can help to explain changes and stability in public policy and facilitate more interd...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• Acronyms and abbreviations
• Foreword
• Preface
• Part I Setting the stage
• Part II Case studies
• Part III Assessments and conclusions
• Index