The German energy transition as a regime shift

By Sebastian Strunz. 2014

235 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In this paper, I use the resilience framework to interpret the project of transforming the German energy system into a renewable energy sources (RES)-based system, the so-called Energiewende, as a regime shift. This regime shift comprises several transformations, which are currently altering the technological, political and economic system structure. To build my argument, I first sketch how technological, political and economic developments reduced the resilience of the conventional fossil-nuclear energy regime and created a new RES-regime. Second, I depict recent changes in German public discourse and energy policy as the shift to the RES-regime. Third, I highlight the challenges involved with increasing the resilience of the RES-regime. In particular, sufficient resilience of the electricity transmission grid appears to be crucial for facilitating the transformation of the whole energy system.

Subfields: Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Global and Planetary Change, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/47d4541e4c9a167e8440555643ae41b1c89469d9

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Citations in the corpus

Exploring the role of phase-out policies for low-carbon energy transitions: the case of the German Energiewende (2017, unknown): “To close this research gap, in this paper we examine the case of the German Energiewende [28 – 30, 74] ,”
GHG Emissions and the Rural-Urban Divide. A Carbon Footprint Analysis Based on the German Official Income and Expenditure Survey (2018, background): “This is surprising given that the German government has established an ambitious energy transition program to withdraw from the use of fossil fuels as well as from atomic energy and to reduce GHG emissions by 80% until the year 2050 (Strunz, 2014).”
Steering innovations towards a green economy : Understanding government intervention (2016, background): “Innovations: The German energy transition encompasses changes at different system levels, ranging from innovations in niche renewable energy technologies (Verbong and Geels, 2007), located at the actor and organization level, to regime shifts (Strunz, 2014) at the market and governance level.”
Transformative policy mixes in socio-technical scenarios: The case of the low-carbon transition of the German electricity system (2010–2050) (2020, background): “The merit-order effect of the electricity market led to a reduction of electricity market prices and thus decreased profitability of existing conventional plants, which forced large incumbents to rethink their beliefs, strategies, business models and organisational structures (Kungl and Geels, 2017;”
Putting an energy system transformation into practice: The case of the German Energiewende (2016, background): “Visions of the final state of the renewables-based regime range from the polar archetypes of a highly centralized and supply-side oriented engineering future focusing on large-scale generation and transmission to a deep reorganization of capitalist society towards more decentralized and local struct”
Energy system resilience – A review (2021, background): “On the lower end, individuals can engage in energy and equipment theft [5] or oppose various energy system development projects either by driving up their costs or prohibiting them completely ( “ not in my back yard ” phenomena) [35,41,84 – 87].”
Business models as drivers of the low carbon power system transition: a multi-level perspective (2016, background): “But once public perception was affected, as it was with Fukushima, these 9 activities had to be revisited in order to protect corporate image and political bargaining power; suggested to have 10 already been affected by this shock (Strunz, 2014; Sühlsen and Hisschemöller, 2014) .”