The Challenge of Energy Transformations: Making New Policies out of Old Actors? Resistances and Strategies of the Nuclear Sector

Contemporary transformations of energy policy are based not only on the development of renewable energies and the increase of energy efficiency, but especially on the explicit abandonment of fossil fuels. The development of renewable energies as part of a layering strategy (Mahoney and Thelen 2010) that is necessary to create a new “solution stream” (Kingdon 1995) has received much academic attention. However merely creating this stream is not sufficient for an energy system to overcome the resistance of the conventional energy producers (here: the nuclear power sector). In times of such transformations, it is necessary to deepen the field of “policy termination processes” (Kirkpatrick et al., 1999) in the energy sector. This paper aims to highlight the similarities in the transformation of energy policies in Germany and France and concentrates in particular on the preferences and strategies of the nuclear industry and nuclear operators, between 2001 and 2016, and their impact on law making and law implementation. This time period encompasses the greatest nuclear energy policy changes in recent memory: the German nuclear phase-out and its different U-turns, and the first national questioning of the role of nuclear energy in France with the adoption of the “Energy transition law” (2015). It will address the general question: In times of an open window of opportunity, what drives the content of energy policy change? We will analyse to what extent costs and financial compensation are key lock-in factors explaining the scope and pace of policy change, by comparing the cases of France and Germany during similar windows of opportunity (opened among others by the governmental representation of Green parties (Evrard 2011) and a focusing event (Birkland 1998), Fukushima). We argue that the "challenges of national energy transformations" and the national nuclear decrease/phase-out policies required for these transformations share the following common features: - a legal framework designed mainly to decrease shut-down costs, and subject to electorate reversibility - the limited impact on nuclear utilities of the development of other profitable energy sources that respond to sustainability concerns, even if they help to build new coalitions of actors - a general “instrumentalisation” of the political punctuations (Baumgartner et al. 2009). Within the common energy market, the repoliticization has been integrated by utilities into an economic strategy to obtain unexpected financial compensations. Based on the multiple stream analysis framework applied to termination policies this article will test two main hypotheses: 1) The more depoliticized the energy sector (delegation of nuclear safety and lack of control on the utilities’ management), the bigger the focus on changing the policy stream. 2) The closer the least worst economic choices of veto players and policy entrepreneurs, the more radical (scope and pace) the implementation of phase-out policies. This proposal relies on qualitative material based on a wide range of primary sources and about 30 interviews of French and German officials, industry and utilities representatives, conducted since 2015, as well as on ongoing research conducted for a PhD thesis on the nuclear policy of the European Union.