Energy Policy

Key findings:

• The design of policy mixes for renewable energy support will benefit from two complementary perspectives when studying policy impact: strategic intent and specific impact domain (Download Ossenbrink et al., in press)
• The EU energy policy mix is contested among major industry actors. Major conflict lines include the ambition to support renewables and the degree of (de-)centralization of the electricity system (Download Lindberg et al., in press)
• Additional incentives from energy policies are necessary to support electric utilities when targeting system integration of renewable energies (Download Frei and Sinsel, 2018)
• Feed-in policy design is essential to shape different configurations of self-consumption in the field of PV (Download Ossenbrink, 2017)
• Policies targeting energy efficiency can also generate innovation effects, which is often overlooked (Download Girod et al., 2017).
• Energy policy making should consider that belief based approaches explain the adoption of innovation better than economic models (Download Girod et al., 2017).
• Deployment policies have to be designed carefully to avoid technology lock-in. Application specific policies may equally contribute to lock-in as technology specific policies (Download Schmidt et. al. 2016).
• Major changes in energy policies depend on coalitions of actors with diverging interests. Advances in renewable energy technology have made major policy changes easier (Download Markard et al. 2016).
• Feed-in tariffs have a major impact in stimulating the uptake of renewable energies such as PV or biogas in the energy sector (Download Hoppmann et al. 2013, Download Hoppmann et al. 2014; Download Markard et al. 2016)
• As actors and technologies may react very dynamically and in unforeseen ways to policies, continuous adaptation of energy policies is crucial (Download Hoppmann et al. 2014)
• Photovoltaics, which benefited very much from policy support in the past, becomes increasingly independent and is already economically attractive without feed-in tariffs in many regions of the world (Download Lang et al. 2014)
• To be efficient, the design of deployment policies should take into account the profitability gap of new technologies, such as energy storage technologies (Download Battke and Schmidt 2015)
• When designing and implementing deployment policies, or transferring them to new contexts, political legitimacy is central (Download Huenteler et al. 2012)
• The effect of deployment policies on new energy technologies may be very much moderated by informal institutions such as professional culture or social context (Download Wirth et al. 2013)
• Electricity market liberalization has profoundly changed existing organizational and market structures, thereby also opening up opportunities for major transformation and strategy changes of utility companies (Download Markard and Truffer, 2006)