Throughout Europe, renewable energy production has expanded over the past decades, boosted by support policies of various kinds. The European Union (EU) appears as a driving force in the deployment of renewable energy and renewable energy support policies, especially for electricity generation. Since the late 1990s, it has encouraged Member States to develop renewables; adopted directives setting mid-term targets for this development; and produced regular reports assessing progress and evaluating the merits of the policies introduced in Member States.
The EU’s renewable energy policy emerged and developed along with the liberalisation of the electricity market, which was officially launched by the 1996 Directive on the internal electricity market . The process of integrating the European electricity market and the process of integrating electricity from renewable energy sources in this electricity market unfolded more or less at the same time, but not necessarily in perfect tune—especially since Member States’ perspectives and objectives in introducing support for electricity from renewable energy sources (RES-E) were not always aligned with those of the European Commission . Simultaneously, renewable energy policy consolidated as a field of research and expertise, attracting increasing academic attention. This book investigates this process from the vantage point of the history and evolutions of one kind of RES-E policy instruments, feed-in tariffs (FITs).
While FITs have been a dominant form of support for RES-E in European countries, their relationship to the policy principles of the EU has always been rather ambiguous: the European Commission has gone back and forth in granting them the label of “market-based instruments” (which amounts to a validation from its own very market-oriented perspective), and has alternated between shunning them and recognising them as the most effective form of support for RES-E. At any rate, ever since renewable energy made its entrance within the scope of European concerns, FITs have been part of the picture, and their vices and virtues have been debated.
The research that led to this book started from an ambition to understand where FITs came from. In retracing their origins and genealogy, we soon encountered European institutions and legislation. We also found a large body of academic and grey literature investigating the characteristics, design, histories, and effects of FITs, often in comparison with other instruments. From there emerged the project to retrace the European career of FITs on the basis of what the EU as well as the literature had said about them. In this book, we thus follow FITs in some of the countries that have implemented them and through the political and academic debates about EU electricity policies and markets, from the late 1970s to 2015. The picture we draw is certainly not exhaustive given the short format in which it is displayed, but hopefully provides an overview of the trajectory of FITs and of the various concerns and issues that have been attached to them over the years.
This book then tells the story of an instrument of renewable energy policy, but it also considers this story as a vantage point from which to look into the wider evolutions, tensions, and frictions at play in European renewable energy policy. In particular, it gives insights about the objectives of liberalisation and harmonisation that have been at the heart of the European project for some decades now, and about the priorities that have guided them in the case of the electricity sector (Barry 1993; Doganova and Laurent 2016). The debates that surrounded the evolutions of FITs, and the evolution of FITs in Member States itself, also interrogate the notion that a balanced, well-functioning, liberalised market can serve as a device to serve the common good and solve problems that are not reduced to economic and market activity (Geiger et al. 2014; Doganova and Laurent 2016). Even if renewable energy policy is a small part of the internal electricity market project, and FITs are only one element of renewable energy policy, we argue that a close look at FITs can shed light on these issues in several ways.
First, it leads us to look into the Commission’s perspective on liberalisation and harmonisation : the liberalisation and harmonisation agendas run through the Commission’s discourses on renewable energy policy. The ideal model of a smoothly running internal market for electricity largely shapes the Commission’s conceptions and assessments of RES-E policy intervention, so in this case we will watch it deploy in relations to a specific issue. Second, it gives us insight into the actual unfolding of the liberalisation and harmonisation projects, and into their imperfect realisation. In our study, we see how actual RES-E policy development in member states sometimes clashed with the Commission’s ideals and ambitions, and how such tensions have been resolved.
We look at how these two enactments of European renewable energy policy—at the EU level and Member States—play out in the design and management of one particular type of instruments and in the debates it raised. FITs are a particularly intriguing object in this respect. The Commission has for a long time considered them to go against the internal market project; but for a few years, between 2005 and 2011, it dubbed them as “generally the most efficient and effective support schemes for promoting renewable energy” (Commission of the European Communities 2008). We thus investigate to what extent different designs and conception of FITs have contributed to the integration of both RES-E and diverse national energy policy agendas (partly informed by economic or industrial interests) within the projected EU internal electricity market , as well as within the EU’s overarching energy-climate and innovation agendas.
In retracing the trajectory of FITs, we pay particular attention to two aspects of it. First, we are interested in the simultaneous production of guiding policy principles, actual policies, and expertise on these policies (and on their potential to align to guiding principles). This implies that we look at the interweaving of theoretical and practical concerns in the evolution and evaluation of FITs in Europe. Second, we are attentive to the relative importance of environmental objectives and liberalisation objectives as they have influenced the design and the theorisation of FITs. This translates into an attention to the extent to which FITs are described, and constituted, as “market-based ” instruments. It also leads us to interrogate what lies behind the term “market-based”: we follow evolutions in this conception, noting shifts in focus from competition to investment, which draw attention to different characteristics of market activities and different “virtues” of so-called market-based policies.
This first chapter sets the scene for our study. We start by providing background on feed-in tariffs: How do they work? When did they appear? How do...