Sussex Energy Group at SPRU

With a lot of interim targets for the EU 2020 agenda already behind us the time has come to evaluate what Member States have achieved so far and what still needs to be done to meet the renewable energy targets in six years’ time. Equally, it is an opportune time to (re)consider the processes involved in developing domestic renewable policy informed by EU targets and agenda.

In the beginning of May I took part in a workshop titled The EU Renewable Energy Policy: Challenges and Opportunities organised by a team from the Environmental Policy Research Center (FFU) of Freie University in Berlin. The workshop reviewed the development of wind, solar, hydro power and biomass energy in several Member States and discussed the extent to which the processes of Europeanisation have changed the make up of domestic energy sectors. The discussion included over 24 researchers from a wide range of institutions, who reviewed a mixed bag of countries including France, Italy, Spain, UK, Germany, Denmark, Austria, Poland, Romania and Bulgaria. This overview of renewable energy policy across the EU reinforced for me the range of issues and nuances that are obscured by using blanket terms like political will, leaders and laggards. Several trends that emerged from the discussion suggest that it is high time for a shift in how we think about renewable energy policy in Member States.

While initially the EU renewable directives did bring about significant changes of energy policy in most countries, it translated into changes in their energy mix that were significantly less impressive. The history of renewable energy in Europe since the 1990s shows that no such thing as direct transposition of EU directives could possibly exist. EU directives cannot be simply “downloaded” onto very different national contexts. Instead what emerges is a process of negotiation between the domestic context and the EU targets and policy. This makes thinking about the implementation of EU renewable policy in terms of leaders and laggards rather unhelpful and obsolete. Are leaders countries which have developed the capacity to quickly and fully implement EU renewable directives? Or countries which have succeeded in meeting their (interim) renewable targets? Because on one hand, the variety of renewable histories discussed showed that renewable targets can be achieved without the full implementation of EU directives. On the other hand, the full implementation of EU renewable directives was not a guarantee of coming close to achieving relevant targets. Read more ›