Renewable Energy Governance

Answers on Renewable Energy (RE) governance have been sought through many initiatives, Directives and legislative instruments, but to what extent the needs of RE have been met through these developments or to what extent questions have been appropriately answered remains debatable. In a dynamic world which is affected by external drivers, such as financial crises and geopolitical manoeuvrings, private companies seem to be at the forefront of RE deployment but they also lag behind or just shut down: why is this happening in the massively expanding RE sector? National governments can back up the whole RE deployment system, or create an investment boom, but they employ different criteria and differences in approaches which maybe suggests there is no “best” model when it comes to governance of RE systems. In the middle of this game with differing rules are the energy consumers, the general public, to whom RE benefits are deemed to accrue, but not without cost. Questions are beginning to emerge from consumers about costs and benefits of their governments policy on RE. The most bespoke of questions is “what is RE finally for”, where and to whom do the benefits really accrue? What do you see when you look behind the financial and institutional cloak of subsidised RE delivery?

In this chapter, the primary technical aspects of conventional and renewable energy systems are presented. The description focuses on commercial systems installed across the world, together with a brief introduction to some promising technologies currently under development, such as Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS). Conventional energy systems include power plants using fossil fuels (natural gas, coal, etc.), while renewable energy systems include solar, wind, geothermal, biomass, and small-hydropower applications. These technologies are briefly described accompanied by economic figures (installation cost, fuel cost, specific cost of electricity, etc.) and emissions data (where applicable). Some insight on the energy strategy in specific countries is provided and how this can be related to local conditions and electric power requirements.

In this chapter, we consider energy transitions as important elements of attaining development goals. In the development context, energy transitions pose both challenges and opportunities. Obstacles to transitions include (1) an existing, centralized, complex energy-grid system, whose function is opaque to most users, (2) coordination and collective-action problems that are path dependent, and (3) difficulty in scaling-up RE technologies. Because energy transitions rely on both technological and social innovations, we are interested in how institutional factors can be leveraged to surmount these obstacles. This research attempts to address the question of what constellation of institutional, biophysical, and social factors are essential for an energy transition. Our objective is to derive a set of “design principles” that we term institutional drivers for energy transitions, analogous to Ostrom’s institutional design principles. This chapter will analyze energy transitions using the Institutional Analysis and Development Framework (IADF) to conduct a comparative case-study analysis. The comparative case-study analysis allows us to uncover recurring patterns across cases that help to identify institutional factors associated with energy transitions.

Australia provides great potential as a case study for renewable energy governance. It is a large continent with a comparatively small and highly urbanised population. It possesses enormous mineral wealth and is a major exporter of fossil fuels, but it also has huge potential for the exploitation of renewable energy. Politically, it is a country divided between those who support large-scale exploitation of fossil fuels and those who advocate that the nation should grasp the opportunity of its rich renewable resources to become a world leader in this field. The potential for renewable energy development has been recognised in some areas, with large-scale wind energy development in particular. But the great distances between energy sources and users suggest that the urban centres themselves should be examined as sources of renewable energy. Governance is complex, with three levels, Federal, State and Local, each exercising power and capable of influencing energy concerns. The key question which is addressed in this chapter is, in a regime with multiple layers of government, at what level is renewable energy development best promoted? We address the politics of energy in the context of Australia’s economy and governance arrangements. Drawing data from previous research carried out by the authors, we examine the potential of urban areas to generate and supply their own power from renewable energy. Using Hammer’s (2009) capacity to act theory we examine the capacity of local government to develop urban renewable energy. We seek to identify hesitations towards RE adoption in all levels. A critical question concerns whether bottom-up or top-down action is preferable.

Is Renewable Energy Governance (REG) finally capable to be used as a tool to achieve Endogenous Development within the Tourism Sector? Here, our effort is to challenge this question by critically assessing specific cases located within the Tourism industry, where various actors interact under specific conditions when the energy game comes to the forefront. Our final goal will be to question several REG schemes and explore which are the drivers affecting the specific relationship between sustainable tourism development and renewable energy (RE). This approach will help to identify processes that could facilitate the transformation of saturated tourism models to niche tourism markets and of exogenous threats to endogenous sustainability and development under certain conditions. We also question whether REG leads to endogenous tourism development or it is the endogenous tourism development that leads to RE exploitation. We conclude that things happen the second way.

