Abstract
The emergence of renewable energy sources (RES) has broadened the scope of socio-technical options for energy systems. While the conventional fossil-nuclear system has been a highly centralized one, both technological and in economic respects, RES can be implemented in a highly decentralized manner—but can also fit to the traditional centralized pathway. This new option space is associated with many conflicts. The paper reconstructs one basic conflict by conceptualizing future energy options as a strategic action field with incumbents and challengers as stylized key actors. We illustrate this approach by various cases from Germany, Austria, the Mediterranean, and China. The paper argues against a popular stylization of the strategic action field of RES along the dichotomy of centralized versus decentralized options and sketches a mixed future as the more plausible—and more desirable—one. The paper ends by sketching the design of a global super smart grid as the backbone for such a mixed option.
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- 1.
Energy security has been -and continues to be-treated as a national objective and priority. In the EU electricity sector efforts to be as much as possible independent from electricity imports have led to massive investments in national generation capacity . Combined with forecasts overstating future demand this policy goal has resulted in substantial overcapacities.
- 2.
As we have included the incumbent players, namely large-scale fossil-nuclear providers, to the energy sector itself (box in Fig. 9.1) we include their substantial investment capacities in the sector. Investors as separate actors outside the energy sector thus mainly include large or small scale providers of funds other than traditional energy providers.
- 3.
In that case we include NGO-founded actors into the energy sector directly.
- 4.
The project was supported by the Intelligent Energy for Europe Program .
- 5.
The project was supported by the Austrian Climate Research Program .
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Reusswig, F., Komendantova, N., Battaglini, A. (2018). New Governance Challenges and Conflicts of the Energy Transition: Renewable Electricity Generation and Transmission as Contested Socio-technical Options. In: Scholten, D. (eds) The Geopolitics of Renewables. Lecture Notes in Energy, vol 61. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67855-9_9
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