Community owned renewable energy initiatives are the emergent and self-organized arrangements where communities become both producers and suppliers of energy. Cases of community energy developments form Texel (Netherlands), and Undy and Urgha (UK) are the empirical grounds that demonstrate this capacity. As highly desirable community owned renewable initiatives may seem, they face many enablers. However, they are also confronted with various tensions, as identified in this chapter. A closer look of the governance space in which these community initiatives operate, reveals that tensions and opportunities span from socio-cultural, political, and technological axes. These initiatives are both outliers and frontrunners of a sustainable energy transition: they create new forms of institutions, challenge even benefiting to them instruments, dare to uptake risks and seize opportunities, and operate outside demarcated institutional space. Community owned energy initiatives constitute a new form of local renewable energy governance that deserves to be explored.

The dearth of commercially viable renewable energy (RE) operators in Kenya is telling. Despite a rising need for clean and reliable energy, a progressive institutional framework, and a new RE funding scheme, which should result in a genuinely competitive and a self-sustaining investment proposition, the poor results on the ground show that technological innovations, costs and prices, and policies have yet to be fully aligned to achieve full RE potentials. We argue that the resulting negative effects of such poorly administrated RE sector is best understood by considering the practical challenges faced by RE power generators and lost opportunities for ordinary consumers to enhance their socioeconomic well-being which hinges upon access to affordable and reliable energy, and for whom barriers impeding that growth must be removed.

This chapter explores renewable energy governance in the context of New Zealand’s “energy culture”. New Zealand enjoys an international reputation as being a clean and green country. Yet surface appearances can be deceptive. Image frequently trumps reality. The green label is largely an exercise in branding (the country is the latest recipient of the “Fossil Award”), although energy is one of the areas where this might not hold. New Zealand’s energy supply mix is impressive, the majority of it being drawn from renewable sources. However, global warming will severely impact upon our ability to generate adequate amounts of electrical power in a sustainable manner, and our centralised corporate-dominated supply system is poorly placed to deal with the challenges that lie ahead. These issues are compounded by various political problems such as ownership of resources and access to the grid. Numerous questions arise: can water be commodified or is it held in common? Does it properly belong to the indigenous people of this country? Why is there no feed-in tariff and why are smart meters not being installed? To explore the topic of renewable energy governance we examine various components of the national energy culture, energy policies and resources. We then look at the likely impacts of climate change, the current state of the deregulated electricity supply industry and why the “business as usual” model is set to prevail. This is illustrated by reference to two case studies—of the potential for distributed generation to contribute towards future electricity demands in Auckland and the proposed district energy system in Christchurch—in both cases we identify a worrying reluctance for resilience.

Renewable energy sources (RES) implementation has been crucial for countries throughout Europe, and this led to several legislative efforts to enhance RES development. However, the persisting financial crisis frequently proved to constitute an obstacle in taking correct and efficient measures. The need to reduce fiscal market specific deficits seemed to overshadow RES policies’ efficient implementation, leading to situations that drive away investments rather than facilitate them. In some cases, the governments, in their effort to mitigate the existing fiscal deficits and adapt to the financial crisis persisting in Europe, often seem to take a wrong turn. The measures they have adopted seem to be in the opposite direction, since they only consider short-term financial results, ignoring the medium- and long-term negative effects in the overall economy. Moreover, regulatory issues that remain unsolved (i.e., unforeseen delays in the licensing procedure) also discourage investments in the renewable energy sector, leading to a recession rather than economic growth. This deficient national governance fails to get the “broader picture” and assess correctly the many advantages of an increased, but also well-structured, RES penetration.

In July 2011, Cyprus experienced an abrupt disruption of power supply as a result of an explosion that happened near the biggest conventional power station of the island, which destroyed about 60 % of the its power generating capacity. This was a major drawback for the Cypriot economy that could turn into an opportunity to restructure Cyprus’s energy mix towards a more sustainable one by further promoting renewable energy sources. However, due to the time-consuming licensing procedures which exists in Cyprus nothing has materialised. This chapter searches for the reasons for this situation and examines the potential of the single stop principle for national renewable energy governance. Within this context, a simple numerical model is considered; what-if scenarios employing the single stop rationale by means of time and cost savings are quantified and examined, and specific suggestions for the improvement of the licensing procedures are performed.

There are several types of restrictions applied on the implementation of wind energy in islands. Technical, economical and land planning aspects are the most important and are discussed in this chapter. Electricity produced by wind energy is competitive against conventional power production in sites with high wind potential, but wind penetration is restricted due to technical constraints imposed to autonomous electrical systems for reasons of safe operation. On the other hand, hybrid solutions which combine wind energy with pumped storage systems may be applied in few cases for further wind energy penetration, but this solution is considered as a rather expensive one and requires large scale civil works for the topology of the reservoirs and huge water quantities for initial fill. Although these solutions could be competitive against the current high electricity production cost and reduce the energy dependence, they lead to wind energy resource exploitation only for partial local supply. In several islands, there is abundant wind potential which could be only exploited and transported to the mainland through the development of large scale wind farms and underwater interconnections to decrease national energy dependence and contribute to the achievement of national goals for renewable energy supply. In all these cases, land planning issues associated with other land uses and protected areas set additional constraints to wind energy development.

Wind energy is constantly gaining ground, especially in the UK, helping to tackle climate change and support energy security as the country wants to become less dependent to imported fossil fuels like coal and gas. Nevertheless, wind farm life cycle environmental impacts are not negligible and the construction and operation of wind turbine generators can cause several environmental impacts to the area where they have been sited. Therefore, it is reasonable to question, (a) whether there are “hidden” environmental impacts from the use of renewable energy technologies, and (b) whether supporting wind energy in order to displace fossil fuels just substitutes one environmental problem with another one (or more). This chapter uses UK as a case-study to describe thorough processes of environmental assessment and the environmental impacts related to wind energy. This lecture creates a pallet of potential issues that should be taken into account with regards to implementing environmental energy governance practices. The two methods used here, are (a) the Environmental Impact Assessment approach (used to identify on-site impacts that wind farms have on the environment) and (b) the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) approach, which connects the energy, material, wastes and emissions with a wide range of environmental impact categories. The findings could change the way we think about wind energy and might make it easy to understand why there are still people who are opposed to the development of wind farms.

Sustainability has gradually become fundamental to the regional planning and decision-making process of French local governments. Local authorities are supposed to incorporate sustainability into their mode of governance. They do it, formally, but, the very idea of sustainable development implies a breakdown of the systems of reference for public action, and of individual and collective practices. So combining sustainability with preexisting governance uses is all but evident, as it appears with wind power plant development. In the Champagne-Ardenne Region, local authorities are caught in the cross fire among developers, farmers, landowners, environmental activists, without any tool to help decision-making.

Environmental sustainability, a highly politicized issue, constitutes one component of global energy security. Awareness of mutual interdependence between global societies and their resources is supposed to facilitate the multilateral cooperation approach towards energy and climate issues. The transition to extensive renewable energy (RE) use, globally, is a key instrument for the passage towards a more sustainable energy system. The global energy governance’s institutional architecture has been transformed in order to respond effectively to this goal. In particular governance has being enhanced with the formation of a series of institutions committed to promote the appropriate expertise for a regulatory and legislative framework for further expansion of RE technologies. This Chapter aims at the study of certain institutions in the establishment of RE governance principles. The Chapter indicates that RE international governance is time consuming and still lacks the necessary coherence, which is capable of compromising the public and private interests for the good implementation of RE at a global scale. The variety of the existing national and international institutions dealing with RE offers a fragmented rather a global approach of RE governance. This is further demonstrated by the insufficient RE integration at an EU level, despite the adoption of a very ambitious environmental regulation package. The analysis of the RE policy immaturity in the EU will be shaped, in this Chapter, around the analysis of the Directive 2009/28/EC and its weaknesses regarding the RE local implementation.

The Black Sea region is diverse, not entirely autonomous and geopolitically tense; however it produces, or transports across its area, significant fossil fuels to the EU market and further afield. The twelve countries of the area which form the Black Sea Economic Cooperation (BSEC) have recently adopted Declarations which target climate change, green economy and renewable energy. The EU has long been operating in the region due to its strategic importance, primarily in the areas of energy, environment and governance; although direct programme success has been limited. The chapter focusses on the question: can a route be devised which uses the strengths of each organisation and effectively aligns both BSEC and EU to a regionalised approach to renewable energy (RE) development? The chapter considers the historical developments in the region by these regional players as well as the benefits and constraints of a regional renewable energy approach. The McKinsey 7S model is used to compare BSEC and EU in their RE approaches which demonstrates significant differences of intention, strategy, operation and capacity to implement. Based on these institutional differences, a third approach is developed in which these two organisations could work together based on their institutional strengths for RE regionalisation.

The utilization of renewable energy sources is considered one of the crucial strategies for sustainability and economic growth. At the same time it can be a powerful tool for achieving economic, ecological, and social benefits on a community and local level. The goal of the European energy policy, namely to increase renewable energy by targeting a 40 % share in electricity production by 2020 and also to consider a more efficient energy use has to be considered as providing an ambitious aim, at least on a national and regional level, leaving to each member state the responsibility or the way in which the aim will be achieved. Although one may argue that target is certainly ambitious, especially in the light of the economic recession troubling the Eurozone, still, one cannot fail to notice that significant progress has been made in the utilization of renewables over the past 15 years, albeit not uniformly throughout Europe. It is in a sense puzzling that the Mediterranean countries, although featuring a rich RE potential, have lost ground compared to northern European countries. This chapter aims to discuss issues encountered during RE implementation with regard to governmental policies and financial and environmental aspects of renewable energy processes which seem to slow down the RE penetration and acceptance.

Many governments have used market stimulation programmes focusing on increasing awareness, regulatory interventions or financial incentives for photovoltaics (PV). Solar resource availability is thus not the primary determinant of economic viability of photovoltaic solar energy systems. Countries with a moderate annual solar radiation resource, such as Germany, have, via governmental interventions, become leaders in installed photovoltaic capacity. In other countries with abundant solar radiation, such as Spain, governmental interventions have led to a boom-bust effect in the PV industry. Governmental governance, is here defined as the combined effect of prevailing policy, regulatory, fiscal and legal environments and measures. In this chapter, international case-studies are presented where different types of governmental governance have led to policy formulations and whose implementation has either enabled and facilitated increased PV uptake or has created barriers to maintaining steady growth in the solar photovoltaic industry.

The transformation of the German electricity sector to a near-total renewable supply (“Eneigiewende”) by 2050 or earlier was embodied into law in 2012. This seemed to consecrate a development which began with the passage of the Renewable Energy Act of 2000. Naturally, such a major transformation needs considerable vision, and over time needs determination from political and social forces to overcome resistance from established ideas, interests, practices, and organizational arrangements. After a historical overview of the institutional politics of RES-E (renewable energy sourced electricity), this chapter will look at three major challenges that German politics and society was/is faced with: launching very rapid, indeed disruptive RES-E growth (disrupting carbon lock-in); building or maintaining political support and an actor network capable of supporting this change; and reshaping the electricity system to accommodate fluctuating generation by wind and solar power.

At the time of its introduction in 2002, the Flemish system to support renewables was a pure market-based green electricity certificate system. Starting in 2004 a string of changes to the system, up till the current year 2013, culminated in the addition of a minimum allowance for green electricity certificates. This minimum allowance presents a minimum market price for green electricity certificates. The gradual transformation of the system took place as a consequence of a series of policy responses to imperfections of the system as perceived by policy makers. In our analysis, we investigate whether the system has been effective and efficient in reaching its goals. We focus on four consequences of the system’s structure: three related to the aspect of minimum allowances (the time-lagged nature, the technological orientation and the differentiated rights for technologies) and one related to the market-based green certificate aspect (the short-term target setting by limited annual quota increases). At present Flemish renewable targets have been reached, thus the system seems to have been effective but there are doubts about its efficiency. Whether the current form of the system will still be effective in the future, so that Flemish renewable energy targets can be met, and whether the system will turn out to be efficient, is as yet undetermined.

This chapter deals with the governance of renewable energy in Norway. The Norwegian case is a peculiar one. Norway has been blessed with an abundance of waterfalls, which for the past 100 years have been used to produce cheap and renewable electricity. In addition, Norway has vast oil resources which have been exported to generate national wealth. How does Norway’s odd position of on the one hand being one of the most renewable nations in Europe, while fuelling the world with hydrocarbons affect the governance of ‘new’ renewables? Does the fact that Norway is already one of Europe’s largest producers of renewable energy make a transition toward more renewable policy and production, easier or harder? What cultural, political, and financial factors seem to influence Norway’s strategies in the area of renewable energy production? Historically, energy in Norway has been both cheap and profitable, and Norwegian energy policies have traditionally been geared toward this goal: energy use and production should first and foremost be cost-effective. This situation has been challenging for the implementation of new renewable energy technologies. In the liberalized Norwegian electricity market, the governance of renewable energy has largely been left in the hands of the market participants. The low electricity prices over the past years have not attracted investment in renewables. In an attempt to mitigate this, Norway recently introduced electricity certificates in a joint market with Sweden, thereby creating a new class of incentives for investment in renewable energy generation. Further, to increase Norwegian renewable energy deployment, the Norwegian government has funded research and development projects and a number of large research centers for environmentally friendly technologies. However, there appears to be challenges in transferring the R&D activities to commercial products that could reach the market.

This chapter focuses on the power that citizens hold, when it comes to the decision making on wind turbines planning and implementation, in their hometown area. Basically, it covers the theoretical concepts related to the governance of renewable energy projects from the local communities’ perspective and involvement. Also, it illustrates the similarities and differences in two Greek geographic locations when it comes to citizen participation in the decision-making process. The results from the two selected areas in Greece are discussed and the conclusions reveal the empowerment that environmental communication can attribute to the local element of the sites where wind turbines are to be located.

A Green Industrial Revolution (GIR) consists of renewable energy, smart green sustainable communities, water, and waste along with advanced technologies that are cost-effective in implementing it. The GIR started in China and the EU, but has taken the USA by surprise. The EU, South Korea, and Japan had started a GIR over two decades ago. The GIR can be reflected in the significant paradigm change from the fossil fuels and nuclear power plants of the Second Industrial Revolution (2IR), which had dominated global economics since the late 1890s, to renewable energy in the late 1990s, which has grown, and is growing at an extraordinarily rapid rate into the twenty-first century. While the US had invested and even began to commercialize some of the technologies developed into mass markets by the EU and Japan, it failed in the last two decades to move ahead of corporate vested interests in maintaining the 2IR in large part due to ignoring and even politicizing the science about climate change being caused by humankind. The problem today in the GIR is that the economic stimuli that helped the 2IR emerge into being dominant around the world was based on government basic economic aid such as land grants (oil drilling), mass transportation (rail roads to transport coal and highways today) infrastructures, tax breaks that are still in place today from over a 100 years ago, and finally the entire auto industry that was once hybrid, electric, and even agriculture oil juice-based (Henry Ford, as the farmer) to dependency on fossil fuels especially oil and now natural gas. The GIR needs these same kinds of government financial support mechanisms. The United States of America (USA) needs to make these significant economic paradigm changes now to become a part of the GIR.

The chapters have demonstrated intensive and diverse efforts in the development and management of RE across the world, and in both developing and developed countries